NEAR Foundation CEO Marieke Flament has stepped down after two years in her role running the organization behind the NEAR protocol (NEAR).

Chris Donovan, the foundation’s general counsel, will take her place, according to a Thursday blog post. Flament will stay on as a strategic adviser to Donovan until the end of the year. Flament will remain at the foundation in a council board role.

“When I joined two years ago, NEAR had around 50,000 users, and now we have over 2.5 million daily active users,” Flament said in an interview with CoinDesk. She added that Donovan is well-suited to the CEO role now given “the current regulatory landscape.” She added: “We are not the only ecosystem making a move like that.”

The NEAR protocol currently ranks 34th in terms of total value locked (TVL), a measure of the amount of money stashed in a given blockchain ecosystem, according to data from DefiLlama.

In September 2022, the NEAR Foundation launched a $100 million venture capital fund and venture lab in partnership with Caerus Ventures.