Coinbase Hires Former Stripe Exec as Chief Compliance Officer

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has hired a former executive of payments company Stripe to head its compliance efforts.

Melissa Strait joins the San-Francisco-based exchange as chief compliance officer where she will be charged with ensuring company accountability, transparency and customer financial safety, Coinbase announced Wednesday.

Strait brings a wealth of experience at Stripe, having served more than seven years as U.S. compliance officer and then as global head of financial crimes, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Prior to joining Stripe, Strait oversaw daily compliance operations at global payments company Square where she led a 17-person strong sub-team.

A Coinbase spokesperson told CoinDesk the addition of Strait to the team means it now has a 50% representation of women in leadership roles.

The latest hire comes as Coinbase is seeking to go public via a listing on Nasdaq. The firm is being valued at $77 billion based on trading of the company’s privately held shares on a secondary market, CoinDesk reported Wednesday.

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MicroStrategy Begins Hiring for Bitcoin Data Product

MicroStrategy is moving to assemble a blockchain analytics team. It would be the first bitcoin-related software product from a company best known for CEO Michael Saylor’s whopping bet on BTC as a reserve asset.

The firm, based in Tysons Corner, Va., put out calls on LinkedIn Friday for a Blockchain Data Analyst and Blockchain Data Engineer, explaining in job postings they will join a team “building an analytics platform with advanced metrics and insights for Bitcoin.”

MicroStrategy hinted last November its interest in building blockchain data products and even stated its intention to hire for them. Executives did not go public then with positions of interest and remained largely mum on program specifics, describing it as a potential data offering at the time.

But Saylor has been vocal about perceived deficiencies in bitcoin’s data. He declared last October that “garbage” market data was holding bitcoin back. “Where can you find something so incredibly compelling that has such bad data around it relative to other assets?” Saylor said at the time. 

For a man who spent much of last week all but pleading his fellow CEOs to adopt the bitcoin standard, there’s an obvious, and vested, interest in improving upon the “garbage.”

MicroStrategy did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

The dual hirings add a rough picture to what is could eventually become a commercialized intelligence offering for digital assets beyond just bitcoin. MicroStrategy wants analysts experienced with public, private and permission blockchains (Bitcoin’s network is public and permissionless).

A product would also produce shareable, digestible analytical insights, the listings indicate. MicroStrategy’s new engineer would be responsible for developing software capable of turning troves of data into “visualizations” that can be shared with “broader audiences.”

The job postings position MicroStrategy to capitalize on bitcoin Saylormania through the software intelligence space, which, as is so easy to forget for a company with 71,079 BTC on its balance sheet, is the firm’s longstanding business expertise.

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BitGo Taps Former Coinbase Exec Jeff Horowitz as Chief Compliance Officer

Qualified cryptocurrency custodian BitGo has hired Coinbase’s former chief compliance officer to lead its compliance and anti-money laundering programs.

Jeff Horowitz led Coinbase’s global compliance program before leaving in October. Prior to Coinbase, he spent 12 years with Pershing, a clearing house owned by BNY Mellon. 

Horowitz was also co-chair of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Anti-Money Laundering Committee. He began his career as a regulator with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

“Banks and institutional investors are looking for a regulated and independent custody solution provider to safely store their crypto,” Horowitz told CoinDesk in an email. “Bankers want to know that a crypto custodian is meeting the same standards of security and compliance that Banks and Trust Companies are subject to today.”

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