Sina Nader, the former head of partnerships of FTX US, is joining Web3 startup Mysten Labs as head of strategy.
(Bloomberg) — Sina Nader, the former head of partnerships of FTX US, is joining Web3 startup Mysten Labs as head of strategy.
Nader will be reporting directly to Chief Executive Officer Evan Cheng. Palo Alto, California-based Mysten was founded by Cheng and other former employees of Meta Platforms Inc., the social media company formerly known as Facebook.
Mysten Labs builds infrastructure that seeks to make the increasingly more decentralized web safe and reliable to use. It has backing from a16z crypto, Apollo and Coinbase Ventures, among others. Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX had, prior to its downfall, led one of Mysten’s funding rounds in 2022.
Nader, who joined FTX US in August 2020, had before that served as head of crypto at Robinhood. And prior to joining Robinhood in 2019, he had spent time with Morgan Stanley as well as with Credit Suisse Group AG’s private banking unit.
“They’ve done some amazing work that is ultra scalable and they’re looking at blockchain technology in a different way than most,” Nader said of Mysten. “In terms of my mandate, it’s going to be bringing to the table all the things I’ve learned thus far since I’ve been in crypto in various shapes or forms since 2013 — but really drawing on my experience at Robinhood and to a certain extent at FTX.”
Nader says he was behind many of the biggest branding deals that FTX had clinched, including celebrity and sports partnerships, as well as business deals with social-media companies and others. He will be based in Silicon Valley for his new role.
The downfall of FTX marked one of the most notable events last year that had ripple effects far beyond the cryptocurrencies world. Everyday traders lost billions of dollars on a platform that had once been thought of as one of the strongest brands in the industry. Multiple stinging — and eye-catching — accusations have come out since then against Bankman-Fried.
Other ex-FTX executives have also been landing new roles in recent days. Zhe “Constance” Wang, who had served in several executive-level roles at the exchange, recently joined crypto venture-capital firm Sino Global Capital.
Meanwhile, former FTX US President Brett Harrison started Architect Financial Technologies, which aims to give institutional-grade trading software to sophisticated individual investors. Harrison had previously noted on Twitter — the social-media platform Elon Musk is renaming X — that he had trouble raising funds for the new firm because investors questioned whether they should back a former FTX US executive.
Nader says he’s had a different experience.
“It’s really nice to see that people have recognized very quickly that otherwise decent people can end up in situations where there’s unfortunate things that happen,” he said. “The smarter, the sharper, the more astute of an observer someone is the more they realize that, OK, there may have been some unfortunate things that happened there, but one can still learn a lot and there are many tools and experiences that one can pick up along the way that are directly applicable elsewhere.”
–With assistance from Hannah Miller.
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