3 Traditional Finance Professionals Turned Bitcoin Evangelists

Bitcoin’s BTC volatility can be disconcerting to those who don’t understand it, but there are a growing number of money managers who are turning to bitcoin as a diversification tool. For example, multi-billion dollar ETF company ARK Invest found bitcoin important enough to dedicate an entire section of its website’s research center to it.

ARK’s CEO, Cathie Wood, has been one of the more prominent proponents of bitcoin in the traditional financial space. She is pictured above speaking at the annual Bitcoin conference held in Miami, Florida. Bitcoin’s network transparency allows for a unique level of analysis not possible with traditional markets.

Analysts like Alpha Zeta, Swan Bitcoin’s new CIO, are also building tools to analyze and illustrate bitcoin’s impact on a portfolio. The site is open source, free to use and listed in the tweet above.

Regardless of your beliefs, there is a group of financiers who are beginning to see bitcoin as an integral part of the modern portfolio. The following three financial experts left their careers in space and are now focusing on bitcoin full-time.

The bond trader

Greg Foss worked as an interest rate trader and credit expert in hedge funds in Canada and the USA. Foss managed several billion dollar accounts before finally leaving the financial sector after 30 years in space.

Foss says he found bitcoin in 2016 and quickly fell down the rabbit hole. “I invested in bitcoin and was actually a founding shareholder in 3IQ, the first closed-end BTC fund to be approved by the OSC and listed on the TSX,” Foss said in our interview about his first investment experience. His conviction has only grown since then.

He said his passion for bitcoin drove him to write a research paper for other credit market analysts and money managers. Foss’ thesis is that bitcoin is a credit swap, or insurance, on a basket of fiat currencies and government debt. The assignment has made him a popular figure in the Bitcoin space as he made his rounds on podcasts in the space to discuss it.

“Bitcoin is the biggest asymmetric investment opportunity I’ve ever seen,” Foss told me in our interview. Although the asymmetry makes the asset volatile, Foss insists that bitcoin is the essential portfolio insurance in the face of rising sovereign debt burdens.

Foss’s paper elaborates on these ideas in more detail and can be found here. He now spends his time focusing on bitcoin education, occasionally publishing with Bitcoin Magazine and speaking on podcasts.

The consultant

Jesse Myers is the COO of Onramp Bitcoin, a company that helps institutions and qualified investors reduce counterparty risk when buying and holding bitcoin. Myers spent time consulting at Bain & Company before managing a bitcoin fund at Protocol Capital.

“The crypto world is full of unregistered securities with management teams and venture funding masquerading as decentralized currencies,” Myers said in our interview about their bitcoin-only focus. In contrast, he describes bitcoin as a digital commodity and store of value, a characterization similar to what SEC chairman Gary Gensler has previously stated.

Myers told me that he and his partners were tired of bitcoin custody solutions for qualified investors and institutions. Previously, these groups would be forced into vehicles with high fees, or exchanges. Recent revelations from crypto exchange failures over the past year revealed that depositors are characterized as unsecured creditors in the event of a bankruptcy. These unsuspecting customers ended up losing billions of dollars in bitcoin held at institutions that were supposed to be safe.

Myers says Onramp seeks to offer a better product, securing bitcoin through its original technology, eliminating the risk of such bankruptcy losses. In short, bitcoin is a digital bearer asset; Onramp helps investors take care of their investment. Onramp’s goal is to facilitate their clients’ education along the way, ultimately allowing them to cash out bitcoin on their own when they’re ready to take the plunge.

The asset manager

Andy Edstrom spent a decade on Wall Street at firms such as Goldman Sachs, The Carlyle GroupCG and at the multi-billion dollar hedge fund Tennenbaum Capital. He eventually left to join his family’s wealth management business where he discovered bitcoin. In 2019, he published a book with the title Why Buy Bitcoin, before joining the team at Swan, a bitcoin-only exchange.

Edstrom, like many others, was drawn to bitcoin because of its price action. After gaining a deeper understanding, however, he developed a thesis on network effects and the role of money in society. The thesis eventually formed the basis of his book. Edstrom says he wrote the book at the bottom of the 2019 bear market to test both his thesis and conviction.

After joining Swan, he launched a product for financial advisors called Swan Advisor Services. “The first set of advisors on board were already very knowledgeable about bitcoin … the second group has been a broader spectrum,” Edstrom said of the clientele in our interview. Swan is unique among exchanges because of their commitment to education, a service they offer free online for anyone to access.

Education in the bitcoin arena is critical to the next wave of adoption, which may well be through proxies such as financial advisors. Edstrom claims that Swan Advisor Services solves that problem. Although volatile, bitcoin is starting to show some strength in the face of a growing banking crisis as one of the best-performing assets in 2023. Edstrom believes that with each market cycle, bitcoin will play an increasingly important role in clients’ portfolios. I am sure that the other interviewees certainly agree with his attitude.

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