My career has spanned several industries, providing me with a somewhat unusual blend of professional experience across financial markets, deep tech development and crypto. Fresh out of college I was an associate at a $600B advisory firm focused on institutional portfolio management, where I focused on multi-billion dollar portfolio construction and manager research (hedge funds, privates, etc.).

After that, I moved out to the Bay area and joined a boutique consulting firm focused on deep tech strategy. During my time there, I supported some of the top tech companies in the world as they navigated how to build out and protect their fundamental technologies across verticals like quantum computing, AI, autonomous vehicle hardware and semiconductors.

It was at that point that I was first introduced to crypto, and the light bulbs went off - crypto represented the first true paradigm-changing upgrade to financial technologies in decades, and I was all in.  

My first professional step into crypto was as one of the first hires at the now-deprecated joint venture between Coinbase and Circle that was tasked with overseeing the governance and development of USDC. It was abundantly clear then that stablecoins were going to eat the world as a truly internet-native way to transfer value; a proposition that is just now finally becoming clear to most around the world, financial institutions and regulators included. 

Following Coinbase’s minority acquisition of Circle, I shifted gears back to the financial world and led liquid asset (e.g. crypto) research at a top-tier VC firm. The nature of crypto markets moved us to ultimately spin out that strategy into a stand alone hedge fund focused entirely on liquid crypto investing, and as a founding partner and head of research there, I led deal sourcing, underwriting and portfolio company support, including leading investments in many of the top teams across DeFi. 

Now, I am excited to be working alongside Mitch as core contributors to SIERRA. There is a simple ideal that shapes my perspective as we bring SIERRA to market: what would I, as a liquid fund manager, look for in a product that I would be comfortable holding as a yield asset and look for in a governance structure that would make me want to get involved. This is not an easy task, but we are building SIERRA to be exactly that.   

DeFi and permissionless internet capital markets offer so much opportunity for innovation and for a global community to benefit from access to US-quality financial infrastructure. Despite recent advances made by the industry, these opportunities remain mired in a quagmire of scams, opaque risk structures, dishonest approaches and complexity that makes accessing them all but impossible for the majority of people around the world. Runs on collateral and subsequent collapses, as we have recently seen, are an unfortunate by-product of these dynamics.

SIERRA is unique in its approach to making DeFi and RWA yield opportunities accessible to a global audience in a simple, transparent and risk-managed way through a best-in-class user experience and a deep roster of integrations across the industry. 

Having evaluated hundreds, if not thousands, of crypto projects during my time running a liquid token book, I have seen many examples of what works, far more of what does not, and have gained a strong perspective on where opportunities lay and where current solutions in the market continue to come up short.

I am excited to build SIERRA into exactly what I would want as both an every day retail user looking to access sustainable internet-native yield opportunities as well as a professional investor looking for an institutional-quality product that I can be comfortable allocating millions towards and still sleep peacefully at night.

There are multiple ways to get involved as we build SIERRA to become the market-defining liquid yield token and I sincerely hope you join us as we bring our protocol to life.


Kevin Mills,

Core Contributor at Sierra