Ben Strack

<div id="highlights-block_635c17a91b884" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Ex-director of mobile product development at Kraken joins blockchain-based entertainment platform</li>
 <li>A former CIO of a BlackRock multi-strategy hedge fund seeks to help Strix Leviathan build out its strategy lineup</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-hoeptner-0a00962/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alexander Hoeptner</a>, the CEO of crypto futures exchange BitMEX, suddenly stepped down from the role, which he had held since January 2021 — as the company tapped Chief Financial Officer <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephan-lutz-7957a6a/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stephan Lutz</a> as its interim chief executive. 



Lutz is set to continue serving as the company’s CFO, his title since May 2021, a spokesperson told Blockworks.&nbsp;



“Together with the rest of the management team and our talented staff members, I will make sure that BitMEX continues to deliver great, innovative crypto trading products and a secure and stable trading environment for our clients,” Lutz said in a statement. “We want to thank Alexander for his support to the business during his tenure and wish him well in his future endeavors.”



A BitMex representative declined to comment on the nature of Hoeptner’s departure, and his plans are unclear. Hoeptner declined to comment.&nbsp;



Digital asset liquidity aggregator FLUID has hired a former Wall Street executive to lead its product strategy.&nbsp;



<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiran-pingali-telk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kiran Pingali</a> co-founded financial technology company TELK Group in 2019 and has been its CEO for the past two-plus years, according to his LinkedIn. He also previously was global head of electronic trading products at investment bank Exotix Capital, and has worked at Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.



Pingali said in a statement that the company is looking to bring its expertise in traditional finance and electronic trading to the crypto space.



“Our smart order router solution aggregates deep liquidity across CEXs [centralized exchanges] and DEXs [decentralized exchanges], and employs predicted order book prices using AI [artificial intelligence]-based models,” Pingali said. “This, coupled with our low-latency co-located infrastructure, ensures we are always offering best execution to our clients.”



Sovren — a company aiming to build a blockchain-based, decentralized news and entertainment platform — has nabbed former Kraken executive <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/davestann/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dave Stann</a>. 



Stann worked as director of mobile product development for Kraken’s digital asset exchange from 2018 to 2020. During that time, he helped the company launch its Kraken Pro and Kraken Futures mobile apps. Before Kraken, Stann was a director of product management at GSN Games.&nbsp;



&#8220;There are many &#8216;free-speech platforms&#8217; promising to save us from state censorship, but those promises mean nothing if the underlying tech is not purpose-built to survive the escalating attacks,” Stann said in a statement. “The team at Sovren understands this implicitly, and is leading the charge to solve this problem for good.”



Nik Bougalis, a director of engineering at Ripple, is set to leave the company.



“My decade-long journey at Ripple has been a fantastic (if exhausting and all-consuming) one,” <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/nbougalis/status/1583548835028090880" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bougalis tweeted on Oct. 21</a>. “I got to work on a project that I love, towards a goal I believe in. But that journey will be coming to an end in a few weeks.”



A Ripple spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.&nbsp;



Crypto mining hardware retailer Phoenix Technology appointed <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-agren-6921068/details/experience/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Carl Agren</a> as its CEO as the company looks to expand globally.



Agren formerly was the company’s chief operating officer. Before joining Phoenix Technology earlier this year, he was the COO at G42, an artificial intelligence and cloud computing company.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Founded in 2015, Phoenix Technology operates in the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. It is developing a site in the US expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2023 and is also building a mining facility in the United Arab Emirates.



Law firm Winston &amp; Strawn LLP has hired <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-azel-4271311b/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Juan Azel</a> to help support clients as crypto continues to transform financial services.



Azel was brought aboard as a partner in the firm’s transactions department and a member of its financial services practice. He is set to advise financial institutions and fintech companies on risk management, financial crime regulatory compliance and corrective remediation responses to enforcement actions.&nbsp;



&#8220;Fintech&#8217;s and crypto&#8217;s rapid evolution continues to transform financial services and to create legal complexities in risk management and regulatory compliance,&#8221; Azel said in a statement. &#8220;Miami is a major center for the further development of fintech and digital assets nationally, and I believe my combination of in-house and external counsel fintech experience will allow me to provide value-focused legal and business solutions to clients across these sectors.”



Azel was most recently deputy general counsel and chief compliance officer of Cross River Bank.



In case you missed it



<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-mcbrady-387471/details/experience/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matthew McBrady</a>, a former chief investment officer of a BlackRock multi-strategy hedge fund, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/crypto-hedge-fund-taps-former-blackrock-cio-as-strategy-head/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">joined quant crypto hedge fund Strix Leviathan</a>.



Before BlackRock, McBrady was head of investment strategy and risk management at alternative investment adviser Silver Creek Capital Management and a vice president for Bain Capital’s North American private equity group.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The Graph Co-founder <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanivtal9/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Yaniv Tal</a> — who <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/latest-in-crypto-hiring-kraken-dydx-foundation-and-blockfi-add-execs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">stepped down as Edge &amp; Node’s CEO</a> earlier this month — <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/the-graph-co-founder-building-info-gathering-app-web3-browser/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">revealed the creation</a> of a knowledge organization app and corresponding Web3 browser.



Called Geo, the company is set to collate blockchain data and develop a browsable user interface accessible to anyone.&nbsp;



Tal told Blockworks the company has five staffers and is looking to hire front-end engineers.



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Latest in Crypto Hiring: BitMEX Appoints CFO as Interim CEO

<div id="highlights-block_6357d6fa91c5c" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Opportunity comes from inefficiencies, of which the crypto space has an increasing number, McBrady tells Blockworks</li>
 <li>The firm is finishing the rebuild of its trading infrastructure to better ingest a broader array of data</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



A former chief investment officer of a BlackRock multi-strategy hedge fund is joining quant crypto hedge fund <a href="https://strixleviathan.com/approach/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Strix Leviathan</a> to broaden its suite of strategies and help the firm capture opportunities in the market.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The world’s largest asset manager hired <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-mcbrady-387471/details/experience/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matthew McBrady</a> in 2014 to overhaul the investment process and operating structure of its $1.5 billion multi-strategy hedge fund — a role he was in for nearly three years.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Before BlackRock, McBrady was head of investment strategy and risk management at alternative investment adviser Silver Creek Capital Management and a vice president for Bain Capital’s North American private equity group. Earlier in his career, he was an international economist with Janet Yellen on President Clinton&#8217;s Council of Economic Advisors.



“Matt’s extensive experience in building and running alternative investment strategies for some of the most demanding LPs in the world is simply unparalleled,” Strix Leviathan CEO Sadie Raney said in a statement. “His skillset and credibility as a successful entrepreneur and an advisor to policymakers and technology startups will be a true asset to our firm’s investment strategies and our investors.”&nbsp;



McBrady began monitoring the crypto space in 2017. He was introduced to Raney a few years ago through a former colleague and has been an adviser on the firm’s investment committee.



“A great time to get into anything, in fact, is when the simple buy-and-hold strategy is no longer a good one, let alone a dominant one,” McBrady told Blockworks. “I think it is a great time to be getting into crypto just because of the crypto winter and all the number of large players that have been shaken out and the stress in the system.”&nbsp;



McBrady decided to take the full-time leap into crypto upon realizing that the inefficiencies in space are temporarily increasing amid a volatile market in part spurred by the collapse of <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/tag/terra/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin</a> earlier this year and the subsequent bankruptcies of centralized platforms, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/celsius-to-file-for-bankruptcy-imminently-report/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">such as crypto lender Celsius</a>.



“Opportunity in any type of hedge fund comes from inefficiency,” the executive said. “You can’t ask for a more patently inefficient sector that’s tradable in large quantities than crypto in general even when the markets are going up, let alone when they’re still suffering from the bruises from the losses that folks took and the meaningful loss of important institutional players.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Opportunities for hedge fund growth</h3>



McBrady is joining Strix Leviathan as the firm is finishing the rebuild of its trading infrastructure to allow the system to better ingest a broader array of data.



Founded in 2018, the company serves institutions, fund of funds, single family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. It currently manages $50 million in assets. 



Strix Leviathan’s flagship Nest Fund seeks risk-adjusted returns to a buy-and-hold basket of digital assets by using statistical models.



“The Nest Fund has captured 70% of the upside and only 30% of the downside, largely by having a really rich suite of risk management signals,” McBrady said. “So the first a-ha [moment] was these can be very easily repurposed into features that can be turned into alpha-seeking signals.”



McBrady said the firm’s research efforts are focused around building market-neutral strategies that complement the Nest Fund.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The new strategy head is also being tasked with helping Strix Leviathan “beef up” its Aurora Fund — a strategy looking to deliver market-neutral yield generation through low-risk arbitrage and liquidity provision strategies on DeFi platforms.&nbsp;



Finding opportunities in DeFi can be done in part through measuring data such as blockchain activity, McBrady said, as well as examining the supply and demand metrics of a liquidity pool.&nbsp;



“A big chunk of it is understanding — especially if you’re making bets on earlier stage layer-1 tokens — ‘Is this healthy? Is the ecosystem going to grow? Are people finding this useful?’” he said. “[A lot] is out there for the world to see, so it’s really just a function of whether you can channel your efforts in the right direction of getting the useful stuff.”



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