Breanne Madigan said was called “crazy” when she left the upper echelon of Goldman Sachs after 15 years to join crypto startup Blockchain.com in 2018.
Three years later, she is now at the helm of crypto firm TradeBlock as its newly appointed chief executive and being lauded as a “genius.”
What has happened since 2018 is the increasing institutional interest in and adoption of crypto. Whether it’s billionaire hedge fund managers making big bets on digital assets or corporations adding bitcoin to their balance sheets, a massive amount of institutional money has come into the crypto market.
“This is what I originally anticipated would happen when I left Goldman at the outset,” she said in an interview. “I knew there was a day that would come when large institutional investors would finally have this aha moment and start coming into the space.”
Madigan saw it coming because she knows the wants and needs of institutions inside and out. As Goldman’s head of institutional wealth services from 2014 to 2018, she worked with ultra-high-net-worth families (often with assets of at least $500 million) on private investment opportunities in early-stage companies.
At one point, while exploring opportunities in the fintech sector, she started reading up on crypto and blockchain technology.
“I remember sitting on weekends at a Starbucks near the office and just reading deeply into these white papers. The more I read, I just thought about myriad applications where this blockchain technology was going to transform traditional banking,” she said. “Then when I started reading about bitcoin, I was like this is the future, this immutable technology is unbelievable. I’m shocked that we didn’t know about this sooner.”
Madigan was so entranced by what she learned that she started thinking about possible ways of getting involved. It just so happened that an Israeli family office, which was one of her clients at Goldman, was an early investor in Blockchain.com, which was looking for someone to build out its institutional business.
As the head of institutional sales and strategy for Blockchain.com, Madigan launched a whole go-to-market strategy that remains the backbone of the firm’s institutional business. Later on, she moved to Ripple, a fintech company that uses blockchain technology to facilitate cross-border money transfer for banks and institutions.
‘Zero doubt’ about growing institutional adoption
Madigan is joining TradeBlock, a crypto index provider and trading platform for the OCT markets, at a time when major cryptocurrencies are still reeling from a recent correction that whipsawed investors.
The downward price spiral, which was induced by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s concerns over the energy waste from bitcoin mining, has caused institutions to put their crypto buying on hold, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood recently said at the Consensus by Coindesk conference. (Coindesk acquired TradeBlock, which has $36 billion benchmarked against its indices, in January this year.)
But Madigan remains unfazed. “I’ve seen this a few times now,” she said. “I have zero doubt that the family offices and broader institutional investing community will 100% continue to be interested
