19. Blythe Masters
Chief Executive Officer
Digital Asset Holdings
Last year: 17
There has been no shortage of milestones for Digital Asset Holdings, the distributed-ledger technology company co-founded in 2014 by Sunil Hirani, CEO of trueEX Group, and Donald Wilson Jr., CEO of DRW Trading Group. The most headline-grabbing was the March 2015 appointment of Blythe Masters as CEO. The former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive — she had served as head of global commodities and CFO of the investment bank, among other senior roles — brought star power and a penchant for evangelizing just as blockchain hype was on the upswing. Yet Masters all along has counseled patience, telling audiences that it could take several years for blockchain to become commonplace. The New York–based company's nuts-and-bolts work has included support for open sourcing: offering up the Digital Asset Modeling Language and donating the Hyperledger trademark and code to the Linux Foundation. In February 2016, Digital Asset announced that it had raised more than $60 million from investors including Accenture, Australian Securities Exchange parent ASX Group, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., IBM, and JPMorgan. Digital Asset has partnered with DTCC on a proof of concept for processing U.S. Treasury and Agency repurchase agreements transactions. It is also working on a posttrade cash equities platform for ASX.
The 2017 Tech 40
1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ 
2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 
3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 
4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 
5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit |
6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 
7. David Craig Thomson Reuters 
8. Michael Spencer NEX Group 
9. Don Callahan Citigroup 
10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group |
11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 
12. Terrence Duffy CME Group 
13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 
14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments 
15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings |
16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp. 
17. Steven Lieblich Citadel 
18. David Rutter R3CEV 
19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 
20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments |
21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group 
22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 
23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 
24. David Gledhill DBS Bank 
25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings |
26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 
27. Peter Brown & Renaissance Technologies 
28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 
29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp. 
30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence |
31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 
32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 
33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 
34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 
35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma |
36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems 
37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 
38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 
39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions 
40. Jim Minnick eVestment |
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