Ex-Credit Suisse traders re-emerge with NFT company

The volume of NFTs traded on OpenSea may have fallen, but senior traders from investment banks still see a future in the tokens. Two former traders at Credit Suisse in New York have re-emerged with an NFT venture of their own.

Bankole Omodunbi and Justin Bojarski spent eight and fifteen years respectively at Credit Suisse. Omodunbi was MD of equity trading and head of key trading products before leaving in 2021. Bojarski was director of delta one trading and left earlier this year. Both have backgrounds in computer science, and have spent their time since leaving banking writing the code for a new API platform (Verbwire) that allows people who aren’t skilled at coding smart contracts to access seven different blockchains.

“Previously, you had to learn Solidity to deploy a smart contract on the Ethereum network,” says Omodunbi. “But with our API it’s not necessary. Solidity is there behind the scenes, but as a developer you can work in Java, Python, C# or C++ and use Verbwire instead.”

Verbwire has the potential to solve a major stumbling block in the development of the Blockchain economy – the eternal shortage of Solidity developers. While they’re not quite as hard to find as they used to be, Omodunbi says really good Solidity developers are still a rarity. By comparison, he says, “there are a ton of people” on Wall Street and in big tech who know Web 2.0 languages ​​like Python and Java. “Verbwire enables them to write and distribute their own contracts on the blockchain.”

Omodunbi does not buy into the notion that NFTs are in perpetual decline. On the contrary, he says that the technology has barely started. “JPEGs aren’t the long-term use case. They’re just scratching the surface – smart contracts can be used for everything from real estate to concert tickets to loyalty cards. Anything where you have an enforceable agreement of some kind is a potential use case for the blockchain.”

Omodunbi also has no regrets about leaving Credit Suisse’s trading business. He says his departure was not motivated by problems at the Swiss bank, but by the fact that he wanted to be more innovative than was possible in a large regulated organisation. “It wasn’t a Credit Suisse thing. There are many layers in a bank and making a small change takes weeks and months. Everything is much faster in the blockchain world.”

“I’m an engineer and like to solve problems,” says Omodunbi. “In banking I built algorithms and wrote code to generate pnl. Now I write code to facilitate the development of Web 3.0.”

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