On Tuesday, crypto heavyweight Fireblocks, which valued its last funding round at $7.5 billion, announced that Marton had begun serving as its digital identity director. Jason Allegrante, the company’s chief legal and compliance officer, said in a statement: “Peter’s exceptional experience developing regulatory frameworks for the world’s most preeminent virtual currency units should prove invaluable. .”
Morton will work with recently hired cryptographer Chaitanya Reddy Konda to use his regulatory expertise to help build automated financial compliance checks for exchanges of assets across blockchains, such as cryptocurrencies or other tokens.
“If you think about some of the challenges that digital assets face, many of them revolve around anti-money laundering, compliance and consumer protection,” Marton told us. wealth. But if we can create automatic checks that happen when assets are transferred on the blockchain, “then it will lead to a better user experience,” he added.
Similar to Automated Clearing House (ACH), the system that allows banks to wire funds electronically between each other, Fireblocks’ technology allows institutions to transfer cryptocurrencies between each other. The addition of Marton to one of the largest crypto infrastructure companies is further evidence of DFS’s continued and growing influence in the industry as other regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the House of Representatives, remain stymied on comprehensive crypto regulation.
Marton began his career in digital assets as an advisor at Promontory Financial Group (acquired by IBM in 2016). At Promontory, digital assets were not part of his initial assignment, but starting in 2020, he was recruited to help the state of Wyoming develop a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies.
In 2021, Marton used his knowledge of cryptocurrency regulation to land a job at the DFS as Deputy Director of Virtual Currencies, overseeing and reviewing applications for the BitLicense, one of the few in the United States available to cryptocurrency companies. one of the state-approved licenses. Under his leadership, in addition to building DFS’s cryptocurrency team and developing stablecoin guidelines, he also oversaw the approval of Bitcoin licenses for a number of major companies, including PayPal and stock trading app eToro.
In 2023, when Fireblocks was brewing a new digital identity unit, Chief Legal and Compliance Officer Allegrante contacted Marton about his interest in making the jump from the public sector to the private sector. He was intrigued and officially started his new role last week.
“I mean, at the end of the day,” Marton said, “there are very few Fireblocks in the world.”
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