New CEO of a Fintech crypto trader in Japan

Gillespie: My role at Goldman Sachs (and JPMorgan and Barclays before) has always been to oversee the electronic and systematic trading of FX at banks. Although cryptocurrencies belong to its own asset class, there are many similarities between cryptos and electronic trading in FX.  The client bases are the same and the core market making functions share several similarities. One way to describe crypto trading is it's similar to electronic trading of FX in its infancy. In that sense, I have been through the evolution in FX and hope to be part of a team that works to replicate the success in FX to crypto trading.

An ex Goldman-Sachs trader taking the CEO job of a Fintech firm in the over the counter FX business.  He sees the similarity between trading digital coin and fiat.

What similarity?
FX is a rectangular trade, no one is really sphere packing at the pits except a few currency speculators. Both parties buy goods using the other currency, then go home and pack sphere.  The result is volume, the longer the window of traders, the most likely you approach a straight rectangular trade.

This guy also knows about market making risk, a little market making can go a long way to finding matches across long windows. Going on:

The sharp moves are the norms in my mind as crypto are still in its infancy, and our risk management and pricing principles are built to withstand these sharp moves in the market.

There we go, he knows the problems of sharp volatility, but he expects it to smooth out as the total sandbox place fills with vendors. 

I think we will continue to see the evolution of crypto products and usage being led from countries like Japan. 2017 was a big year for cryptocurrencies and its caught the attention of very large institutional players.  The more people understand what cryptocurrencies are the more legitimate money will flow into the market.  

See, the guy knows sandbox, he will succeed.  As a follow on, 2018 is the year of wide scale deployment.