Key crypto hires, exits and moves: December 2021

Last year was a big year for hiring in the crypto industry. Just 27 crypto firms hired 8,700 people, with an average doubling of headcount across them. Many more firms also grew, particularly in the fields of NFTs and blockchain gaming.

Last month was no different. There were a lot of big hires from traditional finance and tech, with hires from AWS, WhatsApp, Curve and the United States Attorneys' Office. Crypto exchanges continued to lead the way but there was some activity at venture capital firms too.

On the flip side, there were a number of notable exits from crypto companies and foundations focused on specific blockchains. These included Near, Tron and also Huobi (an exchange that has its own coin).

Hires

• Brian Roberts, the former chief financial officer (CFO) at ride-sharing startup Lyft, has joined NFT marketplace OpenSea as CFO. He spent seven years at the startup and has also worked at Microsoft and Walmart.
• Marieke Flament has replaced Erik Trautman as CEO of the Near Foundation (which focuses on the Near blockchain). She was previously the CEO of digital business bank Mettle, a NatWest subsidiary and worked at Circle for three years. (Read our recent interview with her here.)
• Rob Collier, who was last head of consumer legal at Meta’s Novi project (once known as Facebook’s Libra), has joined social token platform Rally as general counsel. Collier's hire is the latest in a series of additions to Rally's executive team, such as Bremner Morris from Patreon who joined to lead the company as CEO after the exit of Kevin Chou.
• Crypto exchange Zebpay has hired Geetika Mehta as chief human resources officer according to a statement in December — although her LinkedIn profile says she joined in May. Prior to working at the exchange, she was a freelance consultant and she has also worked at hotel chain OYO and at sport clothing company Puma.
• In the spirit of VCs helping out their incubated companies, Natalie Luu has left her role as a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners to join Terraform Labs as head of ecosystem development. She remains connected to the VC in a new role as a venture partner. 
• Former Polygon global CMO Min Kim has joined crypto-focused R&D centre Windranger Labs as head of biz dev. At the same time, former Polygon CMO Eric Dash has joined ETF issuer ProShares as chief content and comms officer.
• Cecile Duparc, founder of consulting firm Synaps, has joined Bitstamp as global head of PR. Earlier in her career, she spent four years working at Netflix and has also worked at Disney.
• Former vice president of strategic partnerships at AWS, Sandy Carter, has joined Unstoppable Domains as senior vice president and channel chief. She previously worked at IBM for nearly nine years.
• Bob Lee has joined MobileCoin — a cryptocurrency embedded into messaging app Signal — as chief product officer, having been an advisor since February 2021. He was once the CTO of Block (formerly Square) and prior to that spent five years working for Google.
• Dean Sovolos is now the general counsel for the Americas at crypto liquidity provider B2C2. He is a former federal prosecutor at the United States Attorneys' Office and is a former FBI agent.
• Elwood Technologies has brought Daniel Ciment onboard  as COO. Ciment was last the COO of IEX (the exchange founded by Brad Katsuyama to fight against high-frequency traders, as depicted in the book Flash Boys). He has previously worked at JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Barclays.
• Former WhatsApp associate general counsel Ashish Chandra has joined CoinSwitch Kuber as general counsel. Prior to WhatsApp, Chandra worked at Netflix for just over a year.
• Crypto lending company Celius Network has hired Rosie McWhorter as head of US compliance operations. Prior to her stint at Celsius, she was supervisor of the special investigations unit at banking firm Capital One.
• MoonPay has poached Joseph-Daniel Millwood from fintech company Curve to be its vice president of growth. He had a similar role at Curve, and has also held growth positions at Coinbase and Uber. MoonPay is a service for buying and selling crypto, that has recently added a service that helps celebrities buy expensive NFTs.
• Kraken has brought on Pranesh Anthapur as chief people officer. The crypto exchange has been hiring aggressively, picking up more than 1,000 people during 2021. Anthapur joins from Uber, where he was vice president of human resources. 
• Blockchain.com has hired Maya Miller as chief people officer. She had been a contractor since March. Miller is a leadership coach who does human resources consulting and once worked at Ripple.
• Valkyrie Funds has picked up Josh Olszewicz as head of research, starting in January. He was a trader at Techemy Capital and a contributor to crypto news site Brave New Coin.
• Ed Chang spent four years at EA as senior director of partnerships. Now he has joined Ava Labs — the company behind the Avalanche blockchain — as director of gaming. 
• Meta’s former head of consumer product management Meron Colbeci has joined Checkout.com to run product strategy. He marks an outlier as someone moving away from the crypto industry — unless that strategy were to involve crypto in some way.

Exits

• Adam White has left bitcoin firm Bakkt, where he worked for three years, first as COO then president. Prior to Bakkt, he was at Coinbase for five years (and was its fifth employee).
• Katie Haun has left a16z to form a new fund focused on crypto and web3. She was at the VC firm for three years and is also a board member at OpenSea and sits on the Coinbase board of directors.
• Li Lin has stepped down as CEO and executive director of Huobi Technologies, the company behind the crypto exchange Huobi. He’s now a non-executive director and remains chairman of the board and a controlling shareholder. Wu Shupeng will take his place. 
• Erik Trautman has resigned as CEO of the Near Foundation. He remains a contributor to the project and will continue as a board member.
• Justin Sun has stepped down as CEO of the Tron Foundation at the same time as becoming a permanent representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organization. (He’s also planning a trip to space.) 
• Roy Liu has also left the Tron Foundation, quitting his position as head of business and marketing. He has co-founded a blockchain game called SYN.CITY and continues to run the VC firm Goat Capital that he also co-founded.
• Former crypto journalist (and former colleague of mine) Nick Chong has left his role as an investment analyst at ParaFi Capital, following in the footsteps of Santiago Santos. He will, however, continue to source primary market opportunities for ParaFi while spending more time as an angel investor.
• SEC Commissioner Elad Roisman has announced that he plans to resign at the end of January.

Advisory and board positions

• Chris Brummer, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, has joined Paradigm as a senior advisor. He said his focus will be on technology and financial regulation as well as financial inclusion.
• Altcoin Psycho, a pseudonymous trader who has 388,000 followers on Twitter and founder of crypto trading bot Psycho Bot, has joined investment firm Sino Global Capital as an advisor for its fund. He will focus on projects within the Cosmos ecosystem.
• Brian Brooks has joined the board of directors of crypto exchange Voyager Digital. Brooks is the CEO of bitcoin mining company Bitfury. Before that, he was CEO of crypto exchange Binance.US — before stepping down suddenly after just four months. He also previously served as the acting Comptroller of the Currency.