(Bloomberg) -- Nana Murugesan, previously charged with leading Coinbase Global Inc.’s international expansion effort, is joining Matter Labs as its first president, hoping to guide and scale the blockchain startup into maturity.

Murugesan, 45, announced his departure from Coinbase as its vice president of international and business development in November, having overseen the largest US crypto exchange’s expansion across Europe as well as asset listings and business partnerships. 

“I’ve always wanted to take on this role of a founder complement, to really help a company scale to the next level, which with smaller companies in earlier stages, it’s possible to do,” Murugesan said in an interview on Tuesday.

Matter Labs’s zkSync technology uses zero-knowledge proofs, a kind of code that can help make the Ethereum blockchain faster, cheaper and easier to use while keeping trades private.

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Murugesan will manage a team of 60 employees and lead a major hiring effort in the coming months, he said, as well as scale its marketing, legal and policy operations. Andreessen Horowitz, one of crypto’s largest venture capital backers which has invested in both Matter Labs and Coinbase, “played an active role in the hiring process,” he added.

“It’s going to be like we brought Matter Labs from zero to one, and Nana’s job is to bring it from one to 10 and 200 to 1,000,” said Alex Gluchowski, the company’s chief executive officer. 

Matter Labs completed a $200 million fundraise in November 2022, right before the crypto sector entered a lengthy bear market. Blockchain Capital, Dragonfly Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners were among its participating investors.

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