Blythe Masters and the End of a Blockchain Era

Blythe Masters is stepping down as CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, the blockchain startup she joined to great fanfare in 2015. The former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive, credited with inventing the credit-default swap, says she is making the decision for personal reasons. But in business terms, her timing is good, too: The Bitcoin bubble of 2017 has burst, and so has that of blockchain.

Masters was the public face of the “blockchain, not Bitcoin” philosophy — the idea that behind the avowedly anti-bank and anti-government cryptocurrency, used to buy dark things in dark places, lay an ingenious technological infrastructure that could be cleaned up and adopted by blue-chip firms and, yes, banks. You’d keep the network of nodes validating transactions securely on a shared ledger, but you’d ditch the coins and the trading. Masters translated this into a story bankers could understand.