Key crypto hires, exits and moves: March 2022

It's starting to feel like a broken record: March was another big month for crypto hires and exits. 

Crypto firms continued to land heavy hitters from US government entities including the Department of Justice, Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Federal Reserve.

There were also some big exits. The headliner was Samson Mow stepping down from Blockstream. And several big names jumped from one crypto firm to another.

• Non-custodial lending protocol Euler has hired Brandon Neal as COO. He spent the last nine years at the New York Federal Reserve, handling governance and strategic planning before managing its purchases of Treasury securities.
• Kraken has hired Carrie Dolan as CFO after former CFO Kaiser NG left in January. This change comes ahead of the firm's prospective plans to go public.
• Dapper Labs has hired two key execs to manage its NFT ventures: Dzmitry Markovich, now SVP of engineering, and Stephanie Lemmerman, the company’s new CFO.
• Fintech company Mode has appointed Rita Liu as CEO. Her last position was CEO of Alipay UK.
• Custody platform Copper has hired Sabrina Wilson, who has previously worked at Citi and Deutsche Bank, as COO. It has also poached Carly Lowery from Coinbase to be its chief legal officer. 
• NFT platform Immutable has hired a set of C-suite execs. It has hired Gill Findlay as COO, John Bories as chief growth officer, Justin Hulog as chief studio officer (a gaming-focused position) and Katherine Rau as chief people officer.
• GoldenTree Asset Management has hired Avi Felman as head of digital asset trading.
• FTX has brought on Steve Sadin as head of gaming partnerships. He joins from WB Games. It also hired Marcel Lötscher as head of regulatory strategy for Europe.
• Crypto asset manager Hashdex has hired Nicole Dyskant as global head of legal and compliance.
• Crypto VC firm Greenfield One has poached David An from Binance to be a partner in the investment team. It has also hired Christian Zimmermann as partner and chief legal officer, and Florian Peter as vice president of investor relations and business development.
• Crypto.com has named Rosie Donachie as senior vice president of sustainability. She joins from the London Stock Exchange Group.
• Bitstamp has brought on James Greenwood as CTO. He was previously the COO of Commercial Bank International, a bank in the UAE. The exchange also hired Ave King as chief compliance officer for the Asia Pacific Region.
• Bitstamp USA made a few of its own hires. It brought on Rika Khurdayan as chief legal officer, Silvia Lacayo as head of marketing and Michael Levi as head of product and strategy.
• Michele Korver has joined a16z as head of regulatory. She makes the switch after 27 years in government and law enforcement; her last role was chief digital currency advisor at FinCEN.
• Framework Ventures has hired Adam Badrawi to lead its communications department and advise its portfolio companies. He was last working for a stealth startup.
• The Stellar Development Foundation has hired Paul Wong as director of product for CBDCs and institutions. He joins from the Federal Reserve, where he was a manager within its technology lab.
• Polygon Studios has named Michael Blank as COO and Young Ko as CFO. It also made some further hires specifically focused on gaming.
• Amanda Cowie has joined DCG as vice president of communications. She’s a former journalist at Bloomberg and Business Insider.
• Lydia Hylton has joined Bain Capital Crypto as partner. She joins from Redpoint Ventures where she was an investor.
• CoinDesk has hired Alan Campbell as president of data and indices. He joins from Bloomberg Indices, where he was head of product management.
• Former attorney at the US Department of Justice Chris Hayes has joined Celo as head of government relations. His last role was as senior policy counsel at the Institutional Limited Partners Association.
• Ahmed Ghappour has joined Nym Technologies — which runs a decentralized VPN service — as general counsel. As an attorney, he has represented well-known individuals, such as Ross Ulbricht, founder of online drug marketplace Silk Road.
• Polygon has hired Mudit Gupta as chief information security officer. Gupta is also a technical partner at Delta Blockchain Fund and an advisor to SushiSwap. 
• Solana Labs has brought on 14-year-old Gajesh Naik as an intern (following Paradigm’s hire of an anonymous developer last month who’s still at high school). Naik has been highly active in the DeFi space.
• Lee Smallwood, former COO for Citigroup, has joined Hivemind Capital, a $1.5 billion investment firm founded by Matt Zhang. 
• Chainlink Labs has picked up Dahlia Malkhi, former CTO and lead maintainer of Diem  — the stablecoin initially launched by Facebook and formerly known as Libra — as chief research officer.
• Metaplex — a standard for NFTs on Solana — has hired Nhan Phan as CTO. Phan is a software engineer who has previously worked at Snapchat, focusing on monetization and analytics engineering.

Promotions

• Fidelity has promoted Luc Froehlich from global head of investment directing and fixed income to global head of digital asset solutions.
• EY has promoted Laeeq Shabbir from senior manager of global and EMEIA blockchain assurance to a director position focused on blockchain.
• Lauren Stephanian was promoted to partner at Pantera Capital, where she has worked for four years.

Exits

• Samson Mow has stepped down from Blockstream after five years at the company. He says he’s now focusing on nation-state bitcoin adoption.
• Anthony Day stepped down as blockchain leader at IBM Blockchain. He says he’s planning to “move to an organization I never would have predicted would be in my future.”
• Anton Cheng has left DeFi derivatives platform Opyn where he was a core developer. He says he’s planning to spend a few months exploring the crypto space and considering what role he wants to take up next.
• Alex Kriete, co-head of digital assets at Citi, is leaving the bank after less than a year in the role. Kriete had spent more than 11 years at Citi and was appointed to oversee its newly formed crypto division in June last year, writes Ryan Weeks.
• Revolut chief revenue officer Alan Chang has left in order to pursue a new crypto venture, where he’s seeking to raise $100 million in a token sale.
• Matt Hamilton, a software developer known as HammerToe, has left Ripple to focus on his family. He’s a former developer at IBM who became director of developer relations at RippleX — a payment platform built on the XRP Ledger — at the start of 2021. His last role was principal developer advocate.
• Daniel Mottice and Matt Vanhouten have left Visa, where they each worked for five years. Mottice was most recently product lead in its crypto team, while Vanhouten was vice president of direct product. Together they have founded a crypto startup called Ansible Labs, which aims to make it easier to transfer money between fiat and crypto. 
• Viktor Radchenko has stepped down as CEO of Trust Wallet. Radchenko founded the multi-chain wallet in 2017. He will be replaced by former Binance VP of marketing Eowyn Chen. 
• Roshun Patel has stepped down at Genesis, where he was a vice president and had worked for three years. According to Genesis’s Matt Ballensweig, Patel is departing “to pursue his own passions within crypto.”

Advisory and board positions

• Galaxy Digital has appointed Jane Dietze to its board of directors. She is the chief investment officer of Brown University.
• Rapper Snoop Dogg has joined Faze Clan’s board of directors. Faze Clan is a popular esports organization that has partnered with MoonPay to work on crypto and NFTs. 
• Former Disney CEO Robert Iger has joined the board of Genies, a startup focused on selling fashion items for avatars that can be used within online gaming and metaverse platforms. He is also an investor in the company.
• Silvergate has added Rebecca Rettig to its board. Rettig is general counsel for the Aave Companies — the entities behind the decentralized protocol Aave and related platforms. 
• Ripple has appointed Michael Warren to its board of directors. Warren is the managing director of Albright Stonebridge Group — part of Dentons Global Advisors — and is a former senior advisor at the White House during the Obama administration.