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Blythe Masters
Photograph by Ore Huiying / Bloomberg
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When Blythe Masters, a pioneer of credit default swaps and one of Wall Street's older women, resigned from
JPMorgan Chase
(JPM) after 27 years of career in the bank, he joined the Start-up Digital Asset blockchain in 2015, was seen as a coup not just for a company, but for a whole technology.
Blockchain technology promises to transform finance in the way the Internet has transformed communication.
Masters has now resigned as CEO of Digital Asset and AG Gangadhar will hold the position of executive director until the election of a permanent leader. "Masters will remain involved in the company as a member of the board of directors, strategic advisor and shareholder," the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
In an e-mail to the staff of Digital Asset, Masters wrote that he knows that his departure "will have been a surprise". He said he was confident in the prospects and in the management team of the company. "Working as part of the D. family means the world to me," he wrote, "but I also work for the future of my family and I need to focus on this for a while."
When the Masters joined the company, Blockchain was little known on Wall Street at the time. His imprimatur was considered a legitimizing force for a technology whose most famous case of use at the time, Bitcoin, had been developed to allow anonymous purchases of things like guns, drugs and illegal services.
Read more: 4 women who make the difference in Blockchain
The specific intent of Digital Asset was that banks needed the blockchain to speed up the back office functions such as business processing, but as the bitcoin bubble grew and the encrypted fans demanded that it would destroy money and financial institutions , the wider charm was something much more vague and existential: the banks had to start using blockchain so that they did not lag behind. From whom, exactly, it was not clear, apart from the fact that they would use the blockchain.
With the Masters at the helm, the company has partnered with companies like Google (GOOGL),
IBM
(IBM)
Accenture
(ACN)
Broadridge Financial solutions
(BR) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, together with the Australia Stock Exchange and various clearing houses.
Now, the bubble of the cryptocurrency has broken out and, despite years of trial, there have been very few significant and tangible results from the experiments of the banks with the blockchain. When blockchain projects in general, and in particular banks, were successful, the improvements were marginal rather than revolutionary.
Write to Ben Walsh at [email protected]
