James Ball

James Ball is Blockchain And DLT Lead Consultant at Asian Development Bank (ADB), a position he has held since August 2025 within the Consulting department at manager level. Concurrently, he serves as a Member of the Digital Trust Taskforce Scotland, a nonprofit focused on blockchain and trust technology, which he joined in October 2024.

Prior to ADB, Ball was Product Manager for Product and Ventures at Nethermind, a blockchain research and software engineering firm, from July 2024 to August 2025. Before that, he worked as a DeFi Analyst at Monolith, a crypto startup, where he focused on investment strategies in decentralised finance applications. He is also Co-Founder of Istari Robotics, a robotics engineering company he co-founded in June 2025. Ball holds a BSc in Geology and Petroleum Geology from the University of Aberdeen, graduating in 2020, and conducted a year of research in oil reservoirs and computational sedimentology during his studies. He was born in Hong Kong and raised and educated in the south of England.