Bassel Assaad, PhD.

Name. Bassel Assaad, PhD. Pronouns he/him.

Positioning. Financial Systems Architect, Regulated Payments and AI.

Current roles. Founder and CEO of Tracee since September 2022, operating since May 2025 as an independent advisory practice. Product and Capital Architect at Arrel since May 2025. Emerging Technologies Expert at the United Nations Development Programme since January 2026, on the Central African Forest Initiative's Payments for Environmental Services program.

Domains. Regulated payments architecture; stablecoin and tokenized-product infrastructure; agentic AI workflows in finance with human-in-the-loop oversight; compliance scoping across MiCA, NYDFS, MAS, KYC, AML, CFT, Travel Rule, and GDPR; financial infrastructure for development finance.

Sectors served. Banks, asset managers, payment providers, regulated digital asset platforms, multilateral funds, fintech infrastructure.

Geography. Based in Paris. Has lived in San Francisco, Paris, Bangkok, and Dubai.

Languages. English, French, Arabic.

Education. PhD in IT, Sorbonne University.

Bassel started in industrial mechanical engineering at Cetim in 2012, focused on power transmission modeling and vibration-based condition monitoring. He completed a PhD in IT at Sorbonne University in 2013, in parallel with an assistant lecturer post at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne and concurrent industrial research at Cetim.

From February 2016 to November 2021 he was R&D Engineer in Electric and Hybrid Motor Design at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. The period produced 29 patents across France, the European Patent Office, and WIPO, and 15 peer-reviewed publications. The underlying engineering contributed to over 3 million electric vehicle units sold by 2024.

In parallel, Bassel founded Mirdad in 2020, a cultural blogging platform for the 300 million Arabic-speaking writers, thinkers, and researchers across MENA. Mirdad grew from 93,000 users in FY2021 to 420,000 users in FY2023, building a high-value network of regional thought leaders.

In September 2022 he founded Tracee, applying the same reliability discipline to regulated payments. The build phase produced a patented multi-agent payment architecture on a chain-agnostic non-custodial wallet using regulated stablecoins. It was recognized among the global winners of Circle's Impact competition in Paris and awarded a Stellar Community Fund grant. Tracee operates since May 2025 as an independent advisory practice.

Since May 2025 Bassel is also Product and Capital Architect at Arrel, a non-custodial digital asset orchestration platform serving banks, asset managers, and payment providers. Since January 2026 he advises the United Nations Development Programme's Central African Forest Initiative on the Payments for Environmental Services program, a $1B multi-donor climate fund for the Congo Basin.