Morgan Stanley's Caitlin Long is the latest high-flying Wall Street executive to trade places for a position at a blockchain startup, joining Symbiont as president and chairman.
Long brings 22 years of experience on Wall Street to Symbiont, including her most recent post as managing director in global capital markets at Morgan Stanley. A long-time advocate for bitcoin and its underlying technology, Long was one of five members of Morgan Stanley's distributed ledger technology working group.
"Blockchain technology will make capital markets safer, fairer and more efficient," says Long. "Symbiont offers the only smart contracts platform purpose-built for financial services. Investors will actually own the assets issued on Symbiont's blockchain, which is a huge improvement relative to how securities are owned today."
Long quit Morgan Stanley in April, and has since been consulting on multiple blockchain-inspired projects. In a blog posting explaining her decision to join Symbiont, Long reveals that she has also made a "substantial investment" in Symbiont’s Series A round
Symbiont, which has so far raised $1.25 million in funding, is the technology partner for the State of Delaware's Blockchain Initiative (DBI), is partnering with Ipreo to revamp the $4.7 trillion syndicated loan market, and provided blockchain technology for a large European insurer's catastrophe swap pilot project in June 2016.