The "Blockchain Queen" wants to raise $35 million, and Wall Street is lining up to write her checks

Blythe Masters, the former global head of commodities at JPMorgan Chase, known as the “Queen of Wall Street,” is raising funds for her blockchain startup, Digital Asset Holdings, and some of her old Wall Street friends are lining up to write her checks. Blythe Masters was once the most powerful woman on Wall Street.

DAH financing is popular

According to the New York Post, DAH is in the process of raising a round of funding, and Blythe Masters is in high-stakes negotiations with investors to raise 3500万美元for DAH, hoping to close the round before Christmas. The company's valuation will be as high as 1亿美元.

It is reported that an email from Blythe Masters stated that Wall Street has great interest in investing in Masters' new project, the round of financing is oversubscribed, and some investors are even becoming increasingly impatient with DAH's slow progress.

Negotiations over the composition of the board, shareholder voting rights and how shareholders can sell their shares have been difficult at times, the people said. The talks are ongoing and could fail. JPMorgan is expected to lead the investment financing with $7.5 million. Spanish bank Santander, where Blythe Masters serves as a non-executive director, will invest $3 million. Other potential investors include Markit, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Nasdaq.

Of course, not all investors are so optimistic about Blythe Masters' new project. Timothy Geithner, former US Treasury Secretary and current chairman of Warburg Pincus, declined an invitation to join the DAH board of directors.

“The Queen of Wall Street” joins blockchain startup

Blythe Masters has been at JPMorgan Chase for 27 years and was the global head of commodities at JPMorgan Chase. She is widely credited for designing credit default swaps (CDS). She became a managing director at the age of 28, setting a record as the youngest female executive in the history of JPMorgan Chase.

As the designer of "CDS", the market size of financial derivatives she conceived once reached 58 trillion US dollars and is believed to have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

In 2014, JPMorgan Chase's commodities business surpassed all competitors and became the top spot on Wall Street. But in the same year, JPMorgan Chase sold the department for $3.5 billion due to regulatory pressure. Masters then announced her resignation in May of the same year. Ten months later, she returned to serve as CEO of Cryptocurrency company Digital Asset Holdings.

Disruptive technology in the financial sector—blockchain

Wall Street is optimistic about the development prospects of blockchain's "disruptive" technology in the financial field. Nasdaq believes that blockchain technology will be a digital revolution for the management of traditional securities and hopes to apply blockchain technology to the stock market. Goldman Sachs said that blockchain technology can completely change the traditional payment system and can be used in a large number of things including issuing securities and smart contracts. It is faster and cheaper than the traditional trading system. Similarly, Digital Asset Holdings is also developing a securities and funds transfer system based on the blockchain system.

Blockchain technology originated from Bitcoin and is a general ledger maintained collectively by participants in the Bitcoin network. Each participant in the blockchain network is a node, and all nodes store a complete set of ledgers that record all historical account information. When any node needs to initiate a transaction, it needs to pass the transaction information to every node in the blockchain network to ensure that the ledgers stored on all nodes can accurately update and verify the transaction.

Blockchain realizes the self-certification function within the entire network in a decentralized manner, rather than the traditional form of unified account book updates and verification by a centralized third-party organization. Therefore, blockchain technology is a technology that collectively maintains a reliable database in a decentralized and trustless manner, and Bitcoin is only the first application of blockchain technology.

Goldman Sachs analyst Robert D. Boroujerdi believes that this decentralized cryptography-based solution eliminates middlemen and has the potential to redefine transactions and back-office operations across multiple industries.

Original article: http://nypost.com/2015/12/14/banks-high-on-ex-jp-morgan-execs-new-bitcoin-business/
Compiled by: Yu Fenghui