Exclusive: Tezos Foundation-backed Trilitech hires former Bank of America trader as DeFi chief

TriliTech, a firm backed by the Tezos Foundation to grow adoption of the blockchain, has hired a former Bank of America trader to lead its DeFi initiatives.

The Tezos Foundation aims to promote and develop the Tezos blockchain, which has a $640 million market capitalisation and trades at $0.68 per XTZ, its coin.

Tezos ranks 29th by total value locked, a metric that tracks how much crypto is locked up in a DeFi protocol’s smart contracts, according to DeFiLlama data.

Nicolas Streschinsky joined TriliTech as head of DeFi in September. Streschinsky most recently served in the same role at Maven Securities, the proprietary trading firm.

Streschinsky previously worked as a trader at various Wall Street firms including Bank of America, UBS, and Credit Suisse.

The new hire is part of TriliTech’s broader effort to attract DeFi applications to Tezos, the firm told DL News.

TriliTech’s objective is to support outside projects on the chain through grants and investments, with funding from the Tezos Foundation Mike Mendes, another recent hire who joined in January to lead the Defi partnership team, told DL News.

Just over $18 million in grants were issued in the first half of 2023 and the Tezos Foundation has a treasury worth $520 million, which includes a mix of cash, Bitcoin, XTZ and other assets.

The firm’s new hire bucks the trend in crypto markets, where layoffs have become the norm. An estimated 30,000 crypto workers have been laid off since April 2022, including at pacesetters such as Coinbase, Crypto.com and Kraken.

During this time, some traditional finance alumni have opted to leave crypto, such as Galaxy Digital’s Goldman Sachs alum Danielle Johnson who left her role in May, after just a year in crypto.

Streschinsky is undeterred by the crypto exodus.

He first traded crypto during his time at Alan Howard’s hedge fund, Brevan Howard, where he became interested in Ethereum and was attracted to how blockchain applications could reinvent finance.

“Wealth management helps high-net-worth individuals leverage their assets across markets,” he told DL News, adding that this “isn’t available to regular folks.”

Decentralised finance can change this, and it’s not just for the regular investor — high-net-worth investors are also interested in it, Streschinsky said.

Leveraging users’ needs

The desire to attract more decentralised exchanges (DEX) to Tezos blockchain is something Streschinsky and Mendes share.

“A very strong spot DEX with a good user experience is crucial,” Streschinsky said, as well as a derivatives exchange.

“Leverage is everything,” Streschinsky told DL News. More speculative ways to play the market attract more users, he added, saying that Coinbase offering users less speculative plays may explain Binance’s larger market share.

With that in mind, giving users the option to trade derivatives is also important, in particular offering things such as perpetual futures, or perps, as they are more commonly known.

Perps are a type of futures contract that trade in perpetuity with no expiration date —they allow traders to continuously place leveraged bets on price movements.

While perps pre-date crypto, they have come to notoriety in the past decade due to crypto trader’s affinity with them — especially due to the leverage opportunities available through perps.

Arthurs Hayes’s BitMex was the pioneer, it launched the XBTUSD perpetual swap in 2016. By May 2021, the XBTUSD perpetual swap was the most traded crypto derivatives product of all time, with over $3 trillion in total volume on BitMex alone, according to the exchange.

The top line is that incentivising people to put leverage trades increases trading and volatility, and is better for everyone, Streschinsky said.

Adam Morgan McCarthy is DL News’ London-based Markets Correspondent. Got a tip? Reach out at adam@dlnews.com.