GSR hires former JPMorgan executive Andreas Koukorinis as new trading head

GSR, a major global crypto trading firm, announced it has hired former JPMorgan Chase executive Andreas Koukorinis.

Koukorinis, who previously worked as global head of electronic trading for credit and fixed income exchange-traded funds at JPMorgan Chase, is joining GSR to strengthen its digital assets trading, the firm said in a press release on Wednesday. He becomes GSR's new head of trading.

"The next few years are going to be foundational in defining the market infrastructure for digital assets and I see GSR uniquely placed to take advantage of the trading opportunities this presents,” Koukorinis said in a statement. 

In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, he said his long-term goal is to build GSR into an authorized participant and market maker for bitcoin spot ETFs. The new financial instrument, which gained approval from the SEC in mid-January, has accumulated roughly $27 billion in total trading volume, with the products offered by Grayscale, BlackRock and Fidelity dominating trade.

'Retail-facing business'

“I think we will get a chance to build a retail-facing business, trading the retail flows by servicing the ETFs,” Koukorinis told Bloomberg. 

Before joining GSR, Koukorinis spent five years at JPMorgan. His past work experience, according to his LinkedIn profile, also includes positions at Fortress, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley. He also founded his own machine learning startup Stratagem Technologies, which was acquired by Blockchain.com in 2018. 

Correction: Clarifies Andreas Koukorinis' quote.