Wall Street veterans and founders of Amber Group — a cryptocurrency trading platform — recently appointed Todd Miller as Americas Chief Operating Officer and Dimitrios Kavvathas as Chief Strategy Officer.
Both are former executives at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Amber Group — a Hong Kong-based trading startup — also took on Dimitrios’ younger brother, Sotirios Kavvathas, as Europe’s chief of operations. He previously worked as an auditor at BDO and Royal Bank of Scotland.
Amber Group also hired three regional directors for Europe to solidify their workmanship even more. All had worked for the finance industry.
Amber is the new crypto unicorn
In 2018, the Morgan Stanley group of traders founded Amber. Currently, a crop of financial services firms owns the crypto-trading platform. These firms trade in derivatives and structured crypto products for crypto traders and investors.
This year, investors — including DCM Ventures and Tiger Global Management — sunk $100 million into Amber Group. The startup is now worth approximately $1 billion.
Michael Wu, Amber Group’s CEO, said they hired about 250 employees this year. That translates to 450 people working for them globally.
Executive’s tainted past
In 2019, the Malaysian Government charged Amber’s new Chief Strategy Officer, Kavvathas, after allegedly dipping his hands and meddling in the 1MDB scandal.
He was charged alongside other Goldman Sachs executives.
However, last year, the court ruled Kavvathas had no case to answer. So, all proceedings against him arising from his former executive roles in Goldman dissipated into the ether. According to Amber’s spokesman, no further actions will be taken against him.
Four months ago, Wu hinted Amber Group boasts $1.5 billion worth of trading capital. Moreover, he predicted Amber’s revenue would soar to nearly $500 million in the coming months.
In 2015, Amber’s founders (who were all in their 20’s) deployed algorithm trading in China’s stocks and index futures as a side project. Later, they went all-in into the cryptocurrency world to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.
Amber Group now uses its capital and clients’ money to trade in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
So far, Amber has grown into a full-fledged cryptocurrency trading company with a rapidly growing team, which continually sources its workforce from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.
Thanks to trading on Bitcoin’s volatility instead of its ups or downs, Amber’s revenue has grown since its first day in crypto. It now has a net margin of more than 60%.
