Genesis, the digital currency trading and lending company, is beefing up its executive ranks, recently announcing the appointment of a general counsel and chief technology officer.
Earlier in July the New York-based crypto trading firm said it named Arianna Pretto-Sakmann, an international attorney as general counsel and appointed Pat DeFrancesco, a veteran technologists at CTO. Dan Torrey was named head of institutional sales. The company also announced its first European hire, naming Leon Marshall head of European business development. According to Genesis, combined the executives bring decades of financial technology experience to Genesis.
Pretto-Sakmann, who is in charge of all of the legal aspects of trading and lending activities at the company was previously employed at two international law firms in London and New York. At the unnamed firms, she was in charge of cross border regulatory issues, advising banks, broker-dealers, clearinghouses, exchanges, and investment managers.
As CTO DeFrancesco is responsible for expanding the firm's trading technology and quantitative research. Prior to coming on board, he was CTO of machine learning startup 7 Chord which is creating trading signals for the U.S. bond market using advanced technology. Before joining 7 Chord, the executive headed up the tech team for credit trading at Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Torey, who is in charge of the company’s lending and trading pipeline, was previously the global head of FX e-commerce sales at Northern Trust.
Marshall, the first hire outside of the U.S. will be in charge of non-U.S. business development. Marshall brings more than a decade of experience in derivatives to the company, previously acting as senior commodities portfolio manager at UBS, Trafigura, and Apollo Management. More recently, he has been focused on the digital currency market even publishing a research piece in 2017, looking at taxes and digital assets and acted as an advisor for a German digital currency project.
While Marshall marks the first non-U.S. based employee the crypto trading company is no stranger to Europe. It has had European clients since as far back as 2013. With business and demand growing it's looking to expand. The company may do the same in Asia Chief Executive Michael Moro said in a recent report. He said there is a lot of trading activity and opportunity overseas.
"It is really exciting to add this talented group of professionals to the Genesis team," said Moro in a press release announcing the appointments. "We are confident that these individuals will build on our sustained success in the digital currency marketplace and play critical roles in expanding our business around the world."
The new appointments come amid a resurgence in the price of cryptocurrency. After languishing for months, the value surged earlier this year with Bitcoin recently trading around $11,300. It’s a far cry from the nearly $20,000 one Bitcoin was worth at the end of December 2017 but it’s much better than $6,000, a price it traded around for months. With expectations high that the likes of Facebook will legitimize digital currency interest is gaining again boding well for digital token trading firms.
