Jacob Dienelt is the latest Morgan Stanley veteran to leave Wall Street and join the Bitcoin industry. Following the likes of former JPMorgan Chase executive Blythe Masters and former JPMorgan Managing Director Paul Camp, Dienelt has made the move from traditional banking at Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management to join the emerging digital currency industry as head treasurer of Factom .
Factom, a Bitcoin 2.0 company creating a notarized audit trail with blockchain technology, has hired Dienelt as part of its focus on bitcoin asset management for its software token sale. Dienelt brings his experience managing a Futures Specialists desk at Morgan Stanley’s New York office to the nascent Bitcoin industry. He graduated from Kenyon College in 2003 where he majored in Game Theory. After graduation, he worked at a private real estate asset management company performing REIT analysis.
On leaving his Wall Street job, Dienelt states, “After two years traveling to Bitcoin conferences, mining, and running a paper wallet company, I’m glad to have found a home in the space.
“Factom is the first non-financial application of the distributed ledger technology that will, over the next decade, change how people prove their data is authentic, and so much more. I spent almost ten years at Morgan Stanley, and I’ll miss my friends and clients dearly. I just couldn’t miss an opportunity to help shape such an important ecosystem as it develops. I’m very excited to be working with [founders] Paul, David, Peter, and the rest of the team.”
Factom has been featured recently for their series of partnerships involving Bitcoin price stability with Tether, documenting gold exchange trades with Serica, and providing notarized audit trails for the Internet of Things with Rivetz.
David Johnston, Chairman of the Factom Foundation, welcomed Dienelt to the team, saying, “As the world’s large companies and institutions begin adopting blockchain technology, it naturally follows that their top people will get involved in projects such as Factom in order to be leaders in that transition.”
Johnston is referring to the recent trend of Wall Street executives who have left to join Bitcoin companies despite the public skepticism Bitcoin has received from banking executives. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was quoted last March stating that ‘Bitcoin [is] a terrible store of value that could be replicated over and over.’
“The question isn’t whether we accept it,” Dimon said in a recent interview with CNBC. “The question is, do we even participate in people who facilitate Bitcoin?”
Unlike Bitcoin companies which are focused on Bitcoin’s use as a digital currency for payment solutions which Mr. Dimon is referring to, Factom is only using the technology of Bitcoin – namely the distributed ledger and consensus system that makes up the blockchain. Factom provides a distributed consensus and audit trail leveraging the Bitcoin blockchain. The company’s open source platform stores a compressed and encoded version of data into the immutable blockchain record as a hash. Factom recently began a crowdsale of tokens supporting the development of the platform and has raised over 1000 bitcoins to date. Upon close of the token sale at the end of the month, Dienelt will be taking the lead on managing the bitcoin received during the sale, bringing his wealth of knowledge and experience from Morgan Stanley to Bitcoin 2.0.
Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Lisa Cheng is an advisor to the Factom project and does not hold any financial stake in the company. She will be participating in the token sale and receiving Factoids.