A veteran executive at Citadel Securities is departing the trading behemoth to lead Wall Street’s newest cryptocurrency venture.
In an internal memo seen by Fortune, Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao wrote that Jamil Nazarali, global head of business development, is leaving to head up a recently unveiled crypto marketplace backed by some of the biggest names in finance and venture capital, including Virtu Financial, Charles Schwab, Sequoia, and Citadel Securities itself.
Originally described as a “cryptocurrency trading ecosystem,” the venture plans to build a marketplace where retail brokerages can have their clients’ orders to buy and sell crypto executed by any one of the market makers expected to be active on the platform, a person familiar with the effort told Fortune. The idea is to centralize more liquidity within the crypto markets so that investors’ orders can be executed at tighter spreads than what is currently available on more traditional crypto exchanges, the person said.
