Monthly Mint — 01.2024
A curated selection of hires and promotions from across crypto and web3. If you would like to sign up to receive this newsletter, please visit our website.
We’re Following
Welcome back, lovely readers, to a new year, new market and new fodder for our monthly jubilee. 🎉 2023 is over — RIP to ‘the Year of the Use Case’ — and we’re officially ushering in that 2024 Travis Kelce energy. 🏈❤️ Think we can manifest a bull market? 🐂
We’ve hunkered down these last eighteen months amidst what Cryptopolitan calls ‘a dichotomy of decline and hope.’ Funny thing about markets though — they change! 🎢 Although we’re continuing to see sizable layoffs in web2 and big tech, crypto has seen just a fraction of the cuts. ✂️ If you’re looking for the voiceover on these & other hiring trends and best practices, have a listen to our very own Scott Fletcher on The Scoop podcast with Frank Chaparro. 🎧 Covering everything from Intersection’s birth story and the state of crypto hiring to how mature organizations like Circle manage to hire stellar execs (appreciate the upvote, Dante🔥🙏🏼), this pod is our Roman Empire, 🇮🇹 and we are thrilled to share it with you.
The major news this month was, of course, the biggest fake-out since Tom Brady’s first retirement. 🤦🏼♀️ After posting its approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs on X, the SEC announced that its account was hacked, and the erroneous post had originated from the hacker in question. They obviously didn’t read our warnings about 2FA back in 1996. 🙄 A day later, the SEC authorized the products (for real this time), leading to 11 spot bitcoin ETFs flooding the market in an ever-exciting race to the bottom. Drivers rev your engines 🏁; Eric Balchunas has officially entered the cryptosphere.
In other news, the compliant-king of stablecoins 👑 has confidentially filed to go public…again. As a reminder, Circle is the crypto adult in the stablecoin room and offers a safe, reliable alternative to an otherwise less-than-perfect payments system. Sending Tether on TRON? Sketchiness squared, my friend. 🟪 Motion for all stablecoin activity to happen through USDC from now on. ✋🏽🧑🏽⚖️ Check out this 2024 Crypto Crime Trends report by Chainalysis for a deep-dive on all of crypto’s illicit affairs.
To wrap things up — Sheryl Shandberg is leaning out, Beanie Babies are back 🧸 and we have a new book on our reading list, or shall we say read-write-owning list. 😏
🍻Cheers & long live NFTs,
The Intersection Crew
We’re Backing
This month we sat with Dana Gibber and Lini Klatt, co-founders at Flowcarbon. Based in NYC, Flowcarbon is an a16z-backed climate tech company which is doing heroic work to bring the nascent carbon trading markets on-chain. Dana and Lini are two of the most-impressive, ambitious and mission-driven founders we know and are working on something truly important. We’re proud to count them as IGP clients.
What’s the origin story of Flowcarbon?
Before launching Flowcarbon, we supported a group of nonprofits working to preserve a forest in South America. We were surprised by the limitations of philanthropy capital in financing conservation projects that are so essential for the future of our planet. We began learning about the impact that the voluntary carbon markets can have in scaling nature-based solutions to combat climate change — and that inspired the five of us to launch Flowcarbon in 2021.
Our mission is to propel the voluntary carbon market forward by developing innovative structured finance and credit distribution products for carbon credit generating projects, both on-chain and off. We are thrilled to be backed by amazing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Invesco and Samsung Next.
Why should carbon credits be moved on-chain vs. originated and traded in a more traditional fashion?
They should — and can — be traded both on-chain and off-chain and should be able to move seamlessly from one to the other. Blockchain enables novel innovations in carbon markets, like improved transparency and traceability of carbon credits, lower transaction costs and increased access for smaller buyers and sellers.
Combine all of that with the fact that carbon is a net new market for which critical underlying infrastructure is actively being developed, and we think there is an unprecedented opportunity!
You’re deeply passionate about climate finance as a means of addressing climate change. Crypto has a reputation, fairly or not, as being somewhat libertarian. Have you found this to be a challenge?
Not at all! We’ve found the web3 world to be incredibly engaging, thought-provoking and open-minded. And super-importantly, we’ve seen a pioneering willingness to engage with blockchain solutions on the part of the key players in the off-chain carbon market. For example, the two major carbon credit issuers have each conducted official stakeholder “consultations’’ on the tokenization of carbon credits, and one of them, The Gold Standard, has activated a tokenization “readiness phase” for a few partners, which includes Flowcarbon.
You have a new market developing that needs infrastructure that offers transparency, data integrity and trust — all things that blockchain is ideal for. We believe that blockchain is the scaffolding that can support a massive funnel of finance into carbon credit projects.
Direct air capture of carbon is a promising but early technology. We gather there are pilot plants operating in Iceland and California’s Central Valley and there are dozens of startups in the space. How quickly do you think this tech takes off and finds scale? Does Flowcarbon have a role here?
Direct air capture (DAC) is an extremely promising technology still in its early days. We believe the key to scaling DAC is getting the cost of carbon removal lowered, which involves making sure pilot projects have access to flexible infrastructure financing at reasonable rates to support their development. This is exactly where Flowcarbon can play a vital role.
Connecting early-stage carbon removal ventures with private credit investment enables more plants to get off the ground faster. More DAC facilities built means costs are lowered through economies of scale and technological refinement — making more affordable negative emissions.
In addition to DAC, another exciting and high-impact type of carbon removal project we work with is called biochar production. In these projects, waste biomatter is burned at high heat without oxygen to create biochar. Biochar is used as a soil additive and natural fertilizer, among other uses. We are working with a growing number of biochar carbon projects to help them scale.
We’re Tracking
BitGo: Mark Azad joined as Chief Revenue Officer. Mark was previously Chief Revenue Officer at Cequence Security. Link
Blockaid: Glenn Rachlin joined to lead Go-To-Market efforts. Glenn was previously Head of Sales and Partnerships at Alchemy. Link
Chainalysis: Omesh Agam joined as Chief Information Security Officer. Omesh was previously Chief Information Security Officer at Celonis. Link
Circle: Tram Doman joined as Chief of Staff. Tram was previously Co-Founder and CEO of Hapybara. Link
Coinbase: George Osborne joined as an Adviser. George is the former U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer. Link
Horizon: Greg Canessa joined as President and Chief Operating Officer. Greg was previously Global Director of Strategy and Business Operations for Games at Google. We’re grateful for the partnership of Peter Kieltyka and Michael Sanders on this project. Link
Kraken: Gilles BianRosa joined as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer. Giles was previously Chief Product Officer at N26. Marcus Hughes joined as Global Head of Regulatory Strategy. Marcus was previously Chief Risk Officer at BitMEX. Link
Oasis Pro: Alana Ackerson joined as President. Alana was previously Founder and CEO of HQ Digital. Link
R3 Digital Markets: Kate Karimson joined as Chief Commercial Officer. Kate was previously Chief Commercial Officer at LedgerEdge. Link
Ritual: Arthur Hayes joined as an Adviser. Hayes is currently Chief Investment Officer at Maelstrom. Link
StarkWare: Eli Ben-Sasson, one of StarkWare’s Co-Founders, was promoted from President to CEO. Link
Superstate: Alexander Zozos joined as General Counsel. Alex was previously Associate General Counsel at Coinbase. Link
SYKY: Nicola Formichetti joined as Artistic Director. Nicola will remain Creative Consultant at Haus of Gaga and Haus Labs, Founder of Nicopanda and Creative Fashion Director at Uniqlo. Link
TRM Labs: Morley Gordon joined as Head of Partnerships. Morley was previously VP of Global Government at Intel 471. Link
Xapo Bank: Neeraj Sane joined as Vice President of Marketing. Neeraj was previously Vice President of Marketing Strategy, Operations and Insights at Circle. Link
Zero Hash: Joaquín Ayuso de Paul joined as Global Head of Product. Joaquín was previously Head of Nium Labs. Link
Intersection Growth Partners is the leading executive search firm in crypto and frontier fintech. We connect our clients with game-changing talent and invest our own capital for true alignment.
