This is the 11th episode of Blockchain All-Star, which is a series of blockchain interviews with BSN friends and partners to talk about their career journeys and personal life stories.

Yves La Rose is the Executive Director and Founder of the EOS Network Foundation (ENF). A consummate consensus builder within the EOS ecosystem, he lives and breathes EOS, working to ensure the success of the network.

At a young age, Yves was attracted to technology. Through the experience of building his first computer and writing his first program at the age of seven, a lifelong interest in the potential of technology was born.

After completing studies in psychology at the University of Ottawa, Yves moved to Japan where he began his professional career in business and education.

With an entrepreneurial and inquisitive nature, six years passed, living and working while steeped in Japanese language and culture. At the same time, his early intrigue with technology was being further amplified by the revelations of Bitcoin. In 2010, he began mining Bitcoin on his laptop, and exploring the potential of decentralized networks.

Returning to Ottawa in 2011, Yves resumed his university education in pure sciences, focusing on perceptual and computational neuropsychology, and additional studies in behavioral economics.

In 2017, with additional years of business planning and analysis experience, Yves began seriously considering an endeavor in the emerging blockchain industry. Along with a handful of interested associates, he formed a blockchain book club, and having made a thorough survey of second and third generation blockchains, they began focusing their attention on the promising open source blockchain platform, EOSIO.

In February of 2018 Yves co-founded EOS Nation and led it to become the top rated block producer on the largest and most valuable network using EOSIO, the EOS Mainnet.

EOSIO was at the bleeding edge of public blockchain development, but it was also a global, decentralized network that was increasingly hobbled by distant and ambiguous leadership, misallocation of capital, and misalignment of incentives. Various teams sought to create a foundation, or a worker proposal system that could fund the development of public goods for the network, but these efforts stalled, and EOS was adrift.

Throughout his tenure as CEO of EOS Nation, Yves had formed many good relationships across the EOS Network, among BP’s in the East, West & in the global South. Yves recognized that he was uniquely positioned to coalesce the stakeholders of the EOS Network around a foundation that would work on behalf of all EOS token holders to realize the true potential of EOS. With the assurance of support from a coalition of stakeholders, Yves founded the EOS Network Foundation.