The former chief executive of the London Metal Exchange (LME) Matthew Chamberlain has joined crypto custodian Komainu as its new head.

Komainu launched in 2018 as a joint venture between investment bank Nomura and two digital asset firms Ledger and CoinShares.

Chamberlain served as the LME’s chief executive between 2017 and 2022. His appointment has been hailed by Komainu as an instrumental step in the firm’s ambition to drive “convergence between worlds of traditional and decentralised finance”.

In particular, Komainu refers to Chamberlain’s track record of “operating regulated and mission-critical financial market infrastructure”.

The appointment is also another example of the blurred lines between new digitally-focused custodians and traditional market infrastructures.

In December, Deutsche Boerse acquired a majority stake in digital asset trading platform Crypto Finance. Meanwhile, asset servicing players like State Street, Northern Trust and Fidelity have launched their own crypto custody ventures.

The emergence of more fully-regulated service providers has also been seen as a necessary step if the nascent digital assets and tokenisation market is to get the support of the institutional investment market, as stated by Chamberlain

"I believe strongly in the transformative capacity of a blockchain-empowered world - but such technologies will only deliver their true potential when robust infrastructure exists to make them easily and reliably available to all those who wish to participate in this unprecedented period of financial democratisation,” he said.

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