A remarkable technological advancement was about to forever change everyday life in the U.S., bringing stunning speed and precision to a system that was often plodding and imperfect. It was 1959, and the U.S. Postal Service had squeezed a pair of blue-and-red containers holding 3,000 letters into a cruise missile and then fired it from a submarine, the USS Barbero. It took 22 minutes for the missile to travel 100 miles to a naval auxiliary air station near Jacksonville, Florida. Afterward, Arthur Summerfield — an entrepreneur turned U.S. postmaster — declared that missiles would soon be used to deliver parcels across the country. “We stand,” he said, “on the threshold of rocket mail.”
Not all promises of paradigm shifts come to fruition. But long-held predictions of a cryptocurrency revolution are aging quite a bit better than, say, launching letters into the sky. While many questions remain, the outlook for the industry has never been more promising: Government officials and investment banks that once wrote off cryptocurrency as too volatile and fraud-prone are now implementing regulations and rushing to embrace reassuringly named stablecoins. Here, four Wharton alumni who are helping to shape the next chapter of the industry’s evolution share their digital currency journeys — and peer cautiously into a crypto crystal ball. (Plus, read a professor’s reasons for both optimism and caution about the crypto gold rush.)
The Convert: Nobel Gulati W94
Chairman and CEO, Numeus Group
Nobel Gulati had always been ahead of the curve. At age 15, he landed his first job, working for a Wall Street firm that had opened an office in Switzerland, where he lived with his parents, both of whom were scientists. He’d been hired to help fix computers but spent hours soaking up wisdom about markets and trading. At 17, he completed high school and entered Wharton, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in finance just two years later. By 19, he was running an office in India for the investment bank Raymond James. Gulati moved on to other investment banks — NatWest Markets, ABN Amro, Citigroup — and tried out different roles: sell-side analyst, global strategist, sales, and trading. “I wanted to forge my own path,” he says.
In 2007, Gulati joined the hedge fund Two Sigma, which had about 100 employees and $3.7 billion worth of assets. This time, he stayed in one place for 12 years and helped the company methodically grow its investment management business until Two Sigma swelled to more than 1,600 employees and $60 billion in assets. Gulati often ended up in conversation with younger colleagues — 20-something engineers who gushed about their interest in cryptocurrencies. But Gulati, who had for so long been inspired by new challenges, couldn’t have been less interested in the nascent field. “That’s the worst combination you can have: being close-minded, cynical, and ignorant,” he says. “I was the naysayer.”
In 2019, Gulati retired from Two Sigma, but he didn’t stay dormant for long. With his younger brother, Deepak, a former global head of equities proprietary trading for JPMorgan Chase, he mulled creating a new venture — and they set their sights on crypto. Gulati began deeply researching the field that he had once dismissed and came away bullish about its potential. “I could see that [crypto] is going to follow the same path we’ve seen in hedge funds,” he says. “This is going to become mainstream … and ultimately, the custodians will embrace it, and the banks will embrace it, and the regulators will bless it.”
Gulati is among the founders of Numeus Group, a global digital asset investment firm that launched in 2021. He observed that the crypto industry had become a siren song to investors and strategists who thought they would “become billionaires overnight.” But the 2022 collapse of multiple cryptocurrency companies was a sobering wake-up call for anyone who’d followed the digital gold rush. In that unstable moment, Gulati’s and his brother’s track records of success in traditional finance gave them an edge over other startups. “We kind of represented the grown-ups in the room,” he says. “We weren’t two guys in a garage.” Numeus now operates offices in Switzerland, New York, London, and Mauritius. Gulati expects cryptocurrencies to become an increasing part of everyday life, likening their potential transformative power to the internet and smartphones. “But there could also be, in the next five years, significant corrections,” he says. “We could see some setbacks. It’s not a linear progression.”
In addition to his work with Numeus, Gulati maintains a close relationship with his alma mater, serving on the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative Advisory Board as well as the Undergraduate Executive Board. He believes Wharton is “uniquely positioned” to help form the next generation of AI leaders, who will have to grapple with complex ethical and regulatory issues that arise as the technology grows. “I think the AI initiative is going to prove for Wharton,” Gulati says, “to be as big as finance was over the past five decades.”
The Crypto Whisperer: Claire Ching C06 WG13
Vice President, Global Head of Capital Markets, Circle
Amid the darkness of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Claire Ching found a spark of inspiration in an unexpected space. For more than a decade, she’d worked in traditional finance, rising at Deutsche Bank from a global markets associate to a director of institutional client coverage, handling the sorts of blue-chip hedge funds, like Elliot Capital Management, whose fortunes were tracked closely by the Wall Street Journal. It seemed likely she would continue to rise into more senior roles with the bank.
Years earlier, though, as a Wharton MBA student, Ching found that her curiosity was piqued more by lessons on the behaviors of macro markets and interest rates than by classes on traditional investment banking. When the pandemic brought everyday life to an abrupt halt, Ching experimented with a new hobby: trading Bitcoin. She quickly felt “completely swooped up” by her initial foray into an unfamiliar world and began studying other crypto assets, trying to decipher how they behaved.
The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, had reduced short-term interest rates in an attempt to stimulate a pandemic-ravaged economy. Ching surmised that cryptocurrencies would see a sudden surge of investment. “It was just very clear to me that if you take interest rates down that fast because of a seismic event,” she says, “then risk assets would fly.” She began explaining the industry’s potential to skeptical colleagues at Deutsche Bank. By year’s end, Bitcoin’s trading price had soared 302 percent, to a then-record $28,949. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, wow. Maybe Claire knows something about this stuff,’” Ching says.
She believed that her background in traditional finance could be valuable in the crypto Wild West, where government regulators, banks, and credit-card companies still feared to tread, and sent introductory emails to human-resources executives at a handful of cryptocurrency companies. In 2021, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by social media pioneers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, hired Ching to educate skittish hedge fund leaders on the nature of crypto assets and guide them through the process of building a trading infrastructure. In this new role, she flourished. “Sometimes pockets open in your life, and there’s an energy that pushes you into another path,” she says. “I was in the right place, with the right knowledge.”
Ching ran Gemini’s global institutional business, helping the company to expand internationally, then moved in early 2025 to Circle, the financial technology company that issues what some observers have estimated to be one of the safest cryptocurrencies: USDC, a stablecoin tied to the U.S. dollar. “The stablecoin is different from any other asset,” Ching says. “It’s a huge enabler for the digital economy to grow.” Circle recruited Ching to help increase USDC’s footprint around the world. Her start at the company coincided with the beginning of the second Donald Trump W68 administration, which has widely embraced the industry. In July, the U.S. House of Representatives held a “Crypto Week” and passed the GENIUS Act — the first meaningful federal cryptocurrency legislation. The bill requires stablecoin issuers to back their assets with dollars or U.S. treasuries and provides a measure of financial protection to consumers in the event a stablecoin issuer declares bankruptcy.
Leaders of traditional finance companies who were once wary of cryptocurrencies now eagerly seek out Ching, anxious to adopt stablecoins. Retail giants like Walmart and Amazon are exploring issuing their own stablecoins. In the years ahead, Ching expects stablecoins to become a staple of everyday transactions around the world, with USDC having an edge over any competitors. “Everyone has a reason to touch the fiat dollar,” she says. “We just made it available digitally. It’s all backed, and we’ve built out the banking infrastructure to make it easy to access. For anyone going into crypto, it’s the safest bet.”
The Problem-Solver: Nana Murugesan WG09
CEO and Co-Founder, Stealth Startup
In 2018, Nana Murugesan turned 40, and his thoughts drifted to the future. He had two young daughters and wanted to have a hand in shaping something that might be relevant to their generation decades later. As a then-managing director of international markets and mobile partnerships for Snap, Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, Murugesan already had some insight into how teenagers and young adults, as digital natives, interacted with the world differently. “There’s no way Gen Z will go to a bank or look at money the way I did,” Murugesan recalls thinking. “So that drew me into crypto.”
Three years later, Murugesan began a new chapter at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, working as a vice president of business development, international, and listings. The position came with steep responsibilities: diversifying the company’s revenue streams; establishing a higher accountability threshold for crypto assets that Coinbase lists; and expanding its footprint across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. For Murugesan, the latter mission had personal significance. He’d spent parts of his childhood in Singapore, Thailand, India, and Malaysia before his family moved to the U.S. in 1999. “We did a lot of bouncing around,” he says. “We faced a lot of challenges, particularly moving money between countries.” Cryptocurrencies promised faster and simpler financial transactions, with less red tape and fewer regulatory delays.
Still, Murugesan recognizes that cryptocurrencies are “not all moons and rainbows.” The industry has weathered fraud scandals and extreme volatility, including a so-called “crypto winter” in 2022 that saw cryptocurrencies lose at least $2 trillion in value amid a wave of bankruptcies. “It was another time when things I learned at Wharton came in handy,” he says. “In a bull market, the people around you are all happy, and everything feels great. In a bear market, you see the darkest side of everything. But how you handle that adversity is one of the most critically important things as a leader.”
The Federal Reserve has reported that just eight percent of adults in the U.S. used cryptocurrencies as an investment or to complete a transaction in 2024 — down from 12 percent in 2021. “There’s no real utility to crypto, like WhatsApp or Google Maps,” Murugesan says. “Bitcoin is an awesome asset to own or trade. But it’s not something you use multiple times a day.”
In those limitations, Murugesan saw possibility. He has been actively angel investing in the nexus point between cryptocurrencies and another surging technology that’s often met with skepticism: artificial intelligence. Murugesan also recently co-founded an AI-native startup that he believes can leverage blockchain technology to deliver the sort of practical application that has been missing from cryptocurrencies. The information that people share without hesitation on social media — photos, videos, personal anecdotes — “generates tons of valuable data that are being used to train AI models,” Murugesan explains. “They’re being given away for free to Big Tech. But crypto can help people to be rewarded.”
Murugesan envisions a digital ecosystem in which blockchain technology keeps track of how an individual’s data is used to train AI programs and then ensures that person is compensated for the contributions through a crypto wallet. “That’s the best way that AI can take the world forward,” he says. “Instead of replacing jobs, it can help create mini economies on our behalf.” It’s a notably optimistic vision for the near future, at a time when some prognosticators have warned that AI advances will lead to widespread job loss and social disruption. “I think we can get to a place,” he says, “where AI and crypto can come together in a natural way, and we’ll feel enhanced by these technologies.”
The Believer: Edward Chin WG08
Founder and CEO, Parataxis Capital
Edward Chin’s introduction to cryptocurrencies arrived in 2010, during a conversation with a friend. Just two years earlier, a mysterious author, Satoshi Nakamoto, had published a nine-page white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” that argued for the creation of a new system for electronic transactions — one that wouldn’t require the involvement of financial institutions. Now, Chin’s buddy was expressing an interest in Bitcoin. Its trading price was hovering around pocket-change territory, rising no higher that year than 44 cents. Chin had spent four years as a captain in the U.S. Army, then earned a Wharton MBA and was working as an investment banking associate in media and telecommunications at Barclays. He says he “just brushed it off as fake internet money.”
Seven years later, in 2017, Bitcoin could no longer be easily dismissed: Its trading price surged to $19,345. Chin wanted to know whether Bitcoin was for real or if it was a bubble that was about to burst. “The development, the building around the Bitcoin ecosystem seemed real,” he says. “I had the view, even then, that at some point, the asset class would become institutional.” Chin wanted to be in a position to accumulate cryptocurrency assets and invest and manage them on behalf of clients.
He considered joining existing hedge funds but in 2019 instead founded an investment advisory firm, Parataxis Capital Management. The company launched its first fund a year later, amid the turbulence of the pandemic. Chin even found a silver lining: The overnight embrace of remote meetings meant he could triple or quadruple the number of conversations he could hold in a given day with potential investors. The pandemic wasn’t the first time his career had been impacted by a historic anomaly. As a new college graduate, he joined the Army in June 2001; three months later, the U.S. was devastated by the September 11 terrorist attacks. Seven years later, in the spring of 2008, he landed a finance job with the investment bank Lehman Brothers — just a few months before the company filed for bankruptcy. Chin realized, over time, that such market and geopolitical disruptions could be opportunities for nimble leaders. “These pivotal moments, I think, if managed properly, can open up really interesting applications,” he says.
Parataxis won the confidence of investors in unexpected spaces even amid the cryptocurrency-market turmoil that erupted in 2022; that same year, Fairfax County, Virginia’s $6.8 billion pension fund agreed to invest $35 million in Parataxis’s digital yield fund. “I may have cracked open my old Wharton business-school books” to secure the pension fund’s trust, says Chin. “It required us to have a deep understanding of how they think about asset allocation, how they think about volatility, how they think about risk.”
In August, Parataxis made an even bigger splash: The company announced it would go public as part of a merger with SilverBox Corp IV, and news reports estimated the combined value of the company at $400 million. “What we’re seeing now, in 2025, is a crossover between digital assets and traditional finance,” Chin says. “For us to have basically built a digital asset manager over the past six years and to take it public, it’s obviously exciting.”
David Gambacorta is an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and a freelance writer.
Published as “The Crypto Catalysts” in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Wharton Magazine.
