The Latest in Crypto Hiring: Disney Names Metaverse Lead

Protego Trust adds crypto CEO to board as it gets set to become a federally chartered national bank

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key takeaways

  • Binance.US taps former Societe Generale and Gemini exec to lead compliance efforts
  • Bitfury CEO Brian Brooks and former Ally Financial CEO Michael Carpenter are joining Protego Trust Bank’s board

Mike White was appointed to lead Disney’s metaverse strategy. He has spent a decade with the company, most recently as senior vice president of consumer experiences and platforms, and will now be in charge of “connecting the physical and digital worlds” for Disney entertainment, CNBC reported.

Before Disney, White had spent nearly 10 years with Yahoo in several roles, including senior director of strategy and technology.

Binance.US has appointed Tammy Weinrib, formerly of Societe Generale and Gemini, as its chief compliance officer. In addition to engaging US regulators and law enforcement agencies, she will lead the company’s know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) programs.

Crypto.com hired Abhi Bisarya as executive vice president of product, after more than two decades leading product teams at Google, PayPal and Visa.

Bisarya, who led the team that launched the new Google Pay app, will now focus on advancing the adoption of cryptocurrency.

James Beer is set to join Hut 8 Mining as senior vice president of operations to support the company’s expansion.

Beer comes to the Toronto-based miner from eStruxture Data Centers, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has 20 years of experience within service provider organizations serving mission-critical facilities operations, colocation, site design and construction, network architecture, security and managed services.

Hut 8 has also announced the hire of Josh Rayner as its vice president of sales. Formerly working as director of sales at Beanfield Metroconnect, Rayner will focus on the company’s recently acquired data center and managed services business.

Protego Trust Bank named Brian Brooks and Michael Carpenter to its board as the bank gets set to become a federally chartered national bank.

Brooks, the CEO of blockchain technology company Bitfury, was the CEO at Binance.US for several months but resigned in August, citing “differences over strategic direction” in a Twitter post. He had also previously worked as acting comptroller of the currency.

Carpenter was CEO of Ally Financial from November 2009 to February 2015 and is currently on the board of CIT Group and CIT Bank.

Crypto platform FalconX hired Jon Kaplan as head of revenue to help expand the platform’s solutions offered to institutional clients.

Kaplan spent six years at Pinterest, where he was responsible for the company’s global revenue operations. Before that, he worked at Google for 12 years as vice president of US sales.

The announcement comes after FalconX announced it is looking to fill hundreds of roles after a $210 million fundraise in August. The company hired a head of people and a vice president of security earlier this month.

Neal Gorevic joined ConsenSys as the blockchain software company’s chief marketing officer after working as Spotify’s global head of consumer marketing.

Among the roughly 370 people ConsenSys has hired in the last seven months, nearly half came from working in the Web2 ecosystem, a spokesperson told Blockworks. About a third of the new hires joined the company from a different industry.


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