BAYC’s Yuga Labs Adds MeebitsDAO Exec

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  • Meebits­DAO gen­er­al man­ag­er takes over as Yuga Labs’ brand leader for the NFT collection
  • Core Sci­en­tif­ic reveals 10% head­count reduc­tion on Thurs­day earn­ings call

Hedge fund fig­ure Blue Macel­lari joined T. Rowe Price as its head of dig­i­tal assets strat­e­gy, she revealed on LinkedIn Thursday. 

“This is what adop­tion looks like,” Macel­lari wrote in the post.

Macel­lari spent the last four-plus years as a man­ag­ing part­ner at cryp­to hedge fund firm Dunamis Trad­ing, accord­ing to her pro­file. There, she launched and co-man­aged Dunamis’ cryp­to mar­ket-neu­tral vehi­cle and for­mu­lat­ed com­pa­ny strategy.

T. Rowe Price man­aged $1.3 tril­lion in assets, as of June 30. A com­pa­ny sur­vey pub­lished in April found that 40% of chil­dren believe cryp­to is the future of invest­ing. A T. Rowe Price spokesper­son told Block­works at the time that giv­en the size of dig­i­tal asset mar­kets, their impact on cap­i­tal mar­kets can­not be ignored.

Cryp­to exchange OKX appoint­ed Fred­er­i­ca Tomp­kins as direc­tor of brand mar­ket­ing and Kim Mur­phy as direc­tor of events.

Tomp­kins joins OKX from the lux­u­ry and fast-mov­ing con­sumer goods sec­tors, hav­ing worked with brands such as Chanel and Ralph Lau­ren. Mur­phy comes from the worlds of event pro­duc­tion and phil­an­thropy, where she helped orga­nize con­certs, con­fer­ences and bou­tique celebrations. 

Tomp­kins and Mur­phy join dur­ing a year that has seen OKX strike part­ner­ships with Man­ches­ter City Foot­ball Club, the McLaren Rac­ing For­mu­la One team and the Tribeca Fes­ti­val. The exchange appoint­ed Rachel Con­lan as its glob­al head of brand mar­ket­ing and part­ner­ships ear­li­er this year.

OKX’s hir­ing of female lead­ers coin­cides with its joint report with LinkedIn show­ing a short­age of tech tal­ent, as well as female pro­fes­sion­als, in the blockchain indus­try. The analy­sis found the sec­tor had about four times more men than women, as of June. 

Lead­ing exchange Binance hired Karl Long, Wis­domTree Asset Management’s for­mer direc­tor of dig­i­tal assets and com­mod­i­ty oper­a­tions, to spear­head its oper­a­tions in Ire­land, Irish Inde­pen­dent report­ed Monday. 

A Binance spokesper­son declined to comment. 

Long joined Wis­domTree in Feb­ru­ary after work­ing as a man­ag­ing direc­tor of oper­a­tions at State Street for near­ly a decade, accord­ing to his LinkedIn profile. 

The exec­u­tive is based in Dublin, Ire­land, his pro­file indi­cates. Binance CEO Chang­peng Zhao told Reuters last year that the exchange was con­sid­er­ing Ire­land and France as poten­tial head­quar­ters and had reg­is­tered a new enti­ty in Ire­land the fol­low­ing month.

Newly-minted NFT execs for Yuga Labs and Dibbs

Yuga Labs, the firm behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, named Dan­ny Greene to fill its new­ly cre­at­ed role of brand lead for Meebits after Greene spent the last eight months as gen­er­al man­ag­er of the MeebitsDAO. 

Meebits is an NFT col­lec­tion with 20,000 char­ac­ters and a trad­ing mar­ket­place. Yuga Labs acquired the com­mer­cial rights to Meebits and Cryp­toP­unks from Lar­va Labs in March. 

“The Meebits col­lec­tion stands out not only for the artis­tic achieve­ment but also because it was the first 3D avatar designed for the inter­op­er­a­ble meta­verse and has always been a pil­lar of diver­si­ty and inclu­sion in web3,” Greene said in a state­ment. “Already you can play with your Meebit in over 20 vir­tu­al worlds, apps, and games — and this is just the beginning.” 

Sports NFT (non-fun­gi­ble token) plat­form Dibbs has added lead­ers as it seeks to grow beyond a col­lectibles mar­ket­place to a tok­eniza­tion and cus­tody plat­form for intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty own­ers and collectors. 

Dibbs hired Ben Plomion as its chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer and Bill Plumeri as its chief com­pli­ance officer.

Plomion spent sev­en years at con­tex­tu­al intel­li­gence com­pa­ny GumGum, where he served as chief growth offi­cer. Plumeri most recent­ly led the glob­al insti­tu­tion­al com­pli­ance pro­gram at cryp­to lender BlockFi.

Pri­or to Block­Fi, Plumeri was the direc­tor of com­pli­ance at dig­i­tal asset secu­ri­ties unit Secu­ri­tize, where he designed and imple­ment­ed a com­pli­ance pro­gram focused on tok­eniz­ing tra­di­tion­al secu­ri­ties on the blockchain. He has held oth­er lead­er­ship roles at cryp­to exchange Gem­i­ni, as well as JPMor­gan and BNP Paribas.

Luno snags policy lead from fintech unicorn Revolut

Insti­tu­tion­al cryp­to trad­ing tech provider Talos hired Neal Pawar as a strate­gic adviser. 

Pawar is the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of Qon­ti­go, an affil­i­ate of Deutsche Börse Group that offers index ana­lyt­ics and risk solu­tions. He was for­mer­ly chief invest­ment offi­cer of UBS’ wealth man­age­ment group and a group CIO at Deutsche Bank.

Pawar joins Jen­nifer Hill, ex-chief finan­cial offi­cer of Mer­rill Lynch; David Cush­ing, for­mer direc­tor of glob­al trad­ing at Welling­ton; and Tim Grant, Galaxy Digital’s head of Europe, on the company’s advi­so­ry board. 

Lon­don-head­quar­tered Luno hired Thomas Tude­hope as its glob­al head of pub­lic pol­i­cy to deep­en its cryp­to invest­ment app’s rela­tion­ships with indus­try reg­u­la­tors, at a time when gov­ern­ments are look­ing to fix their eyes on the sector.

Found­ed in 2013, Luno was acquired by Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy Group in 2020. Luno’s flag­ship app of the same name, has more than 10 mil­lion cus­tomers across rough­ly 40 coun­tries, accord­ing to com­pa­ny figures.

Tude­hope was most recent­ly head of pub­lic affairs at Rev­o­lut, where he expand­ed the company’s pub­lic pol­i­cy team and led polit­i­cal engage­ment. He was also for­mer­ly a senior advis­er to for­mer Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter Mal­colm Turnbull.

Decen­tral­ized finance-focused UK firm AQRU appoint­ed Dig­by Try, the company’s co-founder, as its chief com­mer­cial officer.

Before becom­ing co-founder and chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of AQRU last Octo­ber, Try pre­vi­ous­ly worked as head of glob­al sales at bank­ing and pay­ments plat­form Open­Payd and as a vice pres­i­dent of sales for EMEA at Cur­ren­cy­cloud, which Visa acquired last year.

Kamelia Ganko­va, for­mer­ly man­ag­ing direc­tor at Crypto.com’s Bul­gar­i­an out­post, is now the COO of AQRU sub­sidiary Accru Finance.

Ganko­va has also served as direc­tor of cus­tomer ser­vice at online pay­ments com­pa­ny Paysafe. 

In case you missed it

Core Sci­en­tif­ic reduced its head­count by 10% in the sec­ond quar­ter as part of cost-cut­ting mea­sures to deal with mar­ket tur­moil, the top cryp­to min­er revealed Thursday.

Galaxy Dig­i­tal CEO Mike Novo­gratz said on an earn­ings call ear­li­er in the week that it did some “selec­tive shrink­ing” of its team in the sec­ond quar­ter. Galaxy, a dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment firm, post­ed a $555 mil­lion net loss dur­ing the three-month period. 

Novo­gratz said the com­pa­ny is seek­ing to boost its head­count from 375 peo­ple to more than 400 by the end of the year. A Galaxy spokesper­son declined to comment.


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  • Ben Strack
    Ben Strack is a Den­ver-based reporter cov­er­ing macro and cryp­to-native funds, finan­cial advi­sors, struc­tured prod­ucts, and the inte­gra­tion of dig­i­tal assets and decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) into tra­di­tion­al finance. Pri­or to join­ing Block­works, he cov­ered the asset man­age­ment indus­try for Fund Intel­li­gence and was a reporter and edi­tor for var­i­ous local news­pa­pers on Long Island. He grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land with a degree in journalism.

    Con­tact Ben via email at [email pro­tect­ed]

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