Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

by Chris Burniske

The term blockchain, independent of Bitcoin, began to be used more widely in North America in the fall of 2015 when two prominent financial magazines catalyzed awareness of the concept. First, Bloomberg Markets published an article titled “Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything: The banker who helped give the world credit-default swaps wants to upend finance again—this time with the code that powers bitcoin.”13 In emphasizing “the code that powers bitcoin,” this article quietly questioned the need for the native asset, instead emphasizing the underlying technology. Masters was a well-known and respected figure in financial services, one that people associated with financial innovation. Her choice to join a little-known firm at the time called Digital Asset Holdings, after having been the head of global commodities at JPMorgan Chase, was reason to believe that blockchain technology was no longer on the fringe of the business world. In the article, a quote from Masters brought everyone to attention: “You should be taking this technology as seriously as you should have been taking the development of the Internet in the early 1990s. It’s analogous to email for money.”