As major financial institutions shake up their employee base, more veterans are trickling out of Wall Street and into cryptofunds.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain hedge fund Pantera Capital said Tuesday it is hiring former Deutsche Bank managing director William Healy. He joins the fund's West Coast headquarters as president, effective March 1.
The Wall Street veteran co-founded Deutsche Bank's Hedge Fund Priority Client group and was a key player in establishing the German bank's U.S. hedge fund strategy, according to Pantera's investor letter published Tuesday.
"This is a transformative time," Healy said in a statement. "The blockchain and digital currency environment today remind me of the inflection points in emerging markets and the alternative asset management industry to a more institutional management approach."
Deutsche Bank will cut 250 to 500 investment bank jobs, Reuters reported Monday, citing a person close to the situation. Key traders are also leaving Goldman Sachs as the firm looks to overhaul a struggling commodities unit, Reuters reported last month.
The investment banking industry is getting smaller. In an interview with CNBC, Healey pointed to banks' decreasing role in initial public offerings.
"The underlying trends in the financial services industry is I think going in one direction," Healy said, noting music sharing service Spotify's decision not to follow the traditional IPO route. "I think five years from now, they'll be smaller than they are today."
Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead said his firm got 95 new limited partners in February alone, compared with 10 years to get the first 95 investors. The number of hedge funds focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain now totals 226, and has more than doubled in the past four months, according to the latest estimates from research firm Autonomous NEXT.
Pantera, which has roughly $724 million assets under management, also announced the launch of its third blockchain-focused venture fund Tuesday. The fund will focus on peer-to-peer transactions, fintech, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Pantera's first fund was up 758.6 percent since its inception in 2013 through the end of last year. That portfolio includes companies that help buy and store bitcoin including Ripple, Circle, Xapo and Bitstamp.
Healy is not the only new recruit in crypto announced Tuesday. Bitwise Asset Management, manager of the first cryptocurrency index fund, announced it will hire industry veteran Matt Hougan as vice president of research and development. Hougan was CEO of Inside ETFs and before that CEO of ETF.com.
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said he's seeing more of an appetite for folks like Hougan to jump into a new asset class.
"We're seeing more top-tier people come into the space," he said. "Cryptocurrency's bringing together software people, who tend to be those younger stereotypes, but also pulling in financial community who are really excited about the birth of a new asset class or have been bored with low volatility or fee compression."
Bitwise is still hiring, and Horsley said applicants are not the stereotypical Silicon Valley tech junkies. The company is getting applications from people on "both sides of the spectrum," including Google and BlackRock.
"There are definitely industry veterans who are poking around," Horsley said. "I don't know how many will end up deciding to make the plunge but we definitely see a lot of senior people deciding to put out feelers."
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Correction: An earlier version misstated Deutsche Bank's home country. It is Germany.