Meet the Opacity Founders

Opacity Labs was founded by three people who arrived at the same problem from different directions. Capital markets run on infrastructure designed before the internet existed. The cost of that infrastructure falls on the people the system was supposed to serve: redundant verification at every venue, fragmented liquidity across siloed pools, compliance locked to specific institutions. The functions those intermediaries perform are necessary. The question is whether every function requires the specific institution that was built around it fifty years ago.

Hersh, Aaron, and Andrew believe the answer is no, and that technology solutions that fall within a regulatory framework can upgrade global financial rails, starting in the United States.

Hersh Patel, Co-Founder & CEO

Hersh spent years building verification systems before he understood what they were really for. His engineering career moved through decentralized data networks and verifiable credential infrastructure, each time working on the same underlying problem: how do you prove something true about a person or an asset without forcing a gatekeeper to sit in between?

The key insight for Opacity was that compliance is the reason capital markets fragment. Verification lives at each venue gate, so if you want to trade across five venues, you verify identity five times. Five databases store the same sensitive information, five compliance departments review the same facts, and every siloed liquidity pool in the modern market exists because verification does not travel.

Hersh calls this "the poverty of verifiability." Opacity is his answer. Opacity makes compliance portable, so securities can reach investors on public networks within existing law. Credentials reference a programmable ruleset, preserving the protections investors, managers, and markets need without requiring a new institution at every gate.

Aaron Marz, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer

Aaron studied finance but built software. In school, he and classmates built algorithmic trading tools that turned into products for other traders. That was his first encounter with the problem that has defined his career: complex financial systems that work for the people who built them but not for the people who need them.

He spent seven years in Paris building a technology company from the ground up as CTO, spent time engineering at Kraken, and then began working on decentralized infrastructure alongside Hersh. They saw the same structural problem from complementary angles. Aaron saw that the technical primitives for portable compliance finally existed, and Hersh saw what you could build on top of them if you operated inside existing securities law.

At Opacity, Aaron owns the engineering and product: the Transfer Agent, the Verified Data Network, and other products that have to work together so that asset managers maintain regulatory confidence and an investor gets an experience that feels better than every other financial product they use. His job is the same one it has always been: making technically dense and compliant infrastructure disappear behind a clean interface.

Andrew Bledsoe, Chief Operating Officer

Andrew started his career as an analyst in the office of the President of Bear Stearns, and then moved to a Managing Director role at Oppenheimer Investments. He had an unusual vantage point on how institutional finance operates at the highest level. One of the youngest Managing Directors on Wall Street at 26, Andrew then spent the next fifteen years building and operating companies across real estate, fintech, and technology.

That combination, Wall Street and building companies, is what he brings to Opacity. He has watched how the financial system's structure concentrates access, how it can grow by expanding to more markets, and he knows what it takes to build an organization that can operate under real regulatory scrutiny while scaling.

At Opacity, Andrew runs finance, operations, and corporate infrastructure. The work is unglamorous and essential. A company that wants to serve as regulated financial infrastructure has to operate like one. Andrew makes sure it does.

Why These Three

The founding team covers the full surface area of what Opacity needs to get right, and they share one conviction: the infrastructure connecting issuers to investors can be rebuilt without tearing down the protections investors need. New infrastructure earns the right to power finance by proving itself under real capital, real products, and real regulation. Opacity is the upgrade to financial infrastructure that proves it.