An 11-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps, Ato Andoh has been the Chairman and CEO of GCS Fibers since the founding of its predecessor organization in 2012. Ato is also the Founder of the Ash DAO, a cryptocurrency decentralized autonomous organization that funds sustainable environmentally friendly start-up businesses. Upon separation from the United States Marine Corps, Ato served as a Contracts & Procurement Analyst at the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), an organization that is responsible for the oversight of America’s nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Ato was later appointed as the agency’s Assistant Director for Small Business Programs. In his latter capacity, Ato was the DTRA’s primary point of contact for the business industry and held the additional responsibilities of identifying emerging technologies that could facilitate the agency’s mission of defeating weapons of mass destruction and assisted the business industry with their efforts to secure U.S federal government contracts from the DTRA.

Ato is a former appointed member of the United States National Coal Council, which is a U.S congressionally chartered advisory committee for the U.S secretary of energy that provides advice and recommendations to the secretary on various issues that among other things, include policy matters relating to coal technology, the social impact of coal production and the conversion & environmental control concepts of coal. Ato holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration and a Master of Science in Management from the University of Maryland and the University of Maryland Global Campus. His community involvement includes serving on the board of the Heritage Village Project, an organization that empowers youths and communities through creative and performing arts.

He spoke with The Guardian about the Ash Token.

The Ash Token is a digital asset of the larger Ash Environmental DAO ecosystem, which is registered in the United States and aims to tackle pressing global issues such as environmental pollution, access to funding by entrepreneurs for the deployment of their high-impact environmentally friendly innovations, unemployment, poverty and the stagnation of economic development across global markets.  The Ash Token is a BEP 20 digital asset on the Binance Smart Chain Network (BSC) and since September 2021, the token has experienced an impressive 800%+ growth in value.   In addition, the Ash Token is a governance Token that empowers its holders by enabling them to vote on how the funds that are raised by the project are used.

What brought about the development of the Ash Token?

Born out of the sheer need to find alternative solutions for funding high-impact, sustainable, and profitable environmentally-friendly business initiatives, the creators of the Ash Token conceived the idea as they struggled to commercialize unique innovations that deal with coal ash recycling and greenhouse gas emissions capture at that time.  They faced numerous hurdles in raising their needed capital and encountered stakeholders who dismissed their passion for environmental improvement and economic development.  These challenges, among others, drove the founder to simply seek a different way to help fellow entrepreneurs raise capital for their high-impact commercial and environmentally-friendly projects.

What makes the Ash Token different from other crypto coins?

The Ash Token provides grants to companies that have globally scalable and high-impact environmentally friendly solutions so that they might be able to expand their operations and thereby, clean up the environment, create jobs and generate measurable profit margins for its stakeholders.  So, as one might have gathered, the Ash Token is not a mere crypto project…it is rather, a platform that fosters economic development while cleaning up the environment on a global scale.  The Ash Token even helps the entire cryptocurrency industry by bringing crypto into the mainstream as the “average Joe” begins to relate to the Ash Token sponsored companies within their given communities of operations.

What are the next-steps for the Ash Token?

The most immediate initiative for the project is to raise $5M to fund its initial set of 5 companies that have applied for funding so that they might launch and/or expand their operations after which, the companies will be required to return up to 20% of their profits to purchase Ash Token each month.

Concurrently, the project seeks to expand its footing in the crypto space by establishing operations in additional markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Korea and El Salvador among others.

In the near-term, the project team intends to really make the Ash Token a currency by mandating that anyone who would conduct transactions with any of the Ash Token-sponsored companies must do so with Ash Tokens.  In this regard, the Ash Token will quickly become a global currency since its sponsored companies are such which will have operations across the world.