Another Wall Street executive is defecting to the crypto industry. Mustafa Al Niama, former head of the Americas digital assets desk for investment bank Goldman Sachs, is joining blockchain developer Mysten Labs as head of capital markets, he told Fortune. He’ll help lead the crypto company’s outreach to large financial institutions, he said.
“The objective is to expand that sphere materially more than what we have today,” Al Niama added.
He’s the latest from the world of Wall Street to join an industry populated not so long ago by teens and twentysomethings in hoodies. Others include Mary-Catherine Lader, a former rising star at asset manager BlackRock who jumped ship in 2021 to join Uniswap Labs. There’s also Tom Farley, former president of the New York Stock Exchange, who joined crypto exchange Bullish as CEO in 2023.
The flow of Wall Street executives into crypto mirrors the increasing integration of two sectors that were once thought to be opposites. Large banks like JPMorgan Chase are experimenting with issuing digital tokens meant to represent one dollar of deposits. And other institutions are exploring how to tokenize money-market funds, or put financial assets into blockchain wrappers.
Al Niama already has experience sitting between Wall Street and crypto. He spent four years at American Express before he switched over to Goldman Sachs in 2015, where he eventually worked his way up to becoming a regional head on the firm’s digital assets desk. One of the initiatives he led was a collaboration announced in July between Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York, or BNY, to launch tokenized money-market funds.
Now, he’s joining one of the most deep-pocketed firms in crypto. Founded by former engineers from Meta’s scuttled stablecoin project, Libra, Mysten Labs has raised about $336 million from prominent firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Franklin Templeton, according to PitchBook. (The company also raised significant sums from the venture arm of the failed crypto exchange FTX but bought back the stake after FTX declared bankruptcy.)
Mysten Labs is the main developer behind the Sui blockchain, which uses some of the tech that engineers at Meta had once developed for the social media giant’s crypto moonshot.
“Hiring Mustafa as head of capital markets is the next step towards helping the ecosystem bring Sui’s mainstream public blockchain to institutional finance,” Ryan Servatius, global head of partnerships at Mysten Labs, said in a statement to Fortune.
