Growing the technologies of individual sovereignty

SVRN (NASDAQ: SVRN) manages a NEAR treasury, drives adoption of NEAR's products, and backs technology companies that advance human agency.

Meet the team

Backed by

Where technology serves only you

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What enterprises ask about AI

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Sal Ternullo on Bankless with David Hoffman

NEAR's AI money thesis, on Bankless

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NASDAQ: SVRN

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Digital asset security, at scale

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Re-pricing NEAR, beyond the L1

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The NEAR investment case, bottom-up

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Sal Ternullo on The Bridge panel (The Tie)

How altcoin DATs differentiate

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Our mission

To grow technology that enables individual sovereignty.

Technology should serve only the person it works for. As AI agents begin to act on people's behalf, the infrastructure they run on will decide whether that holds. SVRN was built to make sure it does, with NEAR Protocol at the center of that work.

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Leadership

operators

Sal Ternullo

Chief Executive Officer

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Sal Ternullo is a founder, operator, and investor dedicated to helping global institutions adopt emerging technology responsibly. Before SVRN, he built KPMG's innovation practice, where he launched flagship products including Chain Fusion and Climate Accounting Infrastructure. Earlier, at State Street, Sal engineered enterprise risk and internal audit frameworks for machine learning and blockchain. He also backs transformative Web3 technologies as a Managing Partner at A100x Ventures.

David Schwed

Chief Operating Officer

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David Schwed is a recognized authority in digital assets and AI security, having architected protection strategies for the industry's most critical institutions. As a former CISO of Robinhood and Galaxy, and Global Head of Digital Assets Technology at BNY, he has led security at the intersection of traditional finance and DeFi. A founder with a successful exit at MASS Communications, David also shapes the field as Founding Director of the Katz School's Cybersecurity Master's Program and a strategic advisor to the NEAR Foundation.

Rabbina Aziz

Chief Financial Officer

Rabbina Aziz builds scalable financial infrastructure for regulated, high-growth environments. As the former Head of Finance, US at Crypto.com, she oversaw operations across fiat and digital assets during pivotal expansion. Previously the Chief Accounting Officer at TradeStation, Rabbina applies over two decades of banking and brokerage expertise to drive rigorous regulatory reporting, GAAP compliance, and strategic treasury management.

David Shack

Chief Marketing Officer

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David Shack is a versatile marketer and digital-finance brand-builder. Prior to SVRN, he led brand efforts at Republic and Flipside Crypto, driving growth for platforms ranging from AI-led onchain intelligence to institutional digital asset management. A former founder and early-stage operator, David is a Founding Partner at Syrens, a creative studio supporting design and strategy for frontier-tech brands.

Directors

board

Richard Muirhead

/ Managing Partner / Fabric Ventures

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Richard Muirhead has backed open and decentralized infrastructure for over two decades. He is co-founder and Managing Partner of Fabric Ventures, an early institutional backer of NEAR, and served as a co-founding council member of the NEAR Foundation from 2019. Earlier he co-founded Firestartr and served as CEO of Tideway and Automic; the software companies he has built and backed have created more than $2 billion in value.

James Gereghty

/ Managing Partner / Kips Bay Consulting

James Gereghty has spent more than twenty-five years in credit and special-situations investing. He is Managing Partner of Kips Bay Consulting and previously headed distressed investing at Siguler Guff, where he oversaw more than $6 billion, following senior roles at Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Bear Stearns. A CFA charterholder with board experience across banking and public shipping companies, he serves on SVRN's audit committee.

Peter Marton

/ Chief Risk & Compliance Officer / Cari Network

Peter Marton helped define how U.S. regulators supervise digital assets. As Deputy Superintendent of Virtual Currency at the New York Department of Financial Services, he led the unit responsible for BitLicense and trust-charter supervision, and he authored Wyoming's first crypto-specific bank examination manual. He is now Chief Risk & Compliance Officer at Cari Network, the bank-governed tokenized-deposit network, following senior roles at Fireblocks and Promontory Financial Group.

Nikolaos Veraros

/ Audit Committee Chair / CFA

Nikolaos Veraros has spent more than twenty years in shipping finance, advising shipping companies on capital markets and corporate finance. A CFA charterholder and former senior equity analyst at the National Bank of Greece, he lectures on shipping finance and economics at King's College London and ALBA in Athens. A director since 2021, he chairs SVRN's audit committee.

Alexios Chrysochoidis

/ Head of Trading / Eurobank Equities

Alexios Chrysochoidis has traded at the center of the Greek capital markets for more than two decades. He is General Manager and Head of Trading and Institutional Client Business at Eurobank Equities in Athens, and has served on the Athens Exchange's Markets Operation and Listings Committee since 2024. He holds electrical engineering degrees from Imperial College London and a master's in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University, and serves on SVRN's audit committee.

Advisors

counsel

Illia Polosukhin

/ Co-Founder / NEAR Protocol

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Illia Polosukhin is a co-founder of NEAR and a co-author of the 2017 research that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning modern AI. A former Google engineer and researcher, he has spent the past decade building NEAR into infrastructure for an open, intelligent web. His current work spans user-owned AI, NEAR Intents, and the protocol's post-quantum roadmap.

Łukasz Kaiser

/ Research / OpenAI

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Łukasz Kaiser is a researcher at OpenAI and a co-author of the Transformer architecture. A co-inventor of OpenAI's reasoning models and a contributor to ChatGPT and GPT-4, he previously spent eight years at Google Brain, where he co-created TensorFlow and Tensor2Tensor. His research spans the models and reasoning systems that make autonomous agents possible.

Philippe Sachs

/ Chief Business Officer / Nscale

Philippe Sachs is Chief Business Officer and President of EMEA at Nscale, the AI infrastructure company building gigawatt-scale compute with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI. He spent twenty-five years in banking, latterly building Standard Chartered's global public-sector business. As a general partner at Kestrel 0x1, he backed Nscale's earliest rounds before joining the company to lead its commercial growth.

Jackie Kennedy

/ GTM, Startups / OpenAI

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Jackie Kennedy leads startup go-to-market at OpenAI. She was previously COO of QuickNode, the multi-chain developer infrastructure platform she helped scale through a $60 million Series B at an $800 million valuation. Earlier she spent nearly a decade in startup-facing roles at AWS, DigitalOcean, and Mark Cuban Companies.

Why NEAR sits at the center of our work

SVRN believes NEAR's technologies are well positioned to enable AI agents to transact securely and efficiently on behalf of the people they serve.

Built on

The NEAR Protocol bottom-up investment case

A bottom-up model of NEAR’s fee economics, three valuation methods, and the pathways institutions use to gain exposure.

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NEAR is the money agents will choose

SVRN’s proposal to cut NEAR issuance to 1.6%, and why a fixed supply matters for a currency agents will use.

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Why NEAR Protocol is suddenly everywhere

Where NEAR now shows up across AI, payments, and cross-network transactions, and why that reach matters.

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News & Intelligence

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Sal Ternullo and Bitwise's Matt Hougan on The Rollup: NEAR in a fundamentals-driven market

SVRN CEO Sal Ternullo joins Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan on The Rollup to discuss NEAR's re-pricing, the NRR ETF, buybacks, and a market that now rewards revenue.

The Rollup

October 5, 2026

35 min