JPMorgan's new MD joined from a crypto firm and may be working remotely
Bankers may not be as welcome in crypto these days, but traditional finance firms are open to crypto talent. Two crypto executives have both recently gone into more traditional jobs.
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Christopher Sharp, CTO of blockchain infrastructure firm Blockdaemon, joined JPMorgan two weeks ago as a managing director in the bank's product team. While JPMorgan has relocated other recent joiners to New York, Sharp says his role is remote, based out of Florida. He's also begun recruiting in his team, advertising a job listing for an executive director and senior product lead in digital payments, which pays a salary of up to $285k. This role, however, doesn't appear to be remote.
Sharp was in crypto a relatively short amount of time, spending just two years at Blockdaemon. Prior to that, he spent his entire career, 23 years, at Apple. He worked on Apple Pay for a decade, and was its director of server engineering for five years.
Elsewhere, in London, Coinbase's UK division has lost one of its executives. UK COO and EMEA head of business development Peter Stilwell joined early stage venture capital firm Creandum in June. The firm says previous investments include Spotify, Klarna and Bolt. This marks a return to TradFi for Stilwell; he worked his way from analyst to associate at HSBC in London, then became a senior manager at Bain & Co after interning there during his MBA.
Why are people leaving crypto for TradFi? Perhaps they're looking for something more chill, if you can call TradFi that. Blockchain headhunter Michael Shlayen says crypto is "quite a stressful industry, it’s extremely volatile." He says huge corporations like Coinbase are "becoming quite similar in the way they operate to TradFi and other tech industries," but stress is "amplified because of crypto's volatile nature."
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