Bitcoin companies are on a major hiring spree, attracting top talent from Wall Street and some of the biggest fortune 500 companies on the planet. Anthony Watson, a former CIO of Nike, recently joined BitReserve as president and COO. Bitreserve is a San Francisco-based fiat-to-bitcoin exchange, which has experienced a major expansion in the last few months.
Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas-Pliego, recently partnered with Bitreserve and infused an undisclosed amount of capital into the new exchange to further expand its share of the digital currency remittance market. Bitreserve solves bitcoin’s extremely impractical volatility, by allowing consumers to send cash transfers around the world by using the bitcoin network as a transfer mechanism. Clients of Bitreserve have access to several currencies: British Pound; Franc; Euro; Rupee; Peso; and Japanese Yen. The exchange also offers users the ability to hold precious metals if fiat currencies are not suitable, clients can transact in gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
Watson joined Bitreserve because he sees tremendous potential for future growth in blockchain-based commodity marketplaces. Watson envisions every commodity and natural resource currently traded on traditional futures platforms, to one day trade on blockchain-powered marketplaces. Prior to his engagement with Nike, Watson worked as CIO for Barclays in their European and Middle Eastern branches.
Watson’s banking experience showed him how unfair and biased the financial establishment has become over the years. The legacy financial system has always favored the rich over the poor, and Watson wants to see an end to that trend. Banking systems are very opaque, Bitreserve operates a publicly viewable real-time transparency module that displays the financial health of the exchange. The transparency system shows all transactions, current balances and obligations of the company.
Bitreserve was started by Halsey Minor, who founded CNET and also co-founded Salesforce. Minor was impressed with Watson’s prior banking experience and his leadership at GLAAD, a gay and lesbian acceptance advocacy group. While Watson isn’t a hardcore believer in bitcoin per se, he does value the technology underpinning the digital currency. Watson does acknowledge the negative image bitcoin currently has, and does entertain the idea of bitcoin eventually giving way to an entirely new suite of financial instruments. Halsey Minor seems to have found a very qualified president in Anthony Watson, a man with big ideas for the future direction of Bitreserve.
