Alex O’Donnell

Alex O'Donnell, the CEO of Umami Labs, began his career growing up on the outskirts of Philadelphia before attending Temple University to study literature and economics. His academic focus created a 'pretty natural synthesis' when he became a financial journalist at Reuters where he specialized in M&A IPOs. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, O'Donnell became disenchanted with the mainstream media and began paying more attention to issues like privacy, censorship and other things he had not taken as much interest in before. This led him to tinker with cryptocurrency and eventually his introduction to Umami DAO which resulted in the creation of Umami Labs. O'Donnell is also a Cointelegraph contributor, having written an article on crypto trends for 2024. In his personal opinion, he thinks that the high point of the crypto market in 2021 was the high-water market of this era of very DIY, unregulated, community-run bootstrapped protocols. He believes that going forward we will see a pretty stark shift in which DeFi stops looking so much like a completely separate ecosystem and becomes a subset of TradFi. O'Donnell is currently working on another crypto-related venture but has not yet released full details on this.