From the Financial Times:
Masters joins cryptocurrency start-up
Blythe Masters, the former JPMorgan executive who helped pioneer credit derivatives in the 1990s, has re-emerged as chief executive of a cryptocurrency start-up.Digital Asset Holdings aims to be a venue for buyers and sellers of financial assets to meet and transact, switching currencies into bitcoin in order to cut the cost and time of settlement and make use of the decentralised “block chain” as a secure record of transactions.Bitcoin was created in the wake of the financial crisis by an anonymous computer scientist keen to displace central banks, government currencies and the traditional banking system.
Its most ardent devotees include libertarians and drug dealers, but financial services companies are interested in exploiting the underlying technology, which allows the ownership of a bitcoin to be transferred from one user to another.
“There is a school of libertarian ‘visionaries’ who want to imagine a world without big banks, big governments,” said Ms Masters, who left JPMorgan last April. “That’s nice, but completely irrelevant to this business model. We don’t imagine a world in which big banks and big governments don’t exist.”
“They say they want the world to change, but the world will change by adopting new technology to do a better job,” she said. Reducing the frictional costs of financial transactions is “one of the great challenges of our time”.
Ms Masters said she had held discussions with the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and New York’s Department of Financial Services about the venture, though it would not need regulators’ blessing because it was not an exchange, a custodian or a money transmitter.
Instead, it will admit creditworthy members — such as big banks and asset managers — to trade between themselves using DAH’s technology....MORE
