Ava Labs, the main developer firm behind the Avalanche blockchain, shared Wednesday that it had appointed Arielle Pennington as their senior vice president of growth.

The news comes as Avalanche pushes a wave of institutional adoption, including large tokenization projects, such as SkyBridge’s $300 million hedge fund tokenization on AVAX, and surging real-world assets demand.

Prior to Ava Labs, Pennington was the head of communications at the Solana Foundation since April 2023, where she helped steer the ecosystem’s narrative out of its dark days post the fallout from the collapse of FTX, to a period of rapid expansion with the network reaching massive user engagement and cultural hype.

During that time, the network’s native token surged more than 2,500% from its post-FTX lows, bringing in booming memecoin trends on Solana and large numbers of new active addresses joining the network.

At Ava Labs, Pennington will focus on shaping the Avalanche narrative and work on the ecosystem’s growth efforts, including products focused on real-world asset tokenization and stablecoin infrastructure as well as consumer use cases.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join Ava Labs at this moment,” Pennington said. “Avalanche has always been ahead of the curve — it was the first blockchain to put institutions at its core, and now we’re seeing that vision come alive… My goal is to take that energy, amplify it, and help make Avalanche the place where builders, institutions, and everyday users all connect.”

Read more: Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital to Tokenize $300M in Hedge Funds on Avalanche