Former Mozilla (Firefox) COO Denelle Dixon will become SDF’s Executive Director and CEO on May 1st. Jed McCaleb will become Chief Architect, focused on protocol development and adoption.

SDF Press Release
“Why I’m Joining Stellar” by Denelle Dixon
“Thank you, Denelle Dixon” by Chris Beard

“Could you see a cartoon rocket ship in use at some central bank or in a press release from a national monetary authority? We couldn’t either."

Plans for 2019 include streamlining Core so more validators can join the network, significant changes to Horizon, an overhauled Stellar.org site, an open-source wallet SDK, ecosystem projects being supported by SDF, and more.

CoinDesk profiles Jed McCaleb. Highlights:

• Interstellar is "trying to make the first killer app" - "a viable business built on Stellar"
• “People put the time frame wrong as dot-com, when actually it’s just way before like Arpanet kind of stuff”
• "He sees the next step in its evolution as enlisting more people to build the wallets and exchanges needed for it to truly become what it was meant to be: a useful, open-source protocol for payments."
• Stripe "need(s) the ecosystem to be a certain level of maturity, they need the anchor, the person issuing the fiat currency on the network. We need those entities to exist before they can use the network.”
• On IBM, he says: “They’re building a thing, WorldWire, that is a replacement for SWIFT, and it’s built on Stellar. We just talk to their engineers and help them through the process.”

Yahoo Finance interviews McCaleb. Highlights:

• "If it’s not a public chain, then you’re missing the point."
• "In the rest of the cryptocurrency world now, there’s this big push for tokenizing different things, and now there’s the stablecoin hype, and Stellar has sort of been doing this all along, we just weren’t calling it that."