Coinsetter recruits new CBO; an interview with CEO Jaron Lukasiewicz

Coinsetter CBO Jay Biancamano

Earlier this month, Coinsetter, a Wall Street Bitcoin exchange, announced it had hired Jay Biancamano as its new Chief Business Officer (CBO).

Biancamano’s Wall Street experience includes serving as a premier senior executive at institutional financial technology firms, including Aritas, ITG, and J.P. Morgan. Prior to joining Coinsetter, Biancamano was CEO of Hoyvin, a financial technology firm providing scalable intelligent data analysis and natural language processing for financial markets. Before that, he was a Global Head at Liquidnet.

In a Coinsetter blog post about his hiring, Biancamano said:

“Bitcoin represents the most exciting area of financial technology – we are seeing a new asset class and trading infrastructure rapidly develop before our eyes. In the span of just months, the Bitcoin market will become sophisticated in much the same way as the equities space did over the past 15 years. I am excited to join Coinsetter in developing a robust exchange model for both new and traditional institutional investors that offers a safe, efficient way to trade bitcoin.”

Coinsetter CEO Jaron Lukasiewicz

CoinReport spoke to Coinsetter CEO Jaron Lukasiewicz about the process that led to Biancamano’s hiring as CBO.

Lukasiewicz said:

“First of all, we spent months looking for the right person to fill this position. It was really difficult to find someone who we thought A, was credible, and B, was a good fit for our company, had relevant experience to execute the job quickly and well.

When we met Jay originally, we knew immediately that we wanted him to come on board. It was really an exciting hire for us, because we started FIX API just over a month ago and that FIX API is such a big part of our business strategy going forward.”

Lukasiewicz elaborated on the value that Biancamano adds to the company:

“From a strategic standpoint, he’s going to be playing a big role so we are getting started, having a lot of strategy meetings and determining what specifically we want to offer to certain customers to make trading bitcoin extra worthwhile for them.

Ultimately, one of the strongest value‑adds he brings is not only his Rolodex, but his understanding of the market. When we look at a lot of companies in this space, they don’t really understand what a professional trader even wants, why they’re not actively participating in bitcoin.

We made one step to show that we do understand that market by the FIX API…But it’s about having someone who understands why someone would even want to trade bitcoin in the first place. You can have the technology, and that’s great, but in the end, there has to be a benefit in it for them. That knowledge is something that he brings.”

Touted as the Bitcoin industry’s first institutional FIX API, Coinsetter’s product “allows customers to connect their existing trading systems to a consolidated source of bitcoin liquidity,” states a company blog post. “Traders utilizing Coinsetter’s FIX API are able to place and manage orders, as well as receive status notifications on these orders in milliseconds. The API also offers real-time, incremental market data updates (tick data) for Coinsetter’s full order book, an important tracking feature that is not available on any other bitcoin exchange. Subscribers receive notifications on every change in Coinsetter’s order book for thousands of price levels in real-time.”

Lukasiewicz spoke to CoinReport about the genesis of Coinsetter’s FIX API.

“Another way we’re differentiated from a lot of the exchanges out there is we have a team that consists of Wall Street professionals and Wall Street developers. We went into this knowing that people would want a FIX API. To us, it was an important part of what we wanted to offer to begin with. Earlier this year, we’ve had numerous requests to build a FIX API, and eventually it become a core part of what we offered.”

He added:

“Anyone who hasn’t built their exchange with proper messaging, set it up in a way that if we do it, it would be done on a more institutional‑class technology platform, it’s going to be very difficult them for to actually port that FIX API into what they’ve built. That’s one of our advantages right now. You’re trading on a system that is built properly. When you pull your own systems in, they also communicate, so that your systems can trade properly on our website.”

Lukasiewicz said he sees Coinsetter having continuous growth.

“People come and use our platform. They stay on it, and keep using it and keep making deposits. I think we’re going to keep growing the business, providing free customer support, work on US licensing of course. There are a number of things happening behind the scenes that add to that value proposition,” he said.

Asked what he sees as being on the horizon for Bitcoin, Lukwasiewicz told CoinReport:

“Regulation is going to unfold over the next 12 months, and when that happens people will be able to create bitcoin companies around the protocol and feel much safer about it. Like today, placing a bitcoin app in New York State is actually a pretty scary proposition. If that’s still the case, then creating a company that can displace Western Union in percentages is almost impossible.”

He added:

“Companies want to have a clear regulatory framework that they can abide by and know that they’re not going to be thrown in jail and that they are doing things the right way according to law. Once that happens, in 2015, you’ll start to see a lot of growth in the industry.”

Images courtesy of Coinsetter