Karen Chen, the former president of , is now the chief executive officer of financial technology group Higgs Block Technology Pte. Ltd. Chen is another example of a financial veteran that decided to jump from the financial industry to the blockchain sector.
Making the Crypto Leap
However, according to a phone with Bloomberg, Chen mentioned that she left UBS in October for personal family reasons. Chen initially started working with the Singapore-based blockchain company in December. Higgs Block Technology is however quite a young company. They were founded in August 2017 but have expanded relatively quickly.
Higgs Block Technology currently has five subsidiaries including Higgs Chain, BitUN Fintech, Higgs Consulting, Higgs Exchange Group, and Exchange Technology. The group also includes , a token exchange. These businesses overlap between , financial management consulting, and one-stop exchange solutions.
Bloomberg also pointed out that there has been an increasingly growing number of financial professionals that have joined the cryptocurrency industry. The trend is however significantly less for Chinese executives due to the regulatory crackdowns. However, while the government is strict on cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology remains highly relevant for Chinese clients.
“There are many challenges, including security, risk management, custodian and settlement issues,” said Chen. “Those important controls and risk management rules haven’t all been adopted in the crypto world. That offers the business good opportunities.”
Higgs Block Technology
According to Higgs block technology’s , their vision is “to improve the connect of two-dimensional virtual work to every aspect of the three-dimensional real world via blockchain.”
Higgs block technology’s goal is to, therefore, create a heterogeneous blockchain technology platform. The Higgs Chain was built and developed from the Higgs Block, a blockchain-based open source technical platform. The platform has two hierarchical systems, Higgs Trust and Higgs Global. These structures help handle the low performance seen in public blockchains and its partial consensus problems.
Females in the Male-Dominated World of Blockchain
Chen has become not only a Chinese executive jumping ship from fintech to blockchain but is also one of the female executives in a male-dominated blockchain sector.
According to Yahoo Finance, she that “there is a market need to disrupt the industry by integrating the cutting-edge technology with traditional financial assets and services to help sophisticated investors to bridge this gap.”
With blockchain and cryptocurrencies becoming a sizeable disruptive force in society, unfortunately, there’s exceptionally high gender inequality in the industry. While the lack of diversity has plagued both the finance and technology sectors, the number of women in the cryptocurrency industry is significantly lower.
As by Forbes in December 2017, only five to seven percent of cryptocurrency users are female. Further to that, although created approximately 85 billion in wealth in 2017, only 5.88 percent of that was obtained by women.
Masha Drokova, the founder of Day One Ventures, did, however, to Forbes that “no one really cares about your gender. They only care if you are able to deliver or not. The crypto space is not about gender, but more about your energy, professionalism, and speed. As a female investor and professional, I never felt more appreciated and supported in any industry than in blockchain.”
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The allure of cryptocurrencies is hugely lucrative to , especially for those have primarily been holding back from making large-scale investments in digital assets due to the definite lack of security and solutions. However, several firms are sensing both demand and business opportunities, and in turn, launching their own “Custody” services for institutional investors.
“Komainu”
On May 15, 2018, Japanese merchant bank Nomura released a revealing its plans to launch a security and custody venture for digital assets owned by institutional investors. Dubbed “Komainu,” the business venture fuses Nomura’s expertise in asset management, banking, trading, and security, to provide a robust infrastructure for building a credible digital safekeeping service.
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Bringing the Best of Three Worlds
The venture brings together Nomura, cryptocurrency wallet and security service provider , and the parent company of , Global Advisors.
The demand for Custody services is primed to explode, as evidenced by a Thomas Reuters survey, which approximated one out of five financial institutions strongly considering the launch of crypto trading desks in 2018.
Undeniably, one can’t ignore the impressive rise of cryptocurrencies, with the ten largest digital assets commanding a total market valuation of more than .
Speaking on the topic is Nomura’s global digital officer, Jez Mohideen, stated:
“Global investment managers have long been held back from full participation in digital asset markets, limited by operational and regulatory risk. Our new partnership will set the required standards that will bring peace of mind to digital asset investors, and provide tools and products to enable better integration with more traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds.”
As per Mohideen, the venture provides a robust and operational infrastructure to the broader realms of the traditional asset management industry, in addition to enabling investors to “embed or implement a consistent set of best practice standards within their businesses.”
Co-principal of Global Advisors, Jean-Marie Mognetti, shares the sentiment, noting that his company has been searching for a reliable custody solution, since its inception in 2012. Mognetti adds:
“After six years of research – and collaboration with our administration partner and its regulator – we now have demonstrable progress.”
In conclusion, Mohideen states that operational and regulatory risks have long engulfed the crypto-market, but with upcoming favorable legislation and a generally positive outlook of digital assets, the market would seek a reputed asset-security “brand.” This partnership, as Mohideen believes, brings “peace of mind” to investors in addition to providing a unified platform that integrates the digital asset market with the traditional finance market.
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