Key crypto hires and moves: September 2021

It’s been another busy month in the crypto industry hiring world. 

Key trends this month include a number of major hires for traditional finance and fintech, along with a smattering of moves within the industry — including VC firms continuing to help their portfolio clients with finding personnel.

Plus, there was another big departure as ex-regulator Christopher Giancarlo left BlockFi’s board of directors, extending a trend that began in August.

Hires

• eToro has hired Lule Demmissie as CEO of its US operations. Demmissie was previously the president of Ally Invest and has priors at TD Ameritrade, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch.
• Bittrex Global has brought on Michael Schroder as chief compliance and risk officer. He was formerly a board member of SMBC Nikko Capital Markets Europe GmbH and previously worked at State Street.
• a16z’s crypto fund has hired Miles Jennings, former partner at Latham & Watkins, as its general counsel. Jennings co-chaired Latham's global blockchain and cryptocurrency task force and is a former ConsenSys employee.
• Injective Labs has made two key hires. Brandon Ferrick, a former associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, who has previously worked alongside Ryne Miller and Jay Clayton, will join as general counsel. Maxim Shen, who was a quantitative market maker at Tower Research, will join the company as head of financial markets.
• Bitstamp has hired Bernice Smith as chief people officer. She was last chief people and administration officer at Huma and has priors at Clear bank, Barclays and Nomura.
• Crypto.com has poached Visa’s country manager for Korea and Mongolia, Patrick Yoon, to be its general manager for Korea. Prior to Visa, Yoon spent 12.5 years at Standard Chartered.
• Jane Lippencott, who previously left Winklevoss Capital to become a partner at Distributed Global, has joined a16z as a partner in its crypto unit.
• Fireblocks has hired two co-heads for Switzerland. Taking the roles are Richard Astle, former head of client relations at Swiss Crypto Vault AG, and Ana Santillan, a former sales trader at Covario who also spent nine years at Morgan Stanley.
• Binance.US has hired Brian Shroder, former head of biz dev at Ant Group, as president. He has also worked for Uber and Boston Consulting Group.
• Katherine Wu has joined Coinbase Ventures as an investor. She was previously director of biz dev at Messari and was once a legal intern at the SEC.
• Celo revealed in September that it has made four key hires in recent months — all for cLabs, which builds the Celo blockchain. Former a16z partner Danielle Andrzejewski joins as head of commerce, while former managing director of the digital monetary institute Chris Ostrowski joins as partner. Alberto Martin, who spent 17 years at Google, joins as head of product, and former Novi Financial head of open source for blockchain Eric Nakagawa comes on board as head of developer relations.
• Amber Group has expanded its C-suite, picking up former Nomisma Holdings CEO Dimitrios Kavvathas as its chief strategy officer and former FP Complete Corporation CFO/COO Todd Miller as COO. It also hired Sotirios Kavvathas, former partner at BDO Greece, as operations chief for Europe.
• Babel Asia — part of Babel Finance — has hired Shanshan Yu as CEO. She is a former private banker at the Bank of Singapore.
• On the FinTech side of things, Paul Brooking, former deputy CFO at Revolut, has joined Freetrade as CFO.
• CoinFund has hired David Pakman, former partner at Venrock, as its managing partner. Pakman sits on the boards of NFT-focused companies Dapper Labs and Rarible.
• BNY Mellon has hired Hadley Stern, former head of AWS innovation lab, as global head of digital custody. Stern is the former COO of Bloq and spent 17 years at Fidelity. BNY Mellon has also picked up Benjamin Duve, who spent 14 years at Commerzbank AG, most recently as head of digital assets and custody.
• Shah Hafizi, former chief compliance officer at Vise, has joined The DeFi Alliance as general counsel. Hafizi is a former CCO at BlackRock. The DeFi Alliance also picked up Roberto Riccio, a former senior product manager at Facebook, as head of product.
• Binance continues to hire former regulators, sniping two from the IRS last month. Special agents Tigran Gambaryan and Matthew Price will join as VP of global intelligence and investigations and senior director of investigations respectively.
• The SEC has hired former CFTC commissioner Dan Berkovitz, as general counsel. Berkovitz has previously made comments that DeFi protocols may be illegal because of a lack of intermediaries.
• Metaplex Studios — a backbone for Solana-based NFT projects — has named Adam Jeffries as CEO. He’s the former head of equities UI platform at Citadel and has worked at Google.
• Voyager Digital hired Rakesh Gidwani as its CTO. He joins from Two Sigma Investments, where we was senior vice president of engineering.

Promotions

• Jump Trading — which recently went public about its multi-billion dollar crypto operation — has appointed Kanav Kariya to be president of its crypto unit, Jump Crypto. He has worked for the company for more than three years but has no prior experience. He started as a software engineering intern before becoming director of strategic initiatives, according to his LinkedIn.
• Morgan Stanley has promoted Sheena Shah, formerly head of G10 FX strategy in Europe, to lead crypto analyst. Shah has been at the company for eight years with no priors.
• Robinhood has appointed former head of engineering Johann Kerbrat as its Crypto CTO. He has been at the company for eight months, having previously worked at Uber and Airbnb.
• While technically a new hire, the appointment of Alameda Research’s head of OTC in the APAC area, Ryan Salame, to CEO of FTX Bahamas — its new headquarters — is more of a promotion. This is due to the closeness of the two companies that are both owned by Sam Bankman-Fried. 

Exits

• Former CFTC Chairman Christopher Giancarlo — sometimes known as “Crypto Dad” — resigned from BlockFi’s board of directors after just five months in the position. He will remain as an advisor to the project. As noted in last month’s recap, a number of prominent ex-regulators have recently decided to step back from certain crypto companies in wake of increased regulatory scrutiny.
• Coinbase’s VP of communications Kim Milosevich announced that she plans to leave the company at the end of the year. She has been there since August 2020, having previously worked at Yahoo, Skype and a16z. Her post came just ten days after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called out the SEC for refusing to provide clarity on its yet-to-be launched lending product, Lend.
• Compound’s general counsel Jake Chervinsky left at the end of September, with plans to take a month off before starting a new, undisclosed job. He had worked for Compound for two-and-a-half years.

Board positions

• With Crypto Dad’s departure, BlockFi promoted Ellen-Blair Chube to take his spot. She is currently the managing director of investment banking at William Blair & Company and sits on the boards of two other firms.
• Valkyrie CEO Leah Wald has joined the board of directors of bitcoin investment firm Cypherpunk Holdings. According to BitcoinTreasuries, it has the 20th largest bitcoin holdings by any company.
• NASDAQ CFO Michael Ptasznik has joined eToro’s board, as the exchange heads toward a public listing on the NASDAQ via a SPAC merger. 

Industry insights

• Bloomberg hired Stacy-Marie Ishmael as its managing editor for crypto coverage. Before that, she was the editorial director of the Texas Tribune.
• Crypto media company CoinDesk has lost another couple of staff members. Aaron Stanley, former managing director of events content, has been hired by Filecoin as head of events and community. Quartz has also hired CoinDesk’s Nate DiCamillo as an economics reporter, set to start in October.
• Elle Mouton, former graduate software engineer at Luno, has joined Lightning Labs as a junior engineer.