Latest in Crypto Hiring: Former Nike, Apple Marketing Pro Joins Segment

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Though more cryp­to firms revealed lay­offs this week, sev­er­al seg­ment play­ers added high-lev­el executives. 

The Algo­rand Foun­da­tion named Jes­si­ca Tsai Chin as its new chief mar­ket­ing officer.

The hire comes after Algo­rand brought aboard Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cer Michele Quin­taglie, a for­mer com­mu­ni­ca­tions exec­u­tive at Fideli­ty Invest­ments and Visa. A spokesper­son told Block­works that Quin­taglie will con­tin­ue in that role, while Chin leads on the foun­da­tion side. 

Chin was most recent­ly head of brand for glob­al pri­va­cy at What­sApp, where she also led the mar­ket­ing team’s meta­verse efforts. 

Pri­or to join­ing What­sApp, she worked in glob­al brand mar­ket­ing at Nike, where she devel­oped mobile-first mem­ber­ship growth ini­tia­tives for plat­forms like SNKRS and the Nike Run app. She also spent about four years at Apple, lead­ing glob­al spe­cial projects for enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy products. 

Blockchain.com’s for­mer chief com­pli­ance offi­cer with an exten­sive tra­di­tion­al finance back­ground has moved over to Krak­en to work in the same role.

CJ Rinal­di joined Blockchain.com in Octo­ber 2021, accord­ing to his LinkedIn. As its com­pli­ance leader, he helped the cryp­to plat­form build out glob­al com­pli­ance frameworks.

Before that, Rinal­di was a head of mar­kets com­pli­ance at Deutsche Bank Secu­ri­ties after head­ing up the invest­ment bank’s anti-finan­cial crimes com­pli­ance busi­ness. He also for­mer­ly worked at UBS, work­ing as a trans­ac­tion risk man­ag­er for cur­ren­cies and com­modi­ties, among oth­er roles.

Mon­i­ca Long is now Ripple’s pres­i­dent after work­ing at the com­pa­ny for rough­ly a decade. 

She first joined Rip­ple in 2013 as its first mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions hire, and was most recent­ly a senior vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of both Rip­pleNet and RippleX. 

Rip­pleNet is a decen­tral­ized glob­al net­work of banks and pay­ment providers using Ripple’s dis­trib­uted finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy. Rip­pleX is the open plat­form enabling devel­op­ers and entre­pre­neurs to build pay­ments into their appli­ca­tion through the XRP Ledger.

Long said in a state­ment that Rip­ple is look­ing to delve deep­er into cryp­to-enabled ser­vices like liq­uid­i­ty, set­tle­ment and custody.

The cryp­to unit of alter­na­tive invest­ment man­ag­er Bre­van Howard hired Kevin Hu as a port­fo­lio manager. 

Hu joins from cryp­to invest­ment firm Drag­on­fly where he was a gen­er­al part­ner and head of liq­uid strate­gies. He also pre­vi­ous­ly led liq­uid invest­ments in Dragonfly’s ven­ture funds. 

Before focus­ing on dig­i­tal assets, Hu was an investor at BlackRock’s alter­na­tives invest­ment group and also led the group’s research effort into dig­i­tal assets in 2016.

Bre­van Howard’s Dig­i­tal Mul­ti-Strat­e­gy Fund start­ed trad­ing in Jan­u­ary 2022, sources told Block­works at the time. The vehi­cle raised more than $1 bil­lion from insti­tu­tion­al investors but had been recent­ly part­ing ways with under­per­form­ing port­fo­lio man­agers, sources said. 

Cryp­to tax and account­ing plat­form Ledg­i­ble hired Paul Diegel­man as chief rev­enue offi­cer and Will Cole­man as head of insti­tu­tion­al product. 

Diegel­man was for­mer­ly head of busi­ness devel­op­ment and part­ner­ships for data and con­nec­tiv­i­ty at fin­tech firm Fis­erv for near­ly sev­en years. 

Cole­man was the prin­ci­pal archi­tect of attest ser­vices to sup­port cryp­tocur­ren­cy invest­ment funds for Cohen & Com­pa­ny, the largest audi­tor of cryp­tocur­ren­cy invest­ment funds in the US.

Leg­i­ble raised $20 mil­lion in June as part of a Series A round. 

Another week, another week of layoffs

Despite the slew of exec­u­tive hires around the cryp­to space, lay­offs continued. 

Gem­i­ni is set to lay off anoth­er 10% of staff, The Infor­ma­tion report­ed Monday. 

The news came the same week the founders of Gem­i­ni-owned NFT mar­ket­place Nifty Gate­way revealed their depar­ture from Gem­i­ni.

The com­pa­ny is also bat­tling law­suits from cus­tomers of its lend­ing plat­form, Gem­i­ni Earn, fol­low­ing the col­lapse of Gen­e­sis, which filed for bank­rupt­cy last week. 

Gem­i­ni, found­ed by Tyler and Cameron Win­klevoss, said last June it was cut­ting 10% of its work­force — cit­ing the cryp­to down­turn, as well as macro­eco­nom­ic and geopo­lit­i­cal factors.

Cryp­to exchange Luno is set to cut 35% of its work­force, CEO Mar­cus Swanepoel said Wednes­day. The com­pa­ny co-founder cit­ed the “incred­i­bly tough year” for cryp­to and the broad­er tech indus­try, includ­ing “a series of shocks includ­ing Luna, Three Arrows and FTX.”

“Luno unfor­tu­nate­ly hasn’t been immune to this tur­bu­lence, which has affect­ed our over­all growth and rev­enue num­bers,” he said. 

The com­pa­ny is owned by Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy Group, which also owns strug­gling cryp­to lender Gen­e­sis and Grayscale Invest­ments, man­ag­er of the Grayscale Bit­coin Trust (GBTC). 

Read More: Asset Man­agers ‘Lick­ing Their Chops’ Over Poten­tial GBTC Takeover

Bil­lion­aire Jihan Wu is cut­ting 10% of the staff at his cryp­to lend­ing firm Matrix Asset Man­age­ment, Bloomberg report­ed Friday.

The company’s work­force was an esti­mat­ed 300 peo­ple late last year. 

Matrix­port had hired a for­mer Coin­base exec­u­tive to lead the cryp­tocur­ren­cy invest­ment platform’s US busi­ness, sources told Block­works in June.


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