The Latest in Crypto Hiring: PayPal, Crypto.com Add to Digital Assets Headcount

Bitcoin mining and crypto tech company Bitfury has hired Jonathan Gould as its chief legal officer in the latest instance of a government official to join a crypto firm.

Gould most recently worked as senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel at the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Before that, he was chief counsel of the US Senate Banking Committee.

Crypto.com has hired Giuseppe Giuliani, previously global head of institutional relationships and services at Kraken, as managing director of the company’s exchange. He will look to expand into new markets and introduce new offerings for institutional investors.

Ken Timsit has been named managing director for the Cronos blockchain. He was formerly chief revenue officer in charge of global sales and marketing at blockchain technology company ConsenSys.

Cronos supports both Ethereum and Cosmos technology, including DeFi, NFTs and metaverse technologies. Timsit will help the blockchain firm scale its DeFi (decentralized finance) and Web3 business by equipping developers with the resources to instantly port apps and crypto assets from other chains.

Sébastien Badault joined digital assets platform Ledger as its vice president of metaverse and Web3. He will oversee the company’s NFT (non-fungible token) division, plus gaming and brand collaborations.

Badault was previously a managing director at Alibaba and also spent more than 10 years at Google, where he ran the company’s French operations. Before Google, he led Amazon’s customer and partner acquisition strategy across the UK, Germany and France.

Crypto prime brokerage FalconX has hired former Carta chief people officer and Bloomberg head of talent Suzy Walther as its head of people, amid a push to fill hundreds of roles across engineering, marketing, HR and customer support.

The company, which raised $210 million in August, has also hired Sujay Jaladi as its new vice president of security. He was previously chief information security officer at Gusto, Ripple, Harbor, Inc., Earnin and PayPal subsidiary Xoom.

“Institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies continues to cement the notion that the world’s economy will be tokenized in 5 to 7 years,” FalconX CEO Raghu Yarlagadda said in a statement.

TaxBit, a tax and accounting solution for the tokenized economy, hired Nathan Jones as senior vice president of worldwide public sales and government affairs. Jones has worked the last 19 years at IBM subsidiary Red Hat.

The company also brought aboard Miles Fuller as head of government solutions, plus Christi Muoneke as corporate general counsel.

Fuller joins TaxBit after a 15-year stint with the IRS, where he worked in a senior legal role. Muoneke previously spent more than 15 years working at Meta, DocuSign, Microsoft and Avalara.

Charlie Hu, former head of Polygon China, has joined Syscoin, a decentralized, open-source project created in 2014 by the founders of Blockchain Foundry.

As an ecosystem advisor, he will help drive the company’s expansion into untapped markets. While at Polygon, he focused on business development in Asia. 

Marathon Digital appointed Raymond Walintukan as vice president of mining operations. He previously served as chief operating officer of Apifiny subsidiary Hash Hive. Before that, he served as the head of operations at Bitmain North America.

The hire comes as Marathon seeks to grow from 3.6 exahashes per second (EH/s) at the start of February to 23.3 EH/s by early next year.

PayPal brought aboard specialists in cryptography, distributed technology, regulation, economics and capital markets to establish a crypto advisory council.

The council includes Peter Briger, Jr., co-CEO of Fortress Investment Group; Chris Brummer, a Georgetown University law professor and faculty director of the Institute of International Economic Law; Dr. Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; Timothy Massad, an ​​adjunct law professor at Georgetown University and research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School; Dr. Neha Narula, director of MIT Digital Currency Initiative; and Antoinette Schoar, a finance professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Former Domino’s Pizza President Kory Spiroff joined the advisory board of FriesDao.

Spiroff is tasked with bridging real-world operations with blockchain-based governance. FriesDAO plans to acquire and build on-chain membership around popular fast food franchises.

Metaplex Studios, a US organization working to advance Solana NFT protocol Metaplex, tapped Stephen Hess as its CEO.

21Shares, the largest issuer of cryptocurrency ETPs, has hired three senior sales professionals to boost US growth.

Hires include Kayle Watson as US head of sales; Aram Babikian, who will lead US west coast and Latin America business development; and Ches Snider as US head of research sales.

The executives combined have decades of traditional finance experience at firms such as BlackRock, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and Guggenheim Securities.

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