Blockchain is still in its infancy, but the entrepreneurs who fuel its rapid evolution act as inspiration and wholly deserve recognition for their pioneering spirit. In this part of our Blockchain Trailblazers series, we turn the spotlight on Brian Henning Kerr, CEO and one of the Founders of Kava Labs. 

US-born Brian Kerr was raised by his grandmother in a multi-ethnic working class neighbourhood, strife with drugs. Kerr describes his school experience as a “scary environment”, full of gangs, lacking in funds and unable to provide education in most cases, Kerr found his place in a group of gamers. This is a clue as to his gamer side and the leaning towards cybertechnology in his later career. 

Brian Kerr pursued his higher education at San Francisco State University, where he attended the Lam Family College of Business where he graduated as part of Class ’11 with a degree in Business Administration, focusing on Marketing. Kerr was an active student, as well as a fraternity member, and through his position at Associated Students SFU, was involved in deciding how to allocate annual funds to the tune of $3.5 million. 

His career prior to Kava could be divided into corporate and entrepreneurial: Between 2011-2014, Kerr took marketing leadership roles in BanZoo and the Kenwood Group. 2014 was a fork in the career path for Kerr, who turned his back on a safe job at an industry giant, and instead chose to work for Fnatic, a 3-man start-up in London selling esport equipment.  

“I had these two opportunities. One was a very reliable corporate job that was gonna teach me a lot about how a big company works — that was going to be really good for my career. Whereas on the other side, it was a pretty questionable opportunity”, said Kerr.

In order to understand this perspective that makes Brain Kerr a Blockchain Trailblazer, let’s read this quote from John Allen Paulos, which he shared on his medium blog.

 “Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.”

Kerr’s leadership perspective from early life has led him to choose the wild open seas of opportunity to the safe harbor of a stable job. 

While helping grow the team at Fnatic from three to over 100, he founded and became the CEO of Fnatic Gear, thus learning to run an international business by manufacturing in Asia and partnering with players around the world. 

It was in San Francisco that he met Russian esports founder Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who by that time had started Dmarket, a decentralized marketplace for in-game items. Kerr was blown by the 20 million investment capital raised for Dmarket through a Power Point presentation in only 3 weeks, as it was a remarkable achievement even for a company with what Kerr calls “millions of dollars of real revenue.” Thus, he started working for Dmarket as a consultant. 

In 2017, Kerr set up Kava Labs, the company behind KAVA, with Ruaridh O'Donnell and Scott Stuart. 

Although Kava initially focused only on the ability to make global payments inexpensively and quickly, especially with XRP, between 2017-2019 the preparation for the KAVA infrastructure was in the works.  

With Brian Kerr's intuitive foresight, Kava turned to OPEN Banking and became one of the keystone projects of Decentralized Finance.

Kava’s founders acknowledged the need of a cross-chain DeFi platform outside the Ethereum Network and, for a while, Kava aimed to become a decentralized bank. 

Ethereum's congestion and high fees led Kava to seek options outside the Ethereum network, and thus Kava's blockchain was built using Tendermint. Tendermint-based blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem (such as Binance, Terra, Cosmos Hub, Agoric, Aragon, and others) would thus be able to receive market data such as cryptocurrency moves and commodity prices. 

This has made Kava an ideal place to request and access data from Chainlink for Cosmos-based blockchains and applications.

In 2019, Kava IEO was chosen as a launchpad of project on Binance, the largest CEX, and thus Kava found the capital it needed to establish the chain and DeFi platform.

Today, the Kava project has a total value of over 1 billion dollars. And with its KAVA Rise programs, it is a large ecosystem that distributes significant grants that especially support developers.

Brian Kerr himself continues to blaze new trails in DeFi. 

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