Nadine Jumps to a Startup

State Street’s head of digital assets has a new gig.

Editor’s note: This week SSgA’s ETF executive team threw a thirtieth birthday bash for SPY. While the $350 billion ETF is on top of the world there are others seeking to do to ETFs what ETFs did to mutual funds over the past two decades. Securrency is one of the arms dealers to those fund firms. We take note that the startup recently landed one of the stars leading custodians into tokenized funds. That market will reach $16 trillion by 2030 predicts Securrency and Nadine will help blaze that path.  

Securrency, one of the Web3 tech firms behind WisdomTree’s tokenized mutual fund, has tapped State Street’s former head of digital assets as its new CEO. Dan Doney, Securrency’s co-founder has taken the role of chief technology officer and handed the CEO reins to Nadine Chakar.  Chakar stepped down at State Street in October.

State Street spokesperson Brendan Paul told CeFiWire that Martine Bond, head of global markets EMEA and head of GlobalLink, will assume leadership of State Street Digital on an interim basis. Bond reports to Donna Milrod, State Street’s chief product officer. Milrod will be responsible for leading the strategy, value propositions and growth of State Street’s Asset Servicing businesses and State Street Digital.

“Nadine was a great champion of our Digital strategy, which we see as an integral component of our overall strategy landscape, and we wish her well in her next endeavor,” stated Paul.

Chakar is seen as a greatly talented innovator in the industry, executive recruiter George Wilbanks told CeFiWire. She was a key player in influencing European regulators to ease capital requirements for custodians of digital assets under Basel III. She has also opposed SEC rules that would require custodians to carry digital assets held for clients on their balance sheet. Speaking at the SIBOS conference last fall Chakar expressed frustration at the regulatory hurdles faced by firms in the United States.

“If I’m frustrated with one thing, it is the slow pace. Because it’s fun to do proof of concepts, but at some point, it would be nice to start to deploy at scale and really transform the industry,” said Chakar.

At Securrency she will get a chance to start those transformations. Securrency develops blockchain-based financial and regulatory technology. Dan Doney, John Hensel, and Ron Poe founded the Alexandria, Virginia-based fintech in 2015 and raised seed capital in 2017, according to Crunchbase.

WisdomTree led Securrency’s $17.6 million Series A round in January 2020 and took a second bite in the startup’s Series B round.

All counted, Crunchbase reports that Securrency has raised a total of $64.5 million in funding over 9 rounds with the latest $30 million Series B round coming on May 1, 2021. State Street was one of the investors in that round along with US Bank, Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners, and DisruptAD (ADQ's venture platform) and WisdomTree. Chakar joined the Securrency board as part of the Series B round.

Securrency’s blockchain-based, compliance aware tokenization technology underpins WisdomTree’s new Short-Term Treasury Digital Fund (WTSYX) that is expected to go live later this quarter. Securrency keeps the primary share ownership for the fund using a traditional platform, but it also keeps a secondary record of shares on either the Stellar or Ethereum blockchain. Securrency officials claim that the multi-chain approach is unique. Franklin Templeton offers a money market mutual fund that is recordkept on Stellar and offered exclusively through its Benjamin app (see “Jenny Has a Vision”).

The startup says that it uses a fully interoperable and patented “compliance aware token” framework to interconnect traditional financial platforms and blockchain networks.

Nadine Chakar
CEO, Securrency