Digital Currency Group taps Goldman, Green Dot alum for CFO

Dive Brief:

• Goldman Sachs and Green Dot alum Mark Shifke has been appointed CFO of Digital Currency Group effective immediately, the cryptocurrency venture capital conglomerate said in a Monday press release shared on Twitter, now X.
• Shifke will fill a financial seat that has been vacant since April with the departure of DCG’s first-ever CFO, Michael Kraines, according to a May report by the DCG-owned publication CoinDesk.
• “DCG has long stood out to me as the leading and most well-respected operator, investor and backer of the brightest minds in the digital asset space,” Shifke said in a statement included in the release. “As the industry matures and digital assets continue to gain momentum from institutional stalwarts, I can’t think of a more exciting opportunity.”

Dive Insight:

Shifke most recently served as CFO for B2B payments and accounts-receivable automation provider Billtrust, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Prior to Billtrust, Shifke was at Green Dot from 2011 to 2019, serving as the company’s finance chief for four of those years. He also worked as a managing director at JPMorgan Chase fo four years, and as a Goldman Sachs vice president for five.

Shifke is taking on DCG’s financial seat at a time when when the cryptocurrency industry is in flux, with regulatory attention on the space sharpening following calamitous events like the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

Regulators have tussled in recent months over the question of which digital assets can be considered securities, with a federal judge giving the Securities and Exchange Commission the green light to pursue securities charges against Terraform Labs on Monday — a decision that contradicts previous rulings on the agency’s dealings with exchanges Ripple and Coinbase, according to CNBC.

DCG itself has not scraped by unscathed. Shifke is joining the firm as it moves to wrap up bankruptcy proceedings for its subsidiary Genesis Global Holdco. The company is close to a settlement with the subsidiary’s creditors, according to a shareholder letter cited by Bloomberg on Monday. The company “expects to bring these cases to a close soon and will provide material updates” as the process continues, it said, according to the wire service.

Genesis filed for bankruptcy in January following a series of setbacks, as well as challenges in the broader cryptocurrency sector. Impacted by the collapse of the Terra crypto ecosystem, Three Arrows Capital defaulted on a $2.4 billion loan to the firm in late July 2022, exacerbating a crisis of liquidity Genesis was already facing.

Genesis had paused withdrawals for users of its Gemini Earn product in November after FTX collapsed. Shortly afterward, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged both Genesis and Gemini — one of the latter’s largest creditors — with selling unregistered securities.

Genesis filed an amended Chapter 11 plan and disclosure statement on June 14, with a hearing to be held Aug. 11, according to court filings. The SEC objected to the disclosure statement, stating that it “lacks adequate information about various material matters including the potential buyer of the Debtors’ assets and the nature of the Debtors’ post-effective date business, to the extent they remain in business.”

DCG and Gemini did not respond to requests for comment by CFO Dive.