CoinFund executives explain why crypto is the ‘obvious’ choice for ambitious fintech pioneers

Founded in 2015, crypto-native VC firm CoinFund has spent the past year bolstering its leadership with talent from the world of traditional finance, including Chris Perkins — a former executive at Citigroup — and Christopher Giancarlo, the former CFTC chair.

CoinFund’s hiring of Chris Perkins as the firm’s new President is part of a larger exodus of talent from Citi towards digital asset companies, as reported by The Block.

In this episode of The Scoop, CoinFund’s President Chris Perkins and CEO Jake Brukhman break down the recent personnel updates at CoinFund, and explain why the combination of crypto-natives and experienced executives from traditional finance are key to pushing blockchain technology to the point of mass adoption.

As Brukhman explained during the interview, crypto technology is already innovative, it just needs to be more accessible to reach mainstream market appeal:

“It's a learning curve for everybody to bring these two things together to bridge the gap between this amazing technology that people have built, and to make it usable enough that people out there in the real world can actually benefit from it… and that bridging of the gap is the thing that so far has made most successful crypto companies successful.”

While Brukhman and Perkins believe outsiders from traditional finance can help crypto projects scale, that is not to say that all crypto projects are eager for VC firms to get involved.

As Perkins mentioned during the interview: “Crypto is all about community, and you really have to work to navigate that community to understand the founders and to help them grow.”

While the crypto community can be nuanced compared to the world of traditional finance, Perkins believes the allure of working with the burgeoning digital asset industry is strong enough to continue to draw in talent:

“We're effectively in the process of giving birth to a brand new asset class. And it's just so incredibly exciting being a pioneer, being on the cutting edge. For those of us who are wired like that, it's kind of obvious why you'd want to transition into this space.”

During this episode, Chaparro, Harley-McKeown, Brukhman, and Perkins also discuss:

• Crypto Founders’ regulatory concerns
• Liquid token strategies
• Why 24-hour markets are the new paradigm

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.