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The 2016 Tech 50: Blythe Masters
The Digital Asset Holdings CEO debuts on our annual Tech 50 ranking at No. 17.


Blythe Masters may at first blush seem an unlikely evangelist for the distributed ledger technology known as blockchain. A 1991 graduate of the University of Cambridge with a BA in economics, the U.K. native held a variety of management roles across JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s global capital markets businesses, including credit derivatives, asset-backed securities and commodities. “I grew up deep in the inner workings of the financial services industry,” says Masters, 47, CEO of New York–based blockchain start-up Digital Asset Holdings. “I couldn’t do what I’m doing now if it hadn’t been for the almost 30 years I spent at JPMorgan.” Masters became friends with Digital Asset co-founder Sunil Hirani when JPMorgan invested in his credit default swap brokerage, Creditex Group, in the late ’90s. She joined Hirani and his co-founder, Don Wilson (of Chicago’s DRW Trading Group), on the Digital Asset board in December 2014 and became CEO in March 2015. “In blockchain I saw a technology that had the potential to mutualize infrastructure in a way that has not been practically possible to do before,” Masters explains. Noting that blockchain had been best known for powering the controversial cryptocurrency Bitcoin, she says: “People started to assume that the tenets of the Bitcoin movement — anonymity, open to everyone, no central administrator — were inviolate features of the technology. But it turns out that you can change the assumptions.” Digital Asset is building “encrypted, distributed, straight-through processing tools” that will allow financial services companies to reduce costs, increase capital efficiency and strengthen cybersecurity. The 70-person company, which has offices in Budapest, London, San Francisco, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Zurich, intends to generate revenue through software licenses and contracts. It currently is working with ASX — which in June invested $7 million to raise its stake in Digital Asset to 8.5 percent — to develop a distributed-ledger-based posttrade infrastructure for the Australian cash equities market, and with Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (see Michael Bodson, No. 14) on a new clearing and settlement system for U.S. Treasury repurchase agreements. “A lot of people say blockchain equals the avenue by which the natural intermediaries will be put out of business because you don’t need them anymore,” Masters says. “We have a very different view. We believe that blockchain will enable financial intermediaries to do a better job of providing the services they provide.”
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![]() 1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. ![]() 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange ![]() 3. Lance Uggla Markit ![]() 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group ![]() 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg ![]() 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group |
![]() 7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock ![]() 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq ![]() 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures ![]() 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings ![]() 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments ![]() 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters |
![]() 13. Michael Spencer ICAP ![]() 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. ![]() 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing ![]() 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets ![]() 17. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings ![]() 18. David Rutter R3CEV |
![]() 19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. ![]() 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets ![]() 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings ![]() 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings ![]() 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. ![]() 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group |
![]() 25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. ![]() 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank ![]() 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group ![]() 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse ![]() 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings ![]() 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co. |
![]() 31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence ![]() 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. ![]() 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services ![]() 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix ![]() 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma ![]() 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz |
![]() 37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS ![]() 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management ![]() 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management ![]() 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group ![]() 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives ![]() 42. Jim Minnick eVestment |
![]() 43. Stephane Dubois Xignite ![]() 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin ![]() 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America ![]() 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank ![]() 47. Jock Percy Perseus ![]() 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions |
![]() 49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software ![]() 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen |