Crypto CEOs start stepping down in wake of market rout, but famous founders are hard to shake
- Executives at Kraken, Genesis and elsewhere are relinquishing top positions in a changing of the guard for the decade-old crypto industry
- Some of the biggest exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase and FTX have not addressed succession plans for their celebrity founders
The cryptocurrency industry’s epic shakeout, having cost thousands of jobs and set off a round of consolidation, is reaching the corner office.
The raft of successions sets the stage for a changing of the guard in the roughly decade-old industry. Many of crypto’s most prominent leaders, like Powell, are technologists who discovered digital assets early, cultivated devout Twitter followings and didn’t hesitate to engage their detractors in online battles. With the sector reeling from a slump that’s shaved off roughly US$2 trillion from cryptocurrencies’ market value and landed some bosses in bankruptcy court, regulators’ cross hairs or worse, boards are starting to look for different skills.
“If there is a firm in complete crisis and meltdown, you need an adult in the room, and you need that adult in the room to understand regulation and compliance,” said Deepali Vyas, who leads executive search for areas including crypto at Korn Ferry.
Vyas is currently looking for CEOs for a crypto exchange and a crypto miner which she declined to identify, and she expects more C-suite changes throughout the industry in the fall.
Insiders take over
This wave of changes started in earnest in early August with Saylor, who founded MicroStrategy in 1989, giving up his CEO title to focus more on bitcoin – even after his buying of the token led to a US$918 million second-quarter impairment charge. Two weeks later, Moro stepped down as CEO of Genesis, the crypto brokerage stung by exposure to defunct hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.