Joyce Kim Stellar

In today’s world where everything just zips by on the Internet, one thing hasn’t changed: it is still expensive to be poor. This is what Joyce Kim and her Stellar.org team are fearlessly crusading against. An entrepreneur and former VC at Freestyle Capital, Joyce Kim is prepared to make the most of her business, technological and legal skills, knowledge and talents to help more people from all over the world, especially those in Africa and Southeast Asia have access to the interoperability between diverse currencies and diverse financial systems. In a sincere effort to reduce inequality, Joyce and the Stellar team has designed the organization to be an open source financial network to connect everyone to the world’s global economy while staying committed to the integrity of financial transactions. The Stellar platform can be optimized by everyone, banks, micro financial institutions, businesses, start-ups, even hospitals. Stellar makes it possible for everyone to have a safe place to save money in through a decentralized database. This kind of open system provides access to millions of sources that did not exist before, providing access where there used to be virtually none.

Ms. Joyce Kim used to be an attorney at Wilmer Hale and Sherman & Sterling and also performed pro bono duties at Sanctuary for Families and the Innocence Project. Those stints apparently opened her eyes to the sheer inequality that exists, the huge divide that segregates the moneyed and the poor. This resulted to a selfless and ambitious project to reduce the gap between money and the poor. At age 19, Joyce graduated from Cornell University. She took up graduate studies at Harvard and Columbia Law School. Currently, Joyce Kim serves as a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab.

Stellar is designed to support any kind of asset or currency: mobile minutes, loyalty points, dollars, Euros, pesos, even bitcoin.