FinTech professional Richard Johnson leaves Greenwich Associates to start his own crypto firm
Market structure veteran Richard Johnson has left Greenwich Associates, a global data and analytics provider, to start his own crypto firm, Texture Capital.
“I started thinking about this a while ago,” Johnson told The Block. “I was sitting at my desk at Greenwich and writing about how tokenization and STOs are going to be revolutionary to market structure, but I was not doing anything about it.”
To execute on his entrepreneurial ambition, Johnson resigned in September and founded Texture Capital. His new venture is a broker-dealer firm that uses blockchain technology and smart contracts to streamline the insurance and trading of digital securities.
The security business is driven by institutional money, Johnson told The Block, and he plans to use his almost two decades of experience with institutional clients to differentiate his new startup. The next step, he said, is to get regulatory approval as a broker-dealer to trade security tokens.
Security token offering (STO) enterprises now operate in a fast-changing and unpredictable environment. FinTech company Templum this month lost its General Council Annemarie Tierney and the CEO of Templum Markets Vincent Molinari. Compliance platform Harbor has been gunning to tokenize venture capital funds but there has been no information on where the initiative stands. Johnson expects his startup to benefit from this backdrop.
Johnson makes clear that he is not competing against established technology platforms such as Securitize and intends to stick with the broker-dealer model.
“We think the broker-dealer model is best because we think issuers will need help structure the deal and with other broker-dealer services,” he said. “We are going to go after the existing market with a new product that gives better transparency to issuers and investors.”
Note: The story previously stated that Annemarie Tierney and Vincent Molinari are the former CTO and CEO at Templum. The information has since been updated.
