Adam White, general manager at Coinbase, vividly recalls trying to write about bitcoin while he was a student at Harvard Business School during the early days of crypto. Each attempt was met with the same response from professors: "This is not a subject of academic caliber."
That curiosity, however, paid off for the former Air Force captain and Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom veteran. After a stint at Activision Blizzard, he joined Coinbase as its fifth employee to head up business development, a position that then encompassed marketing, sales, and product management.
Today, he oversees the entire institutional-focused side of Coinbase's business, including its GDAX exchange.
It wasn't until 2014, when Coinbase launched its secretive Project Moonbase — the precursor to Coinbase's institutional-grade exchange — that White dove into the world of market structure and heavy-duty trading technology. At the time, Coinbase was one of the largest brokers for cryptocurrency, but it relied on different exchanges for sources of liquidity.
Under White's leadership, GDAX became one of the largest exchanges by the summer of 2016. And then at the end of that year, just before things really took off in crypto, White focused his efforts on attracting Wall Street clients: brokerages, large global banks, and hedge funds. Moving forward, White's focus is to continue to win institutional business with new products such as Coinbase's custodian.