The crypto ecosystem picked yet another executive from traditional finance. Two months after raising $263 meg, the European-based cryptocurrency trading platform Bitpanda appear that Joshua Barraclough, a former exec at J.P. Morgan, joined its ranks as the CEO of its fully-regulated digital asset exchange Bitpanda Pro.

Earlier transitioning into the crypto earth, Barraclough worked as the global head of the fintech team and then as the co-head of digital innovation at J.P. Morgan. Answering Cointelegraph'southward questions about the transition, Barraclough said that leaving J.P. Morgan to join Bitpanda was an like shooting fish in a barrel determination.

"I accept e'er been at the bleeding border of innovation, and my chore at J.P. Morgan was to launch new businesses to challenge and transform traditional finance," he said, adding:

"The crypto ecosystem is the most exciting part of that right at present, with an incredible pace of change and growth in adoption. We want further to bridge the gap between digital assets and traditional finance, building on my prior feel."

Barraclough spoke about the skyrocketing adoption of crypto and the influx of fresh institutional money. "This wave of institutional investment, unaffected by many of the regulatory worries of the last balderdash run, has proven the viability of Bitcoin (BTC) as a secure store of value and inflation hedge," he explained.

He also pointed to the increasing interest in other layer one protocols, such every bit Solana and Avalanche and innovative DeFi applications. "Far from being the meme-fueled gamble that many still view it every bit, investors are treating cryptocurrencies in the aforementioned style as stocks and ETFs," he added.

"Bitcoin is a $one trillion asset and has seen the world's biggest investors allocate meaning portions of their portfolios to the currency. When the likes of JPMorgan and Blackrock are taking an investment seriously, it'southward a certain sign that it's here to stay."

Speaking about cryptocurrencies' part equally a gateway to more traditional investments, Barraclough highlighted that crypto is gaining traction as the commencement investment asset for younger digital natives and "acts equally a gateway to further fiscal educational activity, building wealth through a diversified portfolio."

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Bitpanda is known to offer digitized versions of precious metals such equally gold, silver and platinum. This portfolio is withal to be added to Bitpanda Pro, an avant-garde and European Union-wide regulated version of the main platform. Barraclough told Cointelegraph that the exchange is "actively looking at offering even more traditional avails other than gold and silvery, using blockchain engineering science and tokenization to facilitate this."

Bitpanda has secured $263 one thousand thousand in a Valar Ventures-led Series C round, bringing its total market value to $four.one billion. Besides new hires, the company then announced that it would use the fresh upper-case letter to aggrandize to new markets in France, Spain, Italia and Portugal.