Sebnem Rusitschka

Dipl.-Inform.

Sebnem has 15 years of experience as an applied research scientist and is an expert on smart grids for the energy, transportation, and industrial sector and spent 10 years in the R&D division of Siemens on cyber-physical and decentralized energy systems, recently as a Senior Key Expert. She brings this experience from applied engineering research and development, and furthermore from architecting proof of concepts, product development, and decentralizing protocols on energy-efficient blockchains to United Sustainability.

With her academic background in computer science and business administration, Sebnem specialized in applied informatics in peer-to-peer systems. After her career at Siemens, she founded Freeelio, an open innovation collective, in 2017, and co-founded the German Blockchain Association together with other blockchain startups and projects. Sebnem led its energy working group for two years until the adoption of the German Blockchain Strategy in 2019.

During that time, she collaborated with a wide range of solar solution providers, such as Africa GreenTec and SolShare in Sub-saharan Africa and Bangladesh, as well as in Germany, such as Polarstern, SMA Solar, and energy efficiency service providers on a range of proof of concepts on using decentralized business and financial models for energy systems and their environmental and social good. Projects from this time, Energy Solidarity Token and The Sun Protocol led to Electraseed Fund in 2019-2020, which received funding and mentorship from “Ledger Project, The Venture Builder for Human Centric Solutions”.

Her insights from the R&D led to the collaboration with Younergy Solar SA in October 2021 on Younergy Crypto as an alternative finance solution and the launch of the minting of YCo2 credits from existing solar projects to fund more solar in November 2022 on Gnosis Chain.

Sebnem currently manages the Ethics and Philosophy resort at Token Engineering Commons (TEC) and leads system model sensemaking sessions with DADA Art Collective. She is a Kernel Fellow (Genesis Block) as well as in the Founder Circle of ReFiDAO, a founder-led web3 regenerative finance accelerator.