Mara Schmiedt, CGO of Alluvial, on Liquid Staking and The Future of Staking

Mara Schmiedt is the Chief Growth Officer at Alluvial. Mara focuses on advancing industry participation and adoption of Liquid Collective, seeking out world-class partnership opportunities, and overseeing Business Development, Sales, and other strategic functions. Mara recently joined Alluvial as Chief Growth Officer from Coinbase, where she served as the Head of Sales for Coinbase Cloud, the leading developer platform for blockchain-based infrastructure products and APIs. She expanded Cloud's staking business, supporting large-scale organizations, enterprises, and institutional investors. Prior to joining Coinbase, she managed Business Development at Bison Trails, a leading provider of blockchain-based infrastructure acquired by Coinbase in February 2021. Mara also served as Strategy Manager at ConsenSys, where she supported the strategic development of Codefi, the blockchain application suite for Web3 Commerce and Finance.

Mara is passionate about open-source technology and has published research multiple research reports and papers on liquid staking, such as The Internet Bond and Ethereum 2.0 Staking Ecosystem Report.
 

In this conversation, we discuss:

- What it takes to grow a Web3 organization
- Security and decentralization trade-offs
- Working at Coinbase
- Coinbase cloud
- Liquid collective - enterprise grade standard for liquid staking
- The impact of liquid staking on the ecosystem as a whole
- Centralized bad actors
- Alluvial
- The future of staking
- Operational security