Yuval Rooz, Co-Founder and CEO, Digital Asset

It's been three months since Yuval Rooz stepped into his new role at Digital Asset as CEO. Rooz, a cofounder of the firm, had a goal of making the firm - which was best known for partnering with large financial institutions on blockchain project - more open. In this episode of The Scoop, Rooz joins Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd to discuss his transition into the CEO suit, what it's been like to take the reins after the exit of Blythe Masters. We also dove into blockchain strategies across cloud providers like Amazon and the success of Digital Asset's partnership with the Australian Securities Exchange.

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Rooz had stepped into the CEO role roughly three months before this episode, succeeding Blythe Masters, the high-profile former JPMorgan executive who had built Digital Asset's public profile since 2015. He tells Chaparro and Todd that one of his central goals since taking over has been making the company more open, both in how it communicates and in how its technology is used, after years in which Digital Asset was known primarily for large, often confidential enterprise blockchain engagements. That shift matters because Digital Asset had, at that point, built its reputation almost entirely on deep institutional partnerships rather than public-facing products.

Much of the conversation centers on those institutional relationships, including Digital Asset's long-running work with the Australian Securities Exchange, which had selected the company's distributed ledger technology to replace its legacy CHESS clearing and settlement system in one of the most closely watched enterprise blockchain deployments to date. Rooz also discusses how major cloud providers, including Amazon, were beginning to evaluate and support blockchain infrastructure, and what that growing cloud interest could mean for enterprise adoption of distributed ledger technology more broadly.

He touches on DAML, the smart contract language Digital Asset developed to let financial institutions build applications across different underlying blockchains, and why he saw broader accessibility of that technology as key to the company's next chapter. The episode offers a look at how Digital Asset's new leadership was trying to translate years of institutional credibility into a more open, widely adopted platform, without abandoning the enterprise relationships that had defined the company under its previous leadership. Rooz also reflects candidly on what changes with a leadership transition of this kind, describing the balance between honoring the roadmap Masters had set and putting his own stamp on the company's direction and culture.