FIO Protocol

A cryptography doctorate, a Web3-only engineering firm, and the world’s only Web3 bachelor’s degree program. Here is the person now driving FIO’s technical and strategic direction.
When FIO token holders went to vote on August 16, 2026, they were not just filling nine board seats. They were confirming a handoff.
Artyom Harutyunyan was elected to the FIO Board of Directors, and he arrives as a co-founder of the new stewardship now carrying the protocol forward, alongside Vardan Khachatryan on legal and regulatory and Narek Gevorgyan on product and growth. The three are co-founders of the Web3 Armenia Foundation, and together they anchor FIO’s next phase. Artyom leads the technical and strategic direction.
The mission has not changed. FIO still exists to make crypto usable through human-readable names instead of long, error-prone wallet addresses. What has changed is who is building it and how far they intend to take it.
A builder since the early Ethereum days
Artyom holds a doctoral degree in cryptography and has worked in this field since Ethereum’s earliest days. He founded Blockstars Technology, an outsourcing firm built exclusively for Web3 at a time when most engineering shops hedged by keeping one foot in traditional software.
He has been through more than one cycle, and his read on what survives them is blunt.
“Coin is nothing, technology is everything. FIO still has the technology, which keeps growing.”
That is not a slogan. It is the reason the handoff makes sense. FIO’s protocol work continued through a downturn that emptied out much of the field, and the people stepping in are the kind who evaluate a project by its codebase rather than its chart.
Building the talent pipeline in Armenia
Artyom’s other long-running project is educational. The Web3 Armenia Foundation, the privately funded nonprofit he co-founded, works on three fronts at once: education, regulatory engagement, and direct support for startups. The practical effect is to help people avoid scams and to give local founders somewhere to turn.
The centerpiece is a university bachelor’s degree program in Web3, which Artyom describes as the only one of its kind in the world. Specialists from across the international industry teach into it, so students work through the history of the technology, the cryptography underneath it, and the applied question of how these systems can serve people the banking system has left behind.
“We have sixty students every year. Exams are harsh, but the students are very potent. We hire them by the third grade.”
Sixty engineers a year is not a rounding error in a field this size. It is one of the few places on earth producing developers who arrive already fluent in this stack, and that pipeline now sits directly behind FIO.
The case for FIO
Artyom’s argument for the protocol is about market structure, not sentiment. He came to the board having concluded that FIO’s market difficulties and FIO’s actual assets were two different things. The technology, the existing integrations, and the user base were all still there.
Wallets, chains, and applications have each built their own naming conventions. Most competitors solve it for one chain. What has never emerged, despite several serious attempts, is a single layer that works across all of them, and several projects aimed at that problem have since pivoted away from Web3 entirely. The gap they left is still wide open.
“There is no global cross-chain naming system, which is like a good niche. FIO has the full potential of becoming the industry’s standard.”
Standards tend to go to whoever is still building when the field thins out. The field has thinned considerably.
FIO 2.0 and the agentic era
The technical expression of that thesis is FIO 2.0. FIO was built on EOS, and the migration to an EVM-compatible chain opens the protocol to a far larger ecosystem of wallets, apps, and developers, while handling more transaction volume and keeping the features holders already depend on.
Four workstreams sit behind it:
Chain migration. Moving off the EOS-based system to EVM compatibility, for accessibility and throughput.
Swap-on-send. Send an asset, and it arrives in the format the recipient actually wants, whichever chain they are on. The bridging happens underneath, where the user does not have to think about it.
Privacy. Methods for obscuring the endpoints of a transaction.
Agent identity. A naming system for AI agents, so an agent keeps a consistent address even when the wallet address underneath it changes.
“FIO made crypto usable through readable names. FIO 2.0 aims higher: private transactions, seamless transfers across any chain, and an identity layer built for AI agents that transact on your behalf. Same mission, ready for what’s next.” Artyom Harutyunyan
That last one is worth sitting with. As AI agents begin transacting on people’s behalf, the question of who or what an address belongs to stops being a convenience problem and becomes an infrastructure problem. An agent that has to re-learn an address every time the underlying wallet rotates is an agent that will eventually send funds to the wrong place. A stable, readable, verifiable name solves that, and FIO has been building that layer since before there was a name for the use case.
What this means for holders
Your FIO Handles continue to work. This transition expands what is possible rather than replacing what you have. Registration continues at app.fio.net, domains at app.fio.net/fio-domain, and FIO remains available across supported partners and exchanges.
Full board election results and vote counts are at fio.net/discover/fio-board-elections.
The long view
What comes through most clearly in conversation with Artyom is that he treats education and infrastructure as one project. You cannot build a usable Web3 on a public that does not understand it, and you cannot teach people to build on a foundation that does not work. He has been working both ends for years, and now he is doing it with FIO.
Artyom is the first guest on Meet the FIO Board of Directors, a new series introducing the people the community elected. He sat down with Wayne Marcel to talk through his path into Web3, the Armenia program, and where cross-chain naming goes next. Watch episode one here.
Meet Artyom Harutyunyan: Co-Founder and Board Director of FIO’s Next Chapter was originally published in FIO Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pembaruan dari komunitas
Tahap terakhir ini adalah salah satu yang paling signifikan dalam sejarah FIO—bukan karena misinya berubah, melainkan karena orang-orang dan teknologi yang mengembannya melangkah ke era baru. Jika Anda telah memegang FIO Handle atau mengikuti protokol selama beberapa waktu, berikut gambaran yang jelas dan tanpa basa-basi tentang apa yang sedang terjadi dan apa artinya bagi Anda.
Perwalian baru
Tahap berikutnya FIO dipimpin oleh tim baru yang berpusat pada Web3 Armenia Foundation, dengan para pendiri bersama Artyom Harutyunyan, Vardan Khachatryan, dan Narek Gevorgyan yang masing-masing mendorong arah teknis, legal, dan produk.

Setelah bertahun-tahun membangun, mengintegrasi, mendidik, dan mengadvokasi, FIO Foundation secara resmi mentransisikan pengelolaan penuh Protokol FIO dari Yayasan ke komunitas FIO.
Sejak hari pertama, FIO Foundation dibentuk bukan untuk menjalankan, mengelola, atau mengontrol protokol, tetapi untuk memfasilitasi pertumbuhannya hingga ekosistem dapat berdiri sendiri. Waktu itu telah tiba. Yayasan mundur agar komunitas, Produsen Blok, integrator, pengembang, dan pemegang token dapat melangkah maju sebagai pengelola tetap protokol.