Robinhood Crypto Appoints New CTO, Hires Chief Compliance Officer From Grayscale

The platform has quadrupled its crypto engineering team’s headcount this year and wants to double the size of the group in the next 12 months.

AccessTimeIconSep 24, 2021 at 4:48 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 5:50 p.m. UTC
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Brokerage platform Robinhood has appointed Johann Kerbrat, who joined the company as head of crypto engineering earlier this year, as its new chief technology officer (CTO) to oversee its growing engineering team.

The announcement coincides with Robinhood Crypto also hiring Benjamin Melnicki as its new chief compliance officer. Melnicki, who was most recently chief compliance officer at digital asset manager Grayscale Investments, joins Robinhood at a time when its crypto arm is dealing with a degree of regulatory scrutiny. (Grayscale and CoinDesk share a parent company, Digital Currency Group.)

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    Crypto CTO

    Robinhood’s crypto engineering team has quadrupled in headcount this year, Kerbrat told CoinDesk. The aim is to double its present size in the next 12 months.

    Kerbrat has been involved in crypto for more than a decade having mined his first bitcoin in 2010.

    His one cause for regret from his early forays into crypto may be that he bought a domain name for 47 BTC when bitcoin was priced at just a few dollars. At the time of writing, 47 BTC are worth just under $2 million.

    Kerbrat previously spent nearly four years across engineering roles at Airbnb and Uber before joining privacy-focused crypto startup Iron Fish in August 2020.

    Robinhood aims to improve its trade flow systems and grow its engineering team under Kerbrat’s stewardship.

    “We want to really work on the structure to make sure we are efficient and have good velocity,” Kerbrat told CoinDesk. “You may remember last year we had a lot of outages and stability issues, and so a lot of time has been spent on making sure we can remain stable.”

    The move comes on the heels of Robinhood announcing that its standalone crypto wallet will be available to all customers by early 2022.

    “If you go to any of our Twitter posts, you can see users saying, ‘I want to withdraw my crypto – when are you releasing wallets?’” Robinhood Crypto Chief Operating Officer Christine Brown told CoinDesk earlier this week.

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    CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. In November 2023, CoinDesk was acquired by the Bullish group, owner of Bullish, a regulated, digital assets exchange. The Bullish group is majority-owned by Block.one; both companies have interests in a variety of blockchain and digital asset businesses and significant holdings of digital assets, including bitcoin. CoinDesk operates as an independent subsidiary with an editorial committee to protect journalistic independence. CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive options in the Bullish group as part of their compensation.

    Jamie Crawley

    Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.


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