< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

When it comes to investing, Barry Silbert has always been a little ahead of his time. The Gaithersburg, Maryland, native began buying and selling stocks at age 13 with his bar mitzvah money and four years later passed his Series 7 exam to become the then-youngest U.S. licensed stockbroker. After graduating from Emory University in 1998 with a bachelor’s in business administration, Silbert went to work for investment bank Houlihan Lokey in New York, focusing on restructuring. He left in 2004 “to scratch an entrepreneurial itch” and founded SecondMarket, a platform to trade shares in privately held companies and funds, now owned by Nasdaq. Silbert launched into angel investing in 2010 and a year later began reading about the history of money and Bitcoin. “It took me about six months of being a skeptic before I came to the conclusion that Bitcoin had the potential to change the world,” says Silbert, 39, who invested about $200,000 in the digital currency in 2012, when the price was below $10. As the price rose tenfold (it has since settled around $300), he used some of his gains to make angel investments in Bitcoin companies. “Being one of the few guys out there making investments in this space, I got to see most of the companies that got formed in 2012 and 2013, and put together a portfolio of really, really great companies,” he says. Today those investments related to Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain ledger are housed within Digital Currency Group, a New York–based C corporation Silbert set up last year with funding from Bain Capital Ventures and RRE Ventures. (Bain’s Matthew Harris, No. 3, and RRE’s James Robinson IV, No. 1, sit on DCG’s investment committee.) DCG’s 56 investments are in 17 countries and include Abra, Align Commerce Corp., Ascribe, BitPesa, Chain, Coinbase and Ripple. “I am absolutely convinced that the time has come for a digital currency whose money supply is not controlled by a government,” Silbert explains. “I think what people are missing is the role that a digital currency could play in the world today as a complement, or even a replacement, to something like gold.”

 
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

1. James Robinson III & James Robinson IV RRE Ventures 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures Model Portfolios to Deliver Alternative Asset Exposure Sponsored by BlackRock April 29, 2025 4. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners 5. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic

6. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group 8. Thomas Jessop Goldman Sachs Group 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital 10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners

11. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City 12. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group 14. Jay Reinemann Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria 15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures

16. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures 17. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi Credit Suisse NEXT Fund 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners 20. Rodger Voorhies Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

21. Michael Schlein Accion International 22. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates 23. Rumi Morales CME Ventures 24. Mark Beeston Illuminate Financial Management 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA

26. Fabian Vandenreydt Innotribe SWIFT 27. Derek White Barclays 28. Alex Batlin UBS 29. Jeffrey Greenberg & Vincenzo La Ruffa Aquiline Capital Partners 30. P. Howard Edelstein REDI Holdings

31. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp FinTech 32. Roy Bahat Bloomberg Beta 33. Andrew McCormack Valar Ventures 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance 35. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong