Dharma parts ways with sales team members to focus on product development

Two employees of Ethereum-based peer to peer lending platform Dharma who were primarily responsible for the firm's sales efforts, have left the company, The Block has learned. 

Sid Ramesh, Dharma's former account executive, announced in an email last week that he had stepped down from his position. Ramesh said he will take “some time off” for now. Meanwhile, former business development manager Max Bronstein, who spearheaded the sales endeavor along with Ramesh, also left the firm in November to join Coinbase, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

When reached for comments, both Ramesh and Bronstein referred The Block to Dharma COO Brendan Forster. 

"I worked with Max and Sid to identify career paths for them that they were really excited about, and those career paths led them out of Dharma," said Forster. 

Forster told The Block that the firm is currently not looking to fill Ramesh's and Bronstein's vacancies. Instead, the growth sector of the firm will now focus on product development led by Dharma CEO Nadav Hollander, according to Forster. 

"We decided with Dharma 2.0 the growth team was going to change its focus from one that is primarily ops and business development and sales, to one that is primarily product-driven," said Forster.  

The departures follow an overhaul of the lending platform. In early August, Dharma announced that it would pause new deposits and loans. Soon after, the firm launched Dharma “Version 2,” which, while still offering lending and borrowing, is connected to the money market protocol Compound's liquidity pool instead of being built on its own protocol. 

At the time, the San Francisco firm was hoping that the new platform would solve the delay in matching lenders and borrowers due to a lack of borrowing demand. According to Forster, Dharma is one of the top user groups on Compound, taking up around 5%  of the total users in Compound's Sai and USDC liquidity pools, and it is on its way to hit 10% by the end of the year. However, industry observers still expressed reservations regarding the future of Dharma Version 2. 

“It’s not particularly clear as to how Dharma can provide a differentiated user experience with their new product: not only are they competing with Compound itself, they must also contend with numerous consumer-facing lending applications — Linen, Outlet Finance, Argent, DexWallet, Frontier, Gossamer, etc. — that are also attempting to become the mainstream on-ramp into Open Finance markets,” said one industry observer.

As for the next steps, Forster said the firm is looking to roll out direct fiat on-ramp on its platform within the next few months.

"Dharma has always been very focusing on building products," said Forster, and the firm is looking to hire three more persons for the product team on top of the team's existing members, Forster told The Block.