At the end of September, the New York Department of Financial Services, one of the premier crypto regulatory bodies in the nation, announced that Peter Marton, head of its virtual currency regulatory unit, was stepping down to move to the private sector.
On Tuesday, crypto heavyweight Fireblocks, valued at $8 billion as of its last fundraising round, announced that Marton had started as its director of digital identity. “Peter’s exceptional experience developing regulatory frameworks at one of the world’s preeminent virtual currency units should prove invaluable,” Jason Allegrante, chief legal and compliance officer at the company, said in a statement.
Along with recently hired cryptographer Chaitanya Reddy Konda, Marton will lend his regulatory expertise to help build out automated financial compliance checks for the exchange of assets, like cryptocurrencies or other tokens, across blockchains.
“If you think about some of the challenges around digital assets, a lot of them revolve around anti–money laundering, compliance, and consumer protection,” Marton told Fortune. But if we can create automated checks that occur as assets travel the blockchain, “then it makes for a much better user experience,” he added.
Akin to the Automated Clearing House, or ACH, the system that lets banks electronically wire funds between each other, Fireblocks’ tech lets institutions transfer crypto between each other. Marton’s arrival at one of largest crypto infrastructure companies is further evidence of NYDFS’s growing influence in the industry as other regulatory bodies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the House of Representatives, remain stymied on comprehensive crypto regulation.
Marton started his career in digital assets as a consultant at Promontory Financial Group, which IBM acquired in 2016. At Promontory, digital assets were not part of his initial mandate, but, beginning in 2020, he was enlisted to help Wyoming develop a regulatory framework for crypto.
In 2021, Marton capitalized on his knowledge of crypto regulation to land a job as deputy superintendent of virtual currency at NYDFS, where he oversaw and reviewed applications for BitLicenses, one of the few state-sanctioned licenses available in the U.S. for crypto companies. Under his watch, in addition to building out NYDFS’s crypto team and hashing out guidance on stablecoins, he oversaw the approval of BitLicenses for some big names, including PayPal and stock-trading app eToro.
In 2023, as Fireblocks was planning its new digital identity division, Allegrante, the chief legal and compliance officer, reached out to Marton to gauge his interest in hopping from the public sector to the private. He was intrigued, and officially began his new role last week.
“I mean, at the end of the day,” Marton said, “there are very few Fireblocks in the world.”
(This story has been updated with Fireblocks’ most recent valuation.)
