Meet the Team
Founding Team
Viktor Ihnatiuk
Co-founder
Viktor has been building in Web3 since 2015, when he launched Ukraine's first peer-to-peer lending platform and ran the country's first fintech conference. He went on to build Boosty Labs into a 150-person studio that shipped for Coinbase, Bitfinex, Ledger, MetaMask, and WalletConnect. A hallway conversation with Tether at Bitcoin Prague in 2023 turned into the company that eventually became Utexo. The goal from day one has been simple: bring USDT home to Bitcoin.
Chris Hutchinson
Co-founder
Hutch has spent over a decade growing communities, teams and businesses. He was the fourth person at Status, then ran community at the Web3 Foundation, where he created the Polkadot Ambassador Program and a global events network that scaled well past a million participants across the projects he worked on. Before Utexo he advised L1 networks, VC funds, and DeFi protocols on launch strategy, investor comms, and partnerships.
Renat Skitsan
Co-founder
Renat founded ThunderStack, the RGB and Lightning infrastructure company backed by Tether Investments and Fulgur Ventures that was later folded into Utexo. Before Utexo, his team shipped the node and channel management tooling that made RGB workable in production, with integrations powering Lnfi, Bitfinex, Kaleidoswap, and Tribe Wallet. That stack is now the foundation Utexo's execution layer runs on.
Our Advisors
Maurice NG
Venture Partner FWD, Byzentine Capital, West Coast Venture
Maurice is the former Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Gate Labs that has over 3,800 digital asset trading pairs for servicing over users in over 130 countries. He previously served as Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Kingdom Labs, where he led the firm’s incubation and investment initiatives. Maurice currently also contributes as Venture Partner at (1) fWD (2) Byzentine Capital (3) West Coast Venture and (4) Transparent Capital, and mentors founders through Outlier Ventures, one of the leading global Web3 accelerators. Maurice is selected in the Top 100 Most Influential Voices in Finance & Web3 in Hong Kong. Maurice is advising on overall strategy in (1) tokenomics (2) token listing (3) market making (4) fundraising and (5) token treasury for token projects for their TGE.
Federico Tenga
R&D Strategist, Bitfinex
Federico Tenga is R&D within the Tether ecosystem, where he leads development of the RGB protocol, the RGB Lightning node, and Iris Wallet. He is also the creator of rgb-lib, an open-source Rust library for building RGB applications. Previously, Federico co-founded Chainside, a Bitcoin payment processor, and served as a blockchain advisor to Italy's Ministry of Economic Development, where he was one of 30 experts appointed to draft the country's national blockchain strategy. Federico advises Utexo on RGB protocol development, Lightning Network infrastructure, and Bitcoin-native stablecoin payment systems.