Wall Street executives are jumping ship to join the digital currency industry. Are they crazy?

This week, after the New York State digital currency regulatory law BitLicense came into effect, many Bitcoin companies moved their services out of New York City, including Bitcoin exchanges Kraken and BitFinex. More quietly, another wave of strikes is surging in secret, that is, the more traditional and mainstream Wall Street "money traders", who are slowly moving towards a decentralized digital currency ecosystem.

Migrating from Wall Street to Blockchain

It’s rare that it makes global news when one person makes a change to a company or starts a new one, but when commodities queen Blythe Masters left JPMorgan Chase to found Digital Asset Holdings earlier this year, it caused a massive stir and set off a wake-up call in the Western financial world. She was not alone, she was just one lightning rod in the thunderstorm of the industry movement.

Timo Schlaefer, a PhD in financial engineering, started his career at Goldman Sachs in London. Schlaefer moved from Goldman Sachs' M&A department to the credit quantitative model department and served as executive director. However, in February of this year, when he was at the peak of his life, he suddenly chose to leave.

After leaving Goldman Sachs, he launched a startup called Crypto Facilities Ltd, which specializes in bitcoin derivatives trading. What motivated him? Schlaefer explained:

“This is uncharted territory and it’s a very exciting opportunity to be involved in such a brand new area of ​​technology with so much potential.”

On the one hand, Bitcoin companies have also been raising new funds, with industry funding in the first half of 2015 exceeding the funding for the entire year of 2014. Many executives continue to pour money into the industry, even though it is relatively small compared to other more mature industries. It seems that some prominent people in the financial industry believe that the digital currency and its ecosystem are on an upward trend in 2015.

Bitcoin Jobs Boom

On the other hand, the digital currency market has also seen a boom in job opportunities, with large companies such as Capital One, Intel and Amazon posting job advertisements in the industry. In June this year, according to data from Wanted Analytics, online Bitcoin job advertisements have soared to 306, setting a record high.

Paul Chou, another entrepreneur who left Goldman Sachs, was previously a top quantitative stock trader at Goldman Sachs in New York, a career he took after graduating from MIT with a degree in computer science and mathematics. Now, he has also chosen to leave Goldman Sachs and founded a bitcoin startup LedgerX, a bitcoin options trading and clearing platform. He hopes his company can become the first regulated bitcoin options trading platform.

Rick Henri Chan, who previously worked for Deutsche Bank in Japan as head of over-the-counter derivatives technology, was also a trader at UBS and Morgan Stanley. Currently, he has chosen to join the Bitcoin company Airbitz to raise funds and plan the direction of the company. Chan said that he once had a multi-million dollar job opportunity in Germany. He admitted that he missed the big salary, but he loves the flexibility he has now.

“We at Airbitz are doing something special, and I think the company will have a lot more value in the future,” Chan said.

Risks and opportunities

What I want to say is that these entrepreneurs are not satisfied with the status quo. Their yearning and vision for higher goals force them to embark on this undeveloped path and gamble on this emerging market.

These are not your average gamblers, they are the most conservative and highly educated group in the market. As the saying goes: life favors the bold; these pioneers seem to be very willing to test this old proverb.

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