BitGo Hires Former Wall Street Forex Trading Exec

Crypto custody provider BitGo has hired Nick Carmi, former head of forex trading at a number of Wall Street banks.

Carmi became BitGo’s head of financial services, joining the company after working at Tower Research Capital, an asset management firm where he was a global head of the fixed income instruments, currencies, and commodities business. It was there he moved into cryptocurrency trading.

“When we got into trading crypto we quickly realized there is a big gap in the market,” he said.

The gap, he found, was that was impossible to trade cryptocurrencies between different venues with the same speed as in traditional markets.

“If you look at the current equity market, you can buy IBM stock from Goldman Sacks, then hang up the phone and immediately sell it to J.P. Morgan,” he said.

He believes the same functionality is needed on the crypto market.

“Being able to buy BTC on one venue, and immediately — could be 100 or 200 milliseconds — sell the same BTC on Gemini, or with Genesis [would be idea],” he said.

He wouldn’t go into details of his future work at BitGo but he does want to try to fix the trading problem.

“The plan is to build a solution that will allow the institutional clients to get into the crypto space and participate in it as easily as it is for them trading other financial products like equity, fixed income and foreign exchange,” he said.

“Forex exchange is getting boring”

Working at an asset management firm, Carmi saw demand for crypto trading from many institutional investors, including pension funds and family offices, but found there was no infrastructure in place that help get them comfortable with this market.

Talking about his own interest in the crypto space, he said:

“Foreign exchange is becoming very boring, it’s very oversaturated. Equities can’t get any more boring. The institutional investors are looking for new outlets to trade and invest.”

Prior to Tower Research Capital, Carmi worked for five years at Deutsche Bank as a head of the foreign exchange prime brokerage. Before that, he spent years on various leading positions at Barclays, Lehman Brothers, UBS and Credit Suisse.

“Nick brings the right type of experience for BitGo to bridge between the complex technology of digital assets and the traditional financial markets,” said Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo. “Nick will be critical to our future progress, helping us meet the existing needs of traditional clients while also helping us build a better financial market of the future in ways that can only be done with digital assets.”

Image of Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, via CoinDesk archives