[AGM Podcast] Fidelity Digital Assets President Tom Jessop on the power and promise of Web3 and building a crypto business within an $11 trillion AUM financial institution

Today we have a guest who is an expert from both the traditional financial services world and the crypto world, which has equipped him with the ability to bridge the two worlds and build onramps into the crypteconomy.

Tom Jessop, who heads Fidelity Digital Assets, is an expert in market structure, capital markets, and crypto.

There are few who have seen as much as him when it comes to the evolution of market structure.

He’s an OG FinTech investor, investing into FinTech before it even had that moniker.

He has a knack for finding trends before they are big. He did it with FinTech – and more recently he’s been on the forefront of another major trend: crypto.

He’s the President of Fidelity Digital Assets, where he’s responsible for helping one of the world’s largest asset managers build out a full-service enterprise-grade platform for digital assets.

Fidelity has long been a pioneer amongst financial institutions in crypto. They started R&D efforts on crypto in 2014, started mining bitcoin in 2015, and tested their first wallet and storage solution with employees in 2016.

With over $11 trillion in client assets under administration and over 2.4 million trades processed per day, Fidelity’s participation in the cryptoeconomy is critical to onramp large financial institutions and wealth managers into the space. Tom leads a team that is in large part responsible for making this happen.

He was previously the Head of Corporate Business Development at Fidelity, where he was responsible for identifying and executing strategic opportunities.

Tom joined Fidelity from Chain, a leading provider of enterprise blockchain solutions to global financial institutions.

Tom previously had an illustrious career at Goldman Sachs, which culminated with a role as Global Head of Technology Business Development, where he was responsible for investing in and partnering with early-stage tech companies across blockchain, AI, and cybersecurity. Tom was also a founding member and senior leader at Goldman’s Principal Strategic Investments team, investing in the likes of Circle Financial, Kensho, Digital Reasoning, and DataFox.

Tom and I had a fascinating conversation about how we can take experiences from the evolution in traditional market structure and apply those learnings to crypto market structure and DeFi.

Tom is such a smart, thoughtful, savvy investor and company builder. And he’s an even better person who treats everyone incredibly well.

Thanks Tom for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify here, on Apple Podcasts here, and on Transistor here.

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