As Wall Street banks embrace crypto, start-ups look to lure top

Wall Street has been beefing up hiring for digital asset teams. But some employees are walking away from name-brand institutions in search of more risk, and potentially, more reward.

JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are among the firms with dedicated groups for cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology. JPMorgan has one of the largest crypto teams, with more than 200 employees working in its Onyx division. The JPM Coin digital currency is being used commercially to send payments around the world.

Umar Farooq, the CEO of Onyx by JPMorgan, said the team has to worry about compliance and protecting the bank’s brand and often moves slower than your average crypto start-up. But when products are launched, they reach “a scale that a fintech can only dream of.”

“There aren’t many places where you can roll out a new platform and that platform can go from literally nothing to transacting a billion dollars of trade a day in a few months,” Farooq told CNBC. “That sort of scale can only be possible when you operate at a company like JPMorgan Chase. The upside of that scale is way more important than whatever downsides might exist by virtue of more regulations or controls.”

When it comes to hiring, Farooq said it’s a mix of current JPMorgan employees and competing for talent with start-ups and bigger tech companies. From first-year analysts to senior management and managing directors, there’s a greater interest in making the move to crypto, he said.

Financial services firms added three times as many crypto jobs last year than in 2015, according to recent data from LinkedIn. In the first half of 2021, that pace jumped by 40%. Banks on a crypto hiring spree included Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Capital One, Barclays, Credit Suisse, UBS, Bank of America and BNY Mellon.

The crypto boom on Wall Street coincides with more funding and hiring in the start-up world. Crypto and blockchain companies raised a record $25 billion last year, an eightfold increase from a year earlier, according to CB Insights data.

Farooq said that even with the start-up boom, JPMorgan has seen “limited attrition.” Those leaving have been people “wanting to start their own company versus wanting to leave and go do something similar.”

However, JPMorgan did lose one of its highest-profile crypto deputies last year. Christine Moy is on garden leave after departing her role as managing director and global head of crypto and metaverse at Onyx. She has yet to announce her next move.

“After over a half-decade laying the foundations for blockchain-based infrastructure across financial markets and cross-border payments, creating new businesses that have already scaled into the $USD billions at J.P. Morgan, I am looking to challenge myself further by finding new opportunities to create value and drive impact for the Web3/crypto ecosystem from a new angle,” Moy told CNBC in an email.