Ben Hedley

Founded and run a blockchain infrastructure business, setting strategy and leading product, engineering, and delivery. Operate 10 cloud servers with typical 99.9% uptime, hosting blockchain nodes (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Flare) and the associated software for the service. Supply live crypto price feeds to the Flare network daily and support user trust via staking (500m+ Flare tokens delegated). Designed and shipped an end-to-end agentic delivery framework using 6–7 LLM-based agents to take work from requirements to release, run from a single control centre, and remain model-agnostic across providers. Built and operated supporting internal tools, including a system health and provider performance monitoring platform, machine-learning models for pricing data, and a public explorer showing wallet history with staking, claim, and delegation flows on-chain.

Led post-acquisition delivery strategy for integrating World First with Ant Group, bringing both organisations onto a shared product and delivery lifecycle with merged tooling, teams, and a single roadmap. Delivered a full-app UI refactoring for launch and rebuilt payment journeys that couldn’t scale within the existing framework. Managed day-to-day build and delivery for two additional Scrum teams (onboarding and FX), improved processes, removed blockers, and drove cohesion between teams across the combined organisations.

Accountable to the CEO for the end-to-end rebuild of an outdated payments product (~£2m). Delivered a new payments product to launch, bringing 25+ people across in-house teams and vendors in the UK, Portugal, and Bulgaria onto one plan. Led delivery of the Open Banking APIs needed for regulatory compliance against FCA deadlines. Designed and introduced an agile delivery lifecycle across ~10 Scrum teams, including business reviews before and after each release.