34 key crypto hires and moves: August 2021

There were a lot of significant hires this month, a few deserved promotions and some surprising exits.

One key trend is the sudden disappearance of high profile, former regulators from big crypto exchanges — around the same time as regulatory pressure on the exchanges has heated up. There continued to be a number of moves from traditional finance and tech companies into the industry, but there were many big moves within the industry as well.

This month, we’re breaking down the types of hires and moves, and due to their prominence, we will begin with the exits, two of which were rather sudden.

Exits

• Former acting head of the OCC Brian Brooks had only just settled into his post as CEO of Binance.US — after the ousting of former CEO Catherine Coley — when he abruptly resigned citing “differences over strategic direction.” He was there for just three months.
• Coinbase similarly faced a sudden exit when head of capital markets Brett Redfearn left after just five months. Prior to Coinbase, he had spent three years at the SEC.
• CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz stepped down at the end of the month. He was known as a crypto advocate who oversaw many crypto-related issues, such as bitcoin futures contracts and the expansion of DeFi.

Promotions

• With the sudden absence of Brooks, Binance.US promoted CFO Joshua Sroge to interim CEO while it seeks a long-term replacement.
• FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried decided to formalize titles for some of the main members of affiliated firm Alameda Research. He promoted traders Sam Trabucco and Caroline Ellison to become co-CEOs, with former head of engineering Nate Parke becoming CTO.

Hires

• PayPal poached Chainalysis chief government affairs officer Jesse Spiro to be its regulatory relations lead on its blockchain and crypto unit. 
• Bitcoin mining firm Canaan has hired James Cheng as its CFO. Cheng was the vice president and CFO of recruitment firm Zhaopin and previously worked at Nokia for eight years.
• Ryne Miller has joined FTX.US as general counsel. He previously worked at Sullivan & Sullivan LLP for eight years and prior to that, was an attorney at the CFTC where he served as legal counsel to then-chairman Gary Gensler, who now leads the SEC.
• Crypto.com has hired the former acting managing director of Spotify Japan, Henrik Johansson, as its global head of growth.
• Grayscale has brought on former Alerian CEO David LaValle as its global head of ETFs. This is important as the firm moves toward converting its trust funds into ETFs. It has also added former Fundstrat head of digital asset research David Grider to lead its own research division. 
• Robert Whitaker, former crypto investigator at Homeland Security — where he worked for nearly 12 years — joined Huobi Nevada as COO in July, it was announced last month. He was previously the COO of BIGG Digital Assets.
• Galaxy Digital has picked up former SIX Digital Exchange CEO Tim Grant, who sits on the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance’s board of directors, to become its head of Europe. Galaxy has also hired former BlackRock managing director Jennifer Lee as chief people officer.
• While Binance continues to face regulatory scrutiny, it has hired former Deloitte senior manager Greg Monahan as its ​​global money laundering reporting officer. Prior to Deloitte, Monahan spent 20 years as a special agent at the IRS Criminal Investigation. Further East, Binance Singapore has hired former Abu Dhabi Global Market CEO Richard Teng.
• After 10 years at Facebook, most recently as VP of corporate and business development, Vaughan Smith left to join Bitso as COO in July. The crypto exchange has also picked up Uber’s former head of public policy in LatAm, Daniel Mangabeira, as its global head of public policy.
• Bitstamp has hired Barbara Daliri as its chief growth officer. Her former job was as SVP of global marketing and sales at e-commerce company Zalando SE. Her priors include Microsoft, Netflix, Google and Axel Springer.
• Twitter has finally chosen a project lead for its BlueSky project, with the lofty goals of creating a standard to decentralize social media. The social media company chose Jay Graber, founder of social event site Happening. She is a former software engineer for the Electric Coin Company.
• BlockFi has hired Jonathan Espinosa, former partner at Veracity Capital, as its director of private clients. Earlier in his career, he spent three years at Goldman Sachs.
• Gemini has brought on Nils Pommerien as its VP of infrastructure. He previously spent three years as director of cloud infrastructure engineering at Netflix and four years at Google before that.

Advisory

• Former SEC chairman Jay Clayton has joined the advisory board of institutional crypto custody firm Fireblocks.

Industry insights

Here are some of the hiring moves below the C-suite that might be relevant to those in the industry.

• In the journalism sector, there were a few moves. Yahoo Finance hired Jennifer Schonberger from Fox Business to be a dedicated crypto reporter. CoinDesk lost three reporters: stalwart Brady Dale who moved to DeFi publication The Defiant; researcher Christine Kim who left for some undisclosed Ethereum research role; and privacy reporter Benjamin Powers who is keeping schtum on his next move.
• OKCoin’s comms lead Will McCormick has moved to Robinhood where he will be head of its crypto comms. The firm is beginning to expand its crypto team, reflecting its growing crypto revenue.
• Coinbase has promoted project manager Trey Edwards to a managerial position, leading Coinbase's Retail Customer Advocacy team — essentially its product ops.
• Last month, Lightning Labs revealed it had hired Peeriot co-founder Benjamin de Waal as a senior engineering manager in May.
• Aave’s Ethereum engineer Hadrien Charlanes has left the company to start work on his own Web3 project. He’s a former software engineer at ConsenSys who has been in the Ethereum space since 2015.
• The pseudonymous purplehat.eth has left Google to join Artblocks in an undisclosed capacity, showing strength in the newly launched NFT platform that’s focused on programmable NFTs.
• Mastercard is looking to hire a director of account management to be the company’s “owner” of the fintech/DeFi space — even along the lines of NFTs. They will be focused on building products to fit these emerging industries.