By Surojit Chatterjee, Chief Product Officer
Today we are announcing that Greg Tusar is joining Coinbase as VP of Institutional Products. Greg joins us as part of our recently announced acquisition of Tagomi, a company he co-founded and where he went on to serve as chief technology officer. Greg brings more than three decades of experience to his role as Vice President of Institutional Products. Most recently he founded Tagomi, a world-class trading platform that is in the process of being integrated into Coinbase’s industry-leading institutional suite of products.
A builder at heart, prior to founding Tagomi with partners Jennifer Campbell and Marc Bhargava, Greg spent over 30 years in a range of electronic trading, technical infrastructure and market structure roles. These included serving as a partner and Global Head of Electronic Trading at Goldman Sachs, and Head of Client Market Making and Execution Services at KCG Holdings (now part of Virtu Inc.).
As Coinbase continues to build the platforms and services that professional and institutional investors expect, we’re committed to bringing in the best leadership possible to guide our product vision. We strongly believe that it’s only with the right combination of technology and people that we will usher in the next phase of crypto’s institutional adoption.
Greg joins Coinbase at a time when many of the world’s top hedge funds and macro investors are entering the space and searching for the right infrastructure through which to engage with crypto. Much like traditional finance, institutional investors play a critical role in the crypto markets. First and foremost, institutions stand to bring more individuals into the ecosystem through vehicles like mutual or index funds, and through indirect exposure such as pension fund allocations. Institutional investors also drive innovation in financial markets. This takes the form of both technology and investment instruments, which over time, become available to non-professional traders. Finally, institutions have extremely high compliance, security and auditing standards. In fact, many funds will not be able to invest in certain asset classes unless there’s an institutional-grade infrastructure in place to support them. And just as technology and instruments make their way into the hands of retail investors over time, the compliance, auditing and security standards that institutional investors require will only stand to benefit those downstream.
Greg’s role will build on a period of significant progress for Coinbase’s institutional offerings, including our recent acquisition of Tagomi, the leading crypto prime brokerage platform, as well as the recent announcement of Brett Tejpaul as our head of institutional coverage, and the rollout of margin trading to institutional investors in 45 states across the US. In partnership with Brett and our Institutional Coverage team, Greg will focus on building out our institutional trading infrastructure and integrating Tagomi’s industry-leading prime brokerage platform into Coinbase’s institutional product suite, which includes Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Custody.
Greg’s experience in both electronic trading and execution as well as trading infrastructure make him uniquely qualified to guide Coinbase’s institutional products as more professional traders and funds seek to allocate portions of their portfolios to crypto assets.