Omega One Enlists Wall Street Execs to Build Finance Market of the Future

The decentralized trading platform is taking major strides towards bridging traditional financial markets and digital assets.

Omega One, a cryptocurrency trade execution platform built on the Ethereum blockchain, announced today the recruitment of four former Wall Street executives to join their powerhouse team of fintech leaders.

A ConsenSys formation, Omega One is building the institutional-grade investment architecture for natively digital asset markets, improving their viability as a foundation for the new financial system, and helping to shape that emerging system toward better societal outcomes. These appointments reflect a strengthening of Omega One’s senior management team ahead of a token launch, anticipated for the first half of 2018.

• Michael Guadarrama has joined as Chief Operating Officer, coming from T. Rowe Price, where he served as Global Head of Investments Technology. Prior to that, Guadarrama served as Head of Trading Technology at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund.
• Daniel Flax has joined as Chief Technology Officer after instrumenting technology transitions for several financial institutions, including roles at Cowen and Company (CIO), The Street (CTO), and CAN Capital (VP, Engineering). Notably, Flax served as Managing Director of Trading Systems at the New York Stock Exchange, where he led their transition to digital trade execution and settlement.
• James Featherly has joined as Trading Platform Product Manager, having previously spent over 13 years at Morgan Stanley. At Morgan Stanley, Featherly served as Executive Director of the Electronic Trading Product Team in Tokyo and Hong Kong, where he helped lead the build-out of Morgan Stanley’s electronic trading platform across all major Asia equity markets.
• Bart Chilton, former Commissioner of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has joined Omega One as an advisor. Beyond advising on compliance, Chilton will be working with Omega One to raise the prospects for meaningful and effective industry self-policing and regulatory engagement.

On joining the company, Guadarrama said, “Omega One’s efforts represent the clearest path forward to successfully bridging the digital asset and traditional markets. This is a transformational moment where blockchain technology can move beyond hype to reality, and the opportunity to solve such a critical piece of the puzzle with such a world-class team was one I knew I had to take.”

Daniel Flax added, “The recent patterns playing out in the cryptocurrency markets draw uncanny parallels to the transition we saw at the NYSE, and the heightened volatility of these markets only further articulate the need for instructional-grade solutions like Omega One.”

James Featherly shared, “Digital asset markets are entering a new stage of evolution, with a broader range of retail and institutional participation. Omega One is launching at a critical time to provide liquidity and security, facilitating and enabling this next stage of evolution. I’m extremely excited to be part of this evolution at Omega One.”

Bart Chilton added, “Omega One, while embracing transparency and right-sized regulation, is poised to be a long-awaited leader and definitive disruptor in digital trading.”

These additions augment existing industry leaders including Omega One CEO Alex Gordon-Brander, who has designed two trading platforms with over $1 trillion dollars traded (at Bridgewater and MarketAxess) and advisors such as Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and Founder of ConsenSys, the primary backer of Omega One.

Omega One is in Davos for the World Economic Forum and will be hosting a panel, Building Financial Markets for the Future, at ConsenSys’ Ethereal Lounge (Promenade 69 Davos Platz) on Wednesday, January 24 at 7:00am.

CEO Alex Gordon-Brander will speak alongside panelists including Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and Founder of ConsenSys; Sandra Ro, Managing Partner & COO at UWINCorp and former head of digitization at CME; and Michael Casey, former Wall Street Journal columnist, author, and currently Senior Advisor for the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT’s Media Lab.

Omega One is dedicated to building a bridge between traditional markets and digital assets. Despite massive growth in crypto markets, exchanges and other market intermediaries remain illiquid, fragmented, costly to trade on, and open to theft by hacking. Omega One solves these problems by providing traders, investors, and institutions with a decentralized automated trade execution system that intelligently implements their trades across the world’s crypto exchanges, shielding them from counterparty risk and reducing their costs of trading. All new hires will play an integral role in building the next generation of global finance infrastructure at Omega One.

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