Ava Labs names Charley Cooper president and promotes Lydia Chiu to permanent CFO

Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain, has appointed Charley Cooper as president and elevated Lydia Chiu to permanent chief financial officer. Who’s coming in and what they bring Cooper arrives with a resume that reads like a regulatory decoder ring. He previously held senior roles at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where his work centered on market infrastructure and regulatory policy. Prior to this appointment, Cooper served as chief operating officer at Ava Labs. His elevation to president represents a consolidation of executive authority rather than a lateral hire. Lydia Chiu’s promotion follows a different arc. Her background spans finance and corporate development, and she has previously operated in business development functions at the company. Context: Ava Labs and the Avalanche ecosystem Ava Labs was founded by Emin Gün Sirer, a Cornell computer science professor who had been researching distributed systems well before the term “DeFi” existed. The company launched the Avalanche mainnet in 2020 and has since built a multi-chain architecture designed to handle the throughput demands that enterprise deployments require. The network’s approach centers...