Key crypto hires, exits and moves: November 2021

It was another buzzing month in the crypto hiring scene as exchanges continued to make strategic hires, VC firms picked up notable crypto individuals as collaborators and fintech companies moving into crypto brought more crypto comms experts in-house.

Last month, there was also some controversy with cLabs top developer James Prestwich leaving the company amid a barrage of allegations.

Plus we saw the return of Brian Brooks — not too long after he jumped ship from Binance.US — as well as two big departures. 

And with that, we start with the exits.

Exits

• After 16 years at the company, Jack Dorsey has finally left Twitter. He resigned on November 29 and has been replaced by former CTO Parag Agrawal. Dorsey had been criticized for innovating too slowly and expectations are that his successor will make changes much more rapidly. Dorsey has previously said that if he wasn’t working at Twitter he would be working on Bitcoin — but will that turn out to be the case?
• After seven years at Meta (formerly Facebook), David Marcus — who was given the arduous task of trying to sell Diem (formerly Libra) to the world — has quit. He explained that his “entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it.” (If only there was a newly available crypto-loving tech founder he could team up with.)
• Alejandro De La Torre has left Bitcoin mining firm Poolin, where he was a vice president, and has set up his own bitcoin mining consultancy called proofofwork.energy. He has plenty of experience to do so, having previously worked at BTC.com and Bitmain.
• Former Nifty’s chief legal officer Olta Andoni has departed the company after eight months. Nifty’s is an NFT marketplace owned by the Winklevoss twins. On Twitter, Andoni said she would be taking time off to consider opportunities coming her way.
• In a rather sudden exit, James Prestwich — founder of Summa and Storj Labs — has departed cLabs, the company focused on Celo. cLabs CEO Tim Moreton claimed that he was fired on the basis of misconduct and may have put Celo’s cross-chain protocol at risk. Prestwich hit back saying he didn’t touch the protocol and that cLabs lied about him to attack his reputation.
• Genesis Trading's chief technology officer Pat DeFrancesco is no longer with the cryptocurrency trading and lending firm, according to a source familiar with the move. He joined the firm in 2019 with priors at machine learning-based trading firm 7 Chord and Intercontinental Exchange.
• Former Insight Partners senior associate Evan Fisher — who was focused on investing in crypto companies — has departed to start his own crypto fund. He is raising $30 million for the fund, called Portal Ventures, with plans to invest in early stage crypto companies.

Promotions

• On the back of Dorsey’s departure, Parag Agrawal is now the CEO of Twitter. He was first tasked with finding a lead for Twitter’s decentralized social media project Bluesky, eventually choosing Jay Graber earlier this year. Plus, Twitter’s new Crypto team reported directly to him while he was CTO. This may bode well for Twitter’s ongoing crypto experiments.
• Raj Karkara has been promoted from CMO to COO of ZebPay. This occurred in October, according to his LinkedIn, but was only announced by the crypto exchange in November.
• Crypto VC firm Hashed announced it is promoting its two members Sean Hong and Baek Kim as partners. Hong currently serves as the CFO at Hashed, and Kim presently leads global investments at the firm.

Hires

• Brian Brooks is back. Two months on from his sudden departure from Binance.US after only four months in the job, Brooks has joined Bitcoin mining firm Bitfury as CEO. As you probably know, Brooks was the former acting U.S. Comptroller of the Currency and was once the chief legal officer of Coinbase.
• Former vice president of General Atlantic Christine Kang has been hired by Thoma Bravo to lead its new growth investing business aimed at crypto and fintech. Thoma Bravo manages more than $91 billion in assets. 
• FTX.US has hired Mark Wetjen as head of policy and regulatory strategy. Wetjen was last CEO of MIAX futures and is a former CFTC commissioner.
• Oliver Linch has joined Bittrex as general counsel. He comes from Shearman and Sterling LLP where he worked for 10 years, most recently as a senior associate.
• Market making firm GSR has brought on Jake Dwyer as managing director. He was previously at HyperScience and has worked at $58 billion fund Two Sigma investments. (Listen to his conversation with Frank Chaparro on The Scoop here.)
• Former Alexa software engineer at Amazon Rahul Kothari has joined Reddit’s crypto team as an engineer. Kothari is also currently an intern at the Ethereum Foundation but he is phasing this out in a month.
• Anchorage Digital has poached Camilla Churcher from Celsius Network, where she was global head of business development. Her new role will be as head of sales. She previously worked for nine years at Credit Suisse.
• Mining firm Marathon has hired Adam Swick as vice president of strategy. He joins from Refinery Ventures where he was a principal investor. He has worked at Kraken in the past.
• Twitter has brought on Tess Rinearson to lead its crypto team (separate from BlueSky). She joins from Interchain GmbH where she was VP of engineering. She is also a council member of the Internchain Foundation.
• Crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky, who resigned from Compound as general counsel last month, has been picked up by the Blockchain Association as head of policy. 
• Blockchain.com has hired CJ Rinaldi as chief compliance officer. He joins from Deutsche Bank where he worked for eight years focusing on financial compliance. He has also worked at UBS and Bridgewater Associates.
• MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen has joined Dragonfly Capital as a venture partner. He will split his time between contributing to MakerDAO and working with Dragonfly, according to the VC firm.
• Sky Mavis co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin has joined 1kx as a venture partner. He will be contributing to its investment strategy in the play-to-earn blockchain gaming field. Similar to Christensen, he will maintain his role at Sky Mavis.
• Joey Messick, who focused on insights and strategy at Riot Blockchain, has left to join Fractional Art as a project manager. Fractional Art is a protocol for fractionalizing and tokenizing NFTs.
• Osprey Funds has picked up Justin Paterno as managing director and project manager of its NFT fund. He co-founded Cardshop, a digital card company aimed at the metaverse. He also worked at Stocktwits for 12 years.
• Former Celo partner Lucinda Bell has joined Square as its crypto communications lead. Bell previously spent three years building out crypto-focused public relations firm Wachsman as a director. 
• Crypto exchange ZebPay has hired Tarun Jain as CFO. He was last CFO at Lithium Urban Technologies and has worked at Zoomcar and Warner Bros.
• Galaxy Digital has picked up Austin Storms as VP of bitcoin mining operations. He comes from Great American Mining where he was director of engineering.

Advisory and board positions

• Stephen Palley, crypto lawyer and partner at Anderson Kill, has joined the editorial team of the International Journal of Blockchain Law. 
• Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang has joined Stripe’s board of advisors.
• Rob McWilliam has become a non-executive director at lobby firm CryptoUK. He has similar roles at multiple other companies and previously worked for Amazon and spent 15 years at Asda.
• Neal Katyal, a partner at Hogan Lovell, has joined Galaxy Digital as Senior Advisor and Chair of its newly-formed Advisory Board.
• Former CFTC commissioner Brian Quintenz has joined Kalshi’s board of directors. Kalshi is an exchange for trading on events that may happen. In September, he joined a16z as an advisory partner.
• Colleen Sullivan is no longer an advisor to Argo Blockchain after around three months in the position. She remains an advisor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce, per her LinkedIn.

Industry insights

• Pseudonymous researcher Proto has joined Optimism, a layer two scaling solution built on Ethereum. He was previously at the Ethereum Foundation, working on research and development.
• Former Fortune journalist Lucinda Shen has joined Axios, where she will cover fintech.