Former traditional finance workers explain why they jumped ship for crypto

With crypto’s epic rise earlier this year — as bitcoin hit highs of $64,000 and ether broke $4,000 — there has come a big increase in both demand and supply for crypto jobs.

The specific demands reflect the current stage of the crypto industry’s development. For instance, there’s a strong demand for traditional finance workers who have experience with trust products and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) because many companies are launching such products at the moment. 

There’s also a demand for former regulators who can lobby on behalf of exchanges coming under fire for lacking sufficient compliance measures. And in the DeFi industry, firms are finally looking beyond developers and are starting to hire for business development and marketing roles. 

The numbers themselves tell the story. Fidelity Digital Assets plans to expand its team by 70%. Crypto exchanges Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, each have hundreds of open positions. And, as The Block reported, firms are investing heavily in recruitment — using their VC investors for help and offering tokens as incentives.

On the supply side, meanwhile, what’s interesting is the change in dynamics of the typical applicant. With respected investors like Stanley Druckenmiller backing bitcoin and companies like MicroStrategy placing the asset on its balance sheet, a growing number of people in traditional finance see the crypto industry as legitimate. And that’s convincing more traditional finance workers that the industry is a real option.

To fully understand the mindsets of those who have recently left long term roles in the traditional finance and tech industries, we spoke to five individuals who have done just that. Here’s why they made the move.

“An inflection point”

Sendi Young spent five years at payments company Mastercard, including a stint as global lead of its digital and fintech segment. She also previously worked at banking giant HSBC. Last month, she joined blockchain payments company Ripple last month as its managing director of Europe.

“I’ve been following the crypto industry closely for a while now and noticed that within the last year, it reached an inflection point, with significantly more people and institutions opening up to crypto opportunities,” says Young. “I was also inspired by many talented, bright leaders joining the industry — it felt like the right time to jump ship.”

Young says that during her banking career, she witnessed that only incremental changes were being made. And even with fintech, she argues that the field is more of a recreation of the traditional banking experience than it is a truly digital experience. 

“Crypto and blockchain enable digitally native experiences and make how we buy, borrow, sell, invest and send money across the world more efficient, transparent and inclusive,” she says. “The potential of improvement is 10X — not marginal. This is what excites me.”

“Learning something new”

Nick Bonos spent 32 years in the traditional finance industry, including four years at asset management firm Guggenheim Investments — before working for MUFG, after it acquired Guggenheim’s Rydex Fund Services. 

In November 2019, he left his job and became an independent consultant. In April 2021, he started doing consulting work for digital asset management firm Valkyrie Investments before joining the company on May 1 as head of fund operations. He will be helping the firm with its application for a Bitcoin ETF with his years of experience handling ETFs under his belt.

But why did he commit to the role?

“For me it’s the excitement of learning something new,” Bonos says, explaining that it reminded him of when he was an early employee at a mutual funds service company startup, which later got acquired by JP Morgan Chase. 

He adds that joining Valkyrie, a relatively small firm, means he gets to wear many hats. “I get to see everything, I get to learn everything.”

While Bonos sees his own move as relatively rare — he says that few folks as seasoned as himself are making the shift to digital assets — he acknowledges that the younger generation is more willing. 

“You’re seeing people leaving and going to the new service providers, custodians and brokerage. It’s more the younger folks who are tech savvy and more knowledgeable about the crypto space,” he says.

“Bigger than when I joined Uber”

One such example is Jake Lee, who was head of operations at Uber Taiwan for six years before joining DeFi lending protocol Cream Finance in May to do the same role.

Lee left Uber in April and with his spare time started experimenting with various DeFi protocols, such as Binance Smart Chain-based decentralized exchange PancakeSwap. His former boss introduced him to Cream Finance co-founder Leo Cheng, leading to the role.

Lee says there was a parallel between Uber then and crypto now. While Uber is fairly mainstream now, back then it was breaking new ground. “It was really new territory. Full of new opportunities. You can do a lot of interesting things.”

Crypto has an ever greater potential for disrupting the status quo, he says. “For me it’s even bigger than when I joined Uber. ” 

Rather than making an impact on just one industry, namely the taxi business, decentralized finance has the potential to make an impact on more than one industry, Lee points out.

“For me this is much bigger, more global and also not restricted within geography or is limited by physical space. Even if I want to grow Uber Eats you need physical space; there’s a limited amount of cars on the road. Feels a much bigger opportunity.” he says.

"Skyrocketing" demand for blockchain engineers

Chase Wright was a network security engineer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago when he first heard about Ethereum in 2016. Over the next few years, as he moved to Boston then back to Chicago, he started experimenting with Ethereum, running his own node and contributing on related Reddit forums. On the side, he even helped set up a project that offers a free way for anyone to access an archival Ethereum node online.

But it wasn’t until this week when he handed in his notice at the Fed, deciding instead to fully submerge himself in the crypto waters — joining blockchain infrastructure provider Quicknode to help build out its infrastructure. 

Wright explains that he finally felt he had the skills to work in crypto. At the Fed he gained valuable experience in cloud computing, and for several years he’s spent his spare time interacting with blockchain code. At the same time, he says, the demand for blockchain infrastructure services has been continually growing.

“With the introduction of MATIC and Polygon, you now have blockchains with one second block times and the infrastructure requirements and storage requirements, the things like that are increasing,” he says, adding, “The need for people to support that infrastructure is skyrocketing.”

At the same time, the big increase in crypto prices helped. With fewer worries about needing his next paycheck, he was able to think about what he would like to do instead. 

“[Quicknode] offered me a job and at this point I really wanted to do something that I’m passionate about and wanted to work on. I wanted to wake up every day and be happy to go to work and do something I find interesting,” Wright says.

“A new paradigm”

Over the last five years, Lane Kasselman has been running a boutique public relations consulting firm called Greenbrier that he co-founded. Before that, he worked at AT&T and Uber. But during the same time period, he was also an advisor to Blockchain.com, a bitcoin wallet company that launched an exchange in 2019. 

In March of this year he decided to enter the crypto fray full time and join Blockchain.com as its chief business officer. 

Like Lee, he remembers when ridesharing platforms (along with home sharing platforms, like Airbnb) first started achieving regulatory clarity around the world, enabling the businesses marketing them to take off. He thinks the crypto industry was achieving a similar turning point.

On top of that, there’s been a lot of momentum and increased mainstream interest in the past year, he says, particularly with respect to DeFi and NFTs.

“There is a new paradigm in the industry, in finance, and its crypto. You can’t put that back in the box,” he says.

This is why so many of his contemporaries in the traditional finance and tech worlds are moving into the crypto industry at a faster clip.

He adds, “What we’re seeing now with the vast numbers of people from traditional finance coming to crypto is that they get that this is how finance is going to work in the future and it’s a lot more fun to be early to it than to be late.”

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