Prices crashed in last year’s ‘crypto winter’, leading to some high-profile collapses and lay-offs. Combined with allegations of fraud at crypto exchange FTX, that has given fuel to&nbsp;critics of the sector. But&nbsp;the senior executives on our list are confident the industry can turn things around, as institutional adoption of crypto grows and regulations are put into place. The list is a&nbsp;broad overview of the sector, including senior leaders at asset managers, banks, exchanges, custodians, regulators, blockchain&nbsp;firms&nbsp;and more.

Ahmad - Crachilov

“I’ve spent four years in crypto but it feels like an entire career,” says Usman Ahmad, chief executive of Standard Chartered’s crypto exchange Zodia Markets. He’s not the only one. Crypto’s annus horribilis spread far and wide into traditional finance markets, with many across the sector saying events last year hit confidence in the institutional space. But Ahmad is sanguine about it — possibly owing to his roughly two decade-long career in traditional finance. He is a former HSBC derivatives trader who joined the bank during the 2008 financial crisis. Before that, he was at Merrill Lynch for seven years. He co-founded Zodia Markets last year as a crypto brokerage and exchange business, and now leads almost 30 staff. “There are lots of ways that things have historically gone wrong in financial services and many of those same mistakes are being made in the development of the crypto markets,” he says. Zodia Markets — and digital assets at large — still have the confidence of Standard Chartered’s chief executive, Bill Winters, who said in December that digital assets are “here to stay”. “There’s no handbook for this. It’s a little out there, it is a little on the edge,” Ahmad admits, but he says that is what makes it exciting.

CEO and co-founder

Steven Ashley co-founded Laser Digital in October 2022 in the depths of the crypto winter and played a critical role in garnering support for the new venture from its parent company Nomura. Laser aims to move faster than the competition at other banks, which have also created dedicated digital assets teams, and to have more of an entrepreneurial approach. The business has already launched a crypto-focused venture capital firm, but plans to start secondary trading this year and is also eyeing an asset management arm. The Swiss-domiciled firm has offices in the UK and Dubai, where co-founder Jez Mohideen is based. It is currently building the team and aims to have 50 employees by March. Ashley is well-known in the City, having worked more than a decade at Nomura as well as at RBS before that. He joined the Japanese bank as global head of rates and worked his way up to head the wholesale division. He also oversaw its investment into Komainu, a joint venture with CoinShares and Ledger to create a regulated custodian for the digital assets sector. Previously, he told Financial News that he made the switch from banking so he could get back to the coalface and “be more heavily involved in the dayto-day running of the business”. Outside Nomura, Ashley served as chair of the Global Financial Markets Association from October 2019 to March 2022.

Co-founder and executive chair

Despite once being told staying in crypto would be “career suicide”, Diana Biggs is well into her second stint in the sector. She joined the industry in 2015 as a director at digital assets exchange Uphold. She then moved to Anthemis Group, where she focused on gender lens finance and blockchain technologies, and then to HSBC, where she was latterly global head of innovation for private banking. But by 2020, Biggs was back with a role at exchange traded products provider Valour, which gives institutional investors access to blockchain and digital assets. In 2021, at&nbsp;the height of the last crypto bull market, Valour was bought by publicly traded DeFi Technologies and Biggs became chief strategy officer. In October last year, Biggs joined crypto venture capital fund 1kx as a partner. Founded by Lasse Clausen and Christopher Heymann, 1kx has received support from the likes of Accolade Partners, Union Square Ventures’ managing partner Albert Wenger and Brevan Howard co-founder Alan Howard. The fund, which has a portfolio of more than 80 crypto and web3 companies, is looking to Biggs and her background spanning both traditional finance and crypto to help build partnerships with institutions to grow its portfolio projects. Biggs is an associate fellow with Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where she guest lectures on digital assets and&nbsp;blockchain technology, and a board member of&nbsp;HIVE Switzerland. “I feel like I have had a front row seat for nearly a decade as this industry developed,” says Biggs. “It has been quite a journey.”

Partner

Yves Choueifaty first began to look seriously at bitcoin almost a decade ago. Back in 2013, when it was trading at less than $500, Choueifaty and his Tobam colleagues would gather once a month in a pizza restaurant to share thoughts on the cryptocurrency. A short time after their first meetings, the $10bn asset management firm hired a dedicated research team to write an investment thesis on bitcoin, before launching the world’s first open-ended bitcoin fund in 2017. It has since developed other crypto and blockchain-focused funds. Choueifaty, who founded Paris-based Tobam in 2005, previously worked at Credit Lyonnais Asset Management where he climbed the ranks to become its CEO. Outside of Tobam, Choueifaty is a member of the 300 Club, a think-tank comprising some of the most influential names in global investment, including former Allianz Global Investors CEO Elizabeth Corley and Federated Hermes International chief Saker Nusseibeh. He is also president of the advisory board of WeNow, a French company that provides tech to help car drivers measure, reduce and offset carbon emissions.

Founder and president

Anatoly Crachilov made the jump into crypto in 2019, after a more than two-decade career in traditional finance. His CV includes stints at HSBC, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, where he was latterly an executive director in its investment management division. He is the founding partner and chief executive of Nickel Digital Asset Management, a crypto hedge fund with more than 70 clients looking to access crypto markets. Despite the slowdown in&nbsp;financial markets, Nickel continued to expand in 2022, increasing its team by nearly a third over the year. Crachilov has been a vocal critic of the more gung-ho corners of the crypto industry, and has repeatedly called for better risk management and compliance practices across the sector. Nickel is among the first crypto hedge funds to be approved by the Financial Conduct Authority. Crachilov has described the firm’s approach as “extremely conservative”. But the same cannot be said of his seafaring career — he is a keen sailor and has crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on a racing yacht.

Guthrie - McDermott

Jason Guthrie has been at the forefront of WisdomTree’s move into crypto exchange traded products and its broader ambitions in the digital assets sector. He played a key role in launching one of the world’s first physically-backed ETPs in the sector in December 2019, which tracks the price of bitcoin — an achievement that led him to his current job. Since then, as head of product, digital assets, he has grown the firm’s range of single-asset ETPs, pioneered three products that track a basket of cryptoassets and, most recently, added a blockchain exchange-traded fund that is listed in London, Germany and Italy. Guthrie joined WisdomTree as head of capital markets in 2017, having worked at Deutsche Bank. He now manages a team of six and is a board observer at Securrency, a financial and regulatory technology company, in which WisdomTree invested three years ago. He also works to dispel some of the myths surrounding crypto, regularly appearing on WisdomTree’s Crypto Clarified podcast

Head of digital assets, Europe

Blair Halliday has come a long way since starting his career as a mail desk clerk at RBS. He is onto his second UK managing director role at a crypto exchange, having moved from Gemini to Kraken late last year. His position at Kraken, the world’s third-largest crypto exchange by volume, involves leading 350 employees in the UK, as well as overseeing institutional and consumer clients. Halliday previously spent more than a decade tackling financial crime at NatWest Group, and has also held compliance roles at International Currency Exchange, Paysafe and JPMorgan. At Gemini, Halliday led the exchange’s entry into the UK market — its first launch outside the US. Starting with a team of two, he scaled the operation to 30 people and built relationships from the ground up with UK regulators, commercial partners and investors. During his spare time, Blair enjoys long walks with his poochon and watching science-fiction films.

UK managing director

Lord Philip Hammond is arguably the most prominent figure in UK politics to move into the digital assets industry. The chancellor of the exchequer from 2016 to 2019, foreign secretary from 2016 to 2019 and defence secretary from 2011 to 2014, he joined crypto custody firm Copper in late 2021, as the price of bitcoin reached its highest-ever point. The firm, which builds infrastructure for institutional investors in digital assets, was at the time reported to be seeking a total of $500m at a valuation of $3bn in a funding round. By mid-2022, after crypto valuations crashed, the value of the funding round had more than halved, according to Companies House filings. That has not deterred Lord Hammond, who on 26 January was confirmed as the new chair of Copper. In a recent interview with Financial News, he spoke about how the crypto winter had enabled “more serious players” to think about digital assets as a “longer term play”. He also headed to Davos earlier this month, where he appeared on several panels talking up the industry. Before becoming an MP in 1997, he had a wide-ranging business career. As chancellor he was an advocate for financial services, especially for Britain’s fast-growing fintech sector.

Chair

Matthew Long, who joined the Financial Conduct Authority in October as director of payments and digital assets, is in charge of executing any new rules that are introduced in the UK to regulate crypto. Early indicators are that he will be tough on the sector. Before joining the FCA, Long was a director at the National Crime Agency, working on economic crime and illicit finance. In a recent interview with Financial News, he said he was wary of regulatory arbitrage between jurisdictions and that his message to crypto investors is to “be prepared to lose all your money”. However, Long may have his work cut out, following City minister Andrew Griffith appearing at the start of the year to push any new crypto legislation into 2024. “It is not for me to decide what people do; it is for me to make it as safe as possible and respond to the laws that are given to me as a regulator and interpret them,” he says.

Director of payments and digital assets

Mathew McDermott is a 17-year veteran of Goldman Sachs and has headed up the investment bank’s digital assets operations since 2020. In that role, he oversees the&nbsp;bank’s crypto trading function, as well as teams that are figuring out how to apply blockchain technology to more traditional financial systems. The former reported a “flight to quality” in November, as the recent crises across the digital assets industry pushed clients to the most trusted players in the space. McDermott is on the boards of several Goldman Sachs portfolio companies including Coin Metrics, HQLAx, One River Digital and&nbsp;Elwood Technologies. He is on the advisory board of Digital Asset Holdings. He also sits on the board of the International Securities&nbsp;Lending Association, a leading non-profit industry body with membership of more than 190 finance firms across Emea. McDermott first joined Goldman in&nbsp;its European special situations group in London, having&nbsp;begun his career at Morgan Stanley

Global head of digital assets

Mercer - Stenger

David Mercer is founder and chief executive of LMAX Group, which operates foreign exchange and crypto exchanges for institutional investors. He joined in 2011, shortly after which he launched a new business plan and then led a management buyout of the firm from its previous owner, Betfair. LMAX broke even by 2013 and was producing an annual profit by 2015. Since launching LMAX Digital in 2018, Mercer has grown the crypto division to more than 75 people, having doubled the workforce over the course of 2022. In the most recent financial year, the crypto exchange also saw a 340% increase in volumes, hitting $500bn. It now boasts more than 600 institutional clients. Through a partnership with LMAX, Mercer and a team of several ex-professional rugby players have raised more than £250,000 for Wooden Spoon, a charity supporting children with disabilities. They have set world records for playing rugby further north and at higher altitudes than anyone else: at the North Pole and on Mount Everest.

Jean-Marie Mognetti’s asset management firm, CoinShares, was one of the earliest institutional adopters of crypto. It was born out of Global Advisors, a commodities-focused firm, which Mognetti joined in 2011. As macro investors moved away from commodities and towards equities in the first half of the 2010s, Global Advisors needed a new focus — that is where crypto came in and CoinShares was founded in 2014. CoinShares is now Europe’s largest and longest-standing digital asset investment firm, employing more than 100 people and managing just over £2bn as of September 2022. It is listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm and last year bought Napoleon Crypto. Prior to joining Global Advisors, Mognetti was a quantitative strategist at Hermes Fund&nbsp;Managers. Before that, he&nbsp;was an energy trading assistant at Lehman Brothers. He&nbsp;holds MScs from Cass Business School in London and Université&nbsp;Paris Dauphine. He also sits on the&nbsp;board&nbsp;of Nomura’s&nbsp;crypto custodian Komainu.

David Rutter has spent much of his career working to modernise trading on Wall Street. He spent 10 years as the head of electronic broking at ICAP, the world’s largest interdealer broker, and was co-owner and Americas chief of Prebon Yamane before that. He is also the brains behind LiquidityEdge, a marketplace for US Treasuries that was acquired by MarketAxess in 2019. Now Rutter is doing the same using blockchain technology at R3, an enterprise software firm that employs hundreds of staff in 13 countries. Its flagship platform, Corda, was chosen last year by the Depository Trust &amp; Clearing Corporation as the underlying technology for Project Ion, one of the largest distributed ledger initiatives in equities settlement across the financial services industry. In 2022, R3 also acquired the technology and team of Ivno, a financial asset tokenisation specialist, to help grow its digital assets business. Rutter is a member of The Well, which pays the administration expenses of non-profit charity: water, so all its donations can go to providing clean water.&nbsp;

Ambre Soubiran bought Kaiko, then a small data aggregation startup, in 2016. Since then, it has become one of the most widely used digital markets references for institutions. Today, Kaiko has three business units — data, analytics and indices — and its 160 institutional clients can access data from more than 100 exchanges. A mathematician by training, Soubiran left a decade-long career at HSBC for crypto, predicting that blockchain would upend the banking industry. She now oversees a team of 80 globally, with offices in Paris, New York, London and Singapore. In 2022, Kaiko secured partnerships with traditional finance players such as Bloomberg and Deutsche Börse. Its real-time crypto price data feeds are streamed on various terminals. Soubiran led Kaiko’s third funding round in June 2022 raising $53m. Despite going from strength to strength last year, she maintains hers is not a winner-takes-all market. “There cannot be a single source of truth in&nbsp;crypto,” she says. “The tide raises all boats. We&nbsp;need to provide value to the institutional industry, so&nbsp;that they grow and we grow with them.”

Jean-Marc Stenger’s career with Societe Generale began in 2000 as an analyst in its investment banking business in Frankfurt. Three years later, he joined SocGen’s asset management subsidiary, Lyxor, becoming its chief investment officer in 2013. Stenger now heads SocGen’s digital assets division, Forge. The company, which was founded in 2018, provides end-to-end services for crypto investors and brokers, and is regulated by France’s Autorité des Marchés Financiers for digital asset custody and trading. The firm has been a forerunner of tokenising assets: It issued a €100m covered bond as a digital native security token in 2019; and a €40m covered bond that was settled with a digital form of euros, as part of a central bank digital currency project with Banque de France in 2020. Stenger has been an active lobbyist for digital assets in Europe over the past year, holding discussions with the European Central Bank, the European Parliament, Germany’s BaFin, the Basel Committee, and the French, Spanish, Italian and British finance ministries, among others.

Stickland - Young

When billionaire hedge fund founder Alan Howard started trading cryptocurrencies a few years ago he encountered difficulties with an industry largely catering to retail investors. He set up Elwood Technologies to provide a platform for institutions that could easily connect with existing trading systems. The company has since attracted investment from Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Commerzbank’s venture capital arm among others, and now provides access to more than 30 exchanges, liquidity providers and custodians. As CEO at Elwood, James Stickland leads 170 staff across offices in London, Jersey, New York and Singapore. He joined from Veridium, which provides biometric authentication solutions for businesses. Before that, he worked at financial technology firm Red Deer and HSBC. Stickland says regulation is essential if the asset class is to be adopted more widely — but one of the most challenging things about his job is convincing others of its benefit. Outside of Elwood, Stickland spends much of his time with his four children including as a side-line supporter at their various sporting fixtures.

Ian Taylor spearheads industry trade body CryptoUK. Since becoming executive director three and a half years ago, he has overseen membership grow from a handful to almost 160 native crypto organisations. Formerly holding positions at Barclays and Santander, Taylor is now among the most prominent voices representing crypto in&nbsp;Westminster. He oversees the secretariat for the&nbsp;Crypto &amp; Digital Assets All Party Parliamentary Group, a cross-party collection of MPs and lords that explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital-asset sector to the wider economy. Taylor is also head of crypto and digital assets at KPMG. Prior to his current roles, he was the advisory&nbsp;board secretariat for GBBC Digital Finance, a global members association focused on accelerating the adoption of global standards for digital assets.

Executive director

Crypto has long been seen as the wild child of finance. Fidelity Investments was one of the first major institutional players that tried not only to tame it, but also to help it mature into a grown-up asset class. While it may not be there yet, Chris Tyrer and his team are likely to play a big part in the process. Fidelity is currently on a crypto hiring push, aiming to bring the digital assets arm’s headcount to roughly 500 by the end of the first quarter to make it one of the biggest institutional crypto teams in the world. Before going into crypto, Tyrer had a 16-year career as a crude oil and commodities trader, first with Barclays, then with Mercuria Energy America, returning to Barclays in 2015. His current role is Tyrer’s second stab at digital assets: He led Barclays’ digital assets project until the bank halted it in September 2018. He moved to Fidelity in 2019.&nbsp;

Head of Europe and head of institutional

Emil Urmanshin heads up Revolut’s crypto operations. It is a fast-growing set of responsibilities; since his appointment to the role in April 2022, the challenger bank has quadrupled the number of&nbsp;tokens it allows its customers to trade, launched a host of educational courses on the subject and developed an as-yet-unreleased cryptocurrency — RevCoin. Urmanshin joined Revolut in 2019 as&nbsp;part of a selective programme created by chief executive Nik Storonsky to fast-track people to senior executive roles. Before that, he co-founded Russian travel tech startup Roomp. The executive, who last year described crypto as a “long-term play” for the challenger bank, scored a major win in September&nbsp;2022 when the Financial Conduct Authority gave it full registration to carry out crypto services in the UK, after a lengthy wait. Next on the&nbsp;agenda is a so-far-elusive banking licence.

General manager (crypto)

Ripple’s growth in Europe has been rapid since regional managing director Sendi Young joined in&nbsp;2021. Formerly head of Mastercard’s digital and&nbsp;fintech business, she has built the crypto payment firm’s headcount in the region by about 75%&nbsp;in the past 18 months. She also recently oversaw the opening of a new Dublin office. The expansion comes during a turbulent time for Ripple’s US business, which is locked in a court battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The regulator argues that the firm’s XRP token is an unregistered security while Ripple counters that it is a commodity. Raised in Turkey and now a British national, Young brings experience from building out large corporations as a consultant at AlixPartners. She also led the development of a global cash management solution at HSBC. Speaking to Financial News last summer, she identified a “lack of transparency” as&nbsp;a problem for the crypto industry. It proved to&nbsp;be prescient — the collapse of FTX months later hit the sector as hard as it did partly because of the exchange’s opaque operating model. Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse has repeatedly spoken about the firm’s “no a******s” hiring policy and Young has identified “crypto bro” culture as an ongoing issue for the sector. If blockchain and crypto are truly to improve access to the financial services system, she says, then they need to represent all of society. Part of her job at Ripple is to make that happen.

Twenty Most Influential in Crypto 2023