Dear Polkadot community,

My name is Mario Altenburger and I am applying to represent Polkadot as a Head Ambassador, primarily as a business development accelerator and fundraiser for the ecosystem.

Having worked in the Polkadot ecosystem for nearly 3 years now, I have had the opportunity to meet many of you in person and I have to say the professionalism and commitment of the teams building on and/or for Polkadot is far beyond what I have seen in any other ecosystem.

Polkadot is the reason why I decided to move from traditional finance into crypto. While the technology and builders are far ahead of others, I believe we still lack widespread adoption.

It will take joint efforts from various angles to help convince projects to build on Polkadot and importantly also to migrate to our ecosystem. Below I will share more on my background and how I plan to drive to push for adoption.

In addition, I would represent Polkadot at traditional investment conferences to help raise new funds for the ecosystem, by finding direct investments for projects, large new DOT buyers as well as investors into fund dedicated to deploy in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Background

Born and raised in Austria, I worked most of my career in the finance sector in Hong Kong. After completing a MA in Economics in Innsbruck and a MA in Mathematics of Finance at Columbia University, I spent 14 years at Bank of China International in Hong Kong.

As Head of EMEA Origination and Debt Syndicate, I focused on fundraising for Chinese and international corporates, raising a total of USD500 billion of debt, equity-linked and structured financings in over 1,000 transactions. I spearheaded the bank's international expansion leading landmark transactions such as the first German Renminbi bond from Volkswagen, the first high yield bond from Korea by Korean Air, the first Chinese Euro bond by CNOOC, the first global sukuk offering from Saudi Aramco and the largest convertible bond from Hong Kong by Cathay Pacific.

I worked with hundreds of major multinational corporations (MNCs, mostly Fortune 500), governments as well as institutional investors and family offices, and have developed a close working relationship at senior level.

Harbour Industrial Capital

In 2021, Max Rebol and I co-founded Harbour Industrial Capital (HIC). We are registered in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in HK. As of Q1 2024 our fund has an AUM of over US$10 million. We have raised this capital from private investors such as Family Offices, and subsequently invested it in over 20 Polkadot-based projects. The primary method of deploying capital were parachain auctions, as part of which we locked up DOT in exchange for a fixed amount of parachain tokens. More recently we have also made direct investment in Polkadot-based projects. Fund 1 held its final closing on 31 December 2023, and we are planning to raise a second fund later this year.

I was speaker at various conferences, instructor of a course on Parachain Auction at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy, Panel Moderator at Polkadot Day in HK; Judge of the HK Web3Hack; Winner of the TADS Award for Ecosystem Excellence in DeFi.

Overall, in the past 3 years, we have been constantly on the road educating folks about Polkadot and convincing that Polkadot is the preferred destination for their capital, applications or projects.

Connecting the DOTs for Polkadot

My plan is to fully leverage on my network built throughout my career to (continue to) approach these MNCs and governments to convince them to utilize Polkadot technology for both existing processes and to upgrade their systems to the latest cutting-edge technology.

Imagine a major car manufacturer moving the supply and production lines onto Polkadot or one of its parachains. Airline ticketing, fuel consumption tracking and carbon credits offsetting all done in the same application.

We have been working actively already on bringing major projects to Polkadot and we may have some good news for the community in the coming weeks. These are projects with the potential to migrate millions of wallets and transactions to Polkadot.

In addition, Max and I are preparing our second fund, a Polkadot Ecosystem fund. We will be at numerous traditional investment conferences and family office summits promoting Polkadot. We plan to invite project teams to join us for conferences and/or the side events and investor dinners that we will organize.

To highlight again here also that for any treasury proposals that we submit to fund sponsorship for Polkadot at conferences we would NOT include any salary for ourselves.

As a Head Ambassador of Polkadot, it would certainly make my efforts easier with an official endorsement from the community.

I would look forward to working closely with the 20 other Head Ambassadors, many of whom I have worked with already. It is important to have a diverse set of Head Ambassadors covering various angles of the community, both inwards and outwards.

More importantly I am very much excited to engage even closer with the overall community, builders and projects so that we can together unleash Polkadot’s full potential. Thanks for your time and support!

For reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ATl5WWcPs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xN-HeJoGI4