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David Raper and Garry Duursma joined Australian crypto exchange behemoth BTC Markets.
BTC Markets adds senior crypto professionals
David Raper and Garry Duursma are the latest additions to Australia’s largest digital assets exchange BTC Markets’ advisory board. The exchange made the announcement last week, with CEO Caroline Bowler seeing Reaper and Duursma as “part of a broader plan for expansion.” BTC markets, which has 325,000 Australian clients and a trading volume of over $17 billion AUD, had been looking for some time for people to join at the senior advisory level.
Raper and Duursma come from a TradFi background. Raper previously held positions at JP Morgan and SFE Corporation before a 15-year stint at ASX, while Duursma has worked at Mastercard and Tyro payments for seven years. CEO Caroline Bowler expects Raper’s experience with institutional clients in the ASX to be particularly valuable since that is the trend BTC is looking to capture in the future. She also added that both executives would be able to help develop upcoming projects that BTC Markets was working on, like “payment channels and moving to a third-party custody solution.”
With BTC Markets looking at an increase in the number of tokens and coins moving into next year and long-term partnership projects on the cards, Duursma and Raper are unlikely to run out of work in the near future.
The bigger regulation picture
BTC Markets is adding fresh blood amid an increase in regulatory pressure in Australia, following the Senate committee report headed by Senator Bragg. Although Bowler recognises the challenges posed by regulation, she officially welcomed more oversight, adding that Raper and Duursma were appointed with that in mind as both have experience “in dealing with the kind of reporting obligations and various different compliance measures that we’re going to need to put in. They’re so used to working within a regulated framework that that’s going to be just essential.”
Undoubtedly, coming from traditional finance, Raper and Duursma will know all about regulation and can advise BTC Markets on how to build products that keep in mind the watchful eye of the government. Even though blockchain proponents would like you to believe otherwise, the technology still is fairly limited concerning its applications in finance and regulation may not be all bad. Especially when it comes to security, blockchain applications are still sorely lacking and can hardly be safely unleashed on a general population that is far from being as tech-savvy as the average cryptocurrency user.
Still, the Australian government is well-advised not to sharpen its regulatory knives too much. Blockchain technology has its fair share of financial use cases and decreasing those in favour of a banking sector that has not faced real competition in a long time will do no one a favour either. It will be interesting to see whether the appointment of senior executives like Raper and Duursma as advisors to a crypto exchange like BTC Markets is the beginning of an eventual merge between traditional finance and cryptocurrencies.