Ex-JP Morgan superstar Blythe Masters is getting into the Bitcoin business
The former global head of commodities at JP Morgan is now the CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, which "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," according to the Financial Times.
Details on the venture are sparse, but the FT reports that DAH was founded by Sunil Hirani and Don Wilson last year, and currently has offices in New York, Chicago, and Tel Aviv.
The idea is that DAH "will admit creditworthy members - such as big banks and asset managers - to trade between themselves using DAH's technology," writes the FT.
Masters also told the paper that she won't be needing regulatory approval because it's not "an exchange, a custodian, or a money transmitter."
Blythe is not the first Masters to get into cryptocurrency.
Masters' ex-husband, Daniel Masters (also an ex-JP Morgan commodities trader), started a Bitcoin fund last year, although he's had trouble finding banks to work with it. In an interview with Newsweek last spring, he compared Bitcoin to the oil market:
"The state of Bitcoin is a lot like the state of the oil market 25 years ago, where you had a lot of these transactions happening merchant to merchant, this product that everyone wanted and could use but whose prices were very, very volatile, very shaky."