Who is Wes Geisenberger?
Wes Geisenberger is an American investor passionate about climate and technology, currently holding the position of vice president of sustainability and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) at the HBAR Foundation. His role involves allocating funding and developing open source, research and innovation tools for the organization. The HBAR Foundation is associated with Hedera, a network that has its own native cryptocurrency.
Geisenberger began his academic journey at Georgetown University and George Mason University, where he dedicated himself to studying government, international politics, economics and history between 2009 and 2013. His professional career began at Oracle, where he worked in business development and, later, in consultancy for the public sector. In this last role, he applied emerging technologies to power smart cities and improve the citizen experience.
In 2019, Wes Geisenberger made the decision to leave Oracle and joined Hedera Hashgraph in September of the same year. There, he assumed the role of director of business development for Americas markets, collaborating with government counsel, applications and ecosystem partners to expand Hedera's growing economy. His attention focused on areas such as sustainability, transportation and tokenization. He has also played an active role in energy and climate markets, promoting policies aimed at an ecological and carbon-neutral vision.
Since October 2021, Wes Geisenberger has been the vice president of sustainability and ESG at the HBAR Foundation, leading the Sustainable Impact Fund, which focuses its efforts on climate markets, energy and related supply chain sectors.
In 2022, the HBAR Foundation received a substantial funding of over $2 billion to drive the adoption and expansion of the Hedera ecosystem. During the year, Geisenberger strengthened his mission at the Foundation, making Hedera a prominent figure in discussions about sustainable economics. He believes that the Hedera ecosystem should support projects on the platform with financial, technical and marketing incentives.
In the same year, the HBAR Foundation's Sustainable Impact Fund announced the allocation of more than 100 million dollars to address issues related to the climate crisis, including transparency, auditability and efficiency of the industry's impact on the global environment through the Hedera platform. A sizable $400 billion fund has been designated to boost the cryptoeconomy, metaverse projects and the fintech sector, collaborating with Blockchain Council members and independent startups to promote the adoption of cryptocurrencies and tokenized solutions.
In September 2022, HBAR was listed on Coinbase, becoming one of the cryptocurrencies available for trading on the platform.
As we move into 2023, Wes Geisenberger, as Vice President of the HBAR Foundation, remains focused on expanding the Hedera ecosystem. Earlier this year, he brought conversations about Web3 and carbon negative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, highlighting Hedera as an ecosystem that aims to foster a sustainable future based on ReFi (regenerative finance) – an approach to solving systemic issues such as climate change. Geisenberger sees the potential of Davos as a springboard to encourage peer-to-peer use of innovative financial tools and services to support regenerative projects, including biodiversity management, ecosystem protection, and carbon and waste reduction.
The goal for 2023 is to improve the scalability of the network and enable support for virtually unlimited non-fungible tokens by adopting the Merkle framework. Resources and funding will be directed to natively support ESG, finance and gaming use cases, which form the pillars of the Web3 ecosystem.
