Crypto Hiring: Summer leader additions continue

Not all crypto companies are expanding their leadership teams, but many are — even during the so-called summer doldrums. 

Crypto exchange Coinbase named Chris Lehane, Paul Clement and Christa Davies to its board of directors, the company revealed Thursday.

Lehane is a member of the executive team at OpenAI and a former Democratic strategist to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. He is set to “provide strategic counsel to Coinbase’s leadership as the company works to make onchain the new online.”

Read more: Empire Newsletter: Is Coinbase stock a proxy bet on crypto’s success?

Clement, a partner at law firm Clement & Murphy PLLC, was the US solicitor general under President George W. Bush. Davies has been the chief financial officer at Aon since 2008, and has board of directors experience at Stripe and Workday. Both of them are set to join Coinbase’s audit and compliance committee.

In other hiring news, the dYdX Foundation tapped Chris Grundy to lead its marketing strategy. 

The executive previously served as a former vice president of marketing at Glassnode. Grundy also held a senior marketing role at Coinbase, where he helped spur international growth and high-profile brand activations, the company said. 

Meanwhile, Bitcoin-focused venture studio Thesis added Kathy Zhu to lead the company’s efforts in the Asia Pacific region. 

Read more: Venture studio Thesis* debuts Bitcoin utility product Mezo with $21M raise

Zhu previously worked at crypto exchange giant Binance as a growth and operations lead. She more recently was a principal at Old Fashion Research, a multi-strategy blockchain investment fund focused on Web3.

In case you missed it last week: Tether appointed Philip Gradwell, ex-chief economist at Chainalysis, as its new head of economics.

The company said in a statement that it intends to task Gradwell with “quantifying the Tether economy and communicating the ways Tether is used to regulators and stakeholders.”

Also last week, statistician and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver joined the advisory board of Polymarket. He will be working alongside former CFTC Chair J. Christopher Giancarlo.

Also notable…

• Swan Bitcoin made staff cuts “across many functions” earlier this week, CEO Cory Klippsten said in an X post. The company is unlikely to continue with its managed mining business, as well as its plans to go public, in the near term, he added. 
• Earlier this month, Pierre Samaties joined The DFINITY Foundation, a contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain, as its chief business officer. Samaties formerly founded and led the global digital assets, Web3 and metaverse practice at consulting firm Roland Berger.

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