Wall Street veteran Jamie Selway departs Blockchain.com as institutional wave fails to materialize | Monero’s Riccardo Spagni: “Financial privacy is a basic human right” | An interview with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire
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Wall Street veteran Jamie Selway departs Blockchain.com as institutional wave fails to materialize
Monero’s Riccardo Spagni: “Financial privacy is a basic human right”
Meltem Demirors: crypto ecosystem growth will come from New York and existing financial centers
The Block in Davos: An interview with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire
“Financial privacy is a basic human right” - Riccardo Spagni, Lead Maintainer Monero
The Big Block
Jamie Selway, the Wall Street trading veteran, has left his post at Blockchain.com as global head of institutional markets, The Block has learned. He had joined the firm in August.
Count this as another sign that firms and executives across the crypto market are finding building institutional-aimed businesses a tough egg to crack.
Selway joined Blockchain.com, which operates over 32 million crypto wallets, with a grand vision to build out a business aimed at luring large investors and proprietary traders to its platform, as The Financial Times reported. The plan was to build out an over-the-counter trading business, institutional custody and an exchange business aimed at serving larger investing firms and trading shops. The OTC desk, which launched earlier this year, counts former derivatives trader Vince Machi as a team member. Still, the firm’s plans to build out an exchange and integrate the OTC desk with an institutional custody solution is behind schedule, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Read More on The Block (3 Minutes)
Around The Block: Davos
Monero’s Riccardo Spagni: “Financial privacy is a basic human right”
Speaking in Davos at an event co-hosted by The Block and E8 Partners, Riccardo Spagni, the lead maintainer of a privacy project Monero, spoke about why privacy matters to him and why he thinks it should matter to everyone. Spagni is convinced that financial privacy is a basic human right. — More
Meltem Demirors: crypto ecosystem growth will come from New York and existing financial centers
Speaking at a panel in Davos at “Innovate Finance,” an event co-hosted by The Block and E8 Partners, Meltem Demirors, the Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, said she thinks that most of the innovation in the cryptocurrency space will come out of the already existing financial centers, headed by New York. Demirors said that growth of the ecosystem will come from understanding the regulatory environment as well as building the things that people can use, trust and feel safe using. — More
The Block in Davos: An interview with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire
Circle, a Boston-based firm, wears many hats in the nascent crypto market. The firm, which was founded by Allaire and cofounder Sean Neville in 2013, got its start as a payments company — allowing users to send bitcoin around the world via a mobile application. Now, it operates a number of businesses including a massive cryptocurrency over-the-counter trading unit, Circle Trade. In 2018, Circle acquired Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange, and rolled-out a roboadviser-like product for crypto, Circle Invest. — More
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