Why a Fund Manger Left BlackRock to Trade Bitcoin and Pudgy Penguins NFTs

For years, Jennifer Thornton’s career had hummed along a fairly conventional path. A portfolio manager, she spent more than a decade at BlackRock, where her duties included trading risk-off assets like government bonds.

But, in 2021, Thornton’s career took a sharp turn—she left her post at the world’s largest asset manager and entered the world of Web3. 

“There’s just a lot of opportunities here,” Thornton said of the crypto industry. That’s particularly true for women, she added,  despite the fact that the space’s ranks are overwhelmingly dominated by males.

“It’s exciting,” Thornton said. “People [are] coming from other industries, bringing their knowledge, bringing their skills, and applying them in this new way on this new asset class.”

Now, she spends her days in the crypto trenches, trading tokens like Bitcoin and one-of-one monkey jpegs —two emerging asset classes that lie at the opposite end of the risk spectrum compared to the financial instruments she traded during her traditional finance days. 

“When I’m working from home, my kids will kind of walk by my desk, and then they’ll stop in their tracks and ask, ‘Mom, what are you doing?’” Thornton told Decrypt.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, well, these are the Pudgy Penguins, and these are the Lil Pudgys,’” she said, explaining that the people in her life often seem mystified by her work. 

Her mother, she added, “thinks I work for Bitcoin.” (She does not.)

Thornton is a senior index fund portfolio manager at Bitwise, a crypto-focused asset manager founded in 2017 that offers its clients a variety of investment vehicles, from crypto index funds to ETFs and private funds. 

As part of her role at the company, Thornton is responsible for implementing investment strategies across a large swath of portfolios—much like she did in her TradFi days. But, she also contributes to managing such unconventional funds as the Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Index Fund, which targets a decisively more crypto-native crowd. 

“Where I am, and like so much of what I do really, is at that intersection of the two spaces,” Thornton told Decrypt.   

Thornton is one of a growing number of traditional finance professionals who are flocking to the crypto industry as institutions increasingly embrace the asset class, and lawmakers clear a path toward reducing federal regulatory oversight of the industry, encouraging its growth in the U.S.

Although current employment data on the crypto industry is scant, a report from digital assets-focused research firm K33 Research shows that 199,000 people held jobs in the industry as of 2023, with the majority of those employees working for exchanges and brokerages or crypto-focused financial firms.

That tally is small compared to the more than 6 million people who were employed in the finance and insurance sectors that same year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

But now, as a growing number of institutions, states, and public companies invests in the asset class, elevating the price of Bitcoin back near its all-time high above $108,000 set in January, some experts say the crypto industry is poised to attract even more talent from more traditional employment sectors.

A recent report from the World Economic Forum shows that over 10% of global GDP could be stored on blockchain by the end of 2025—a marked increase in blockchain use that could spur cross-industry hiring into Web3, according to crypto-focused recruitment services firm RecruitBlock. 

As Web3 and traditional finance become increasingly enmeshed, it’s people like Thornton who will continue to close the gap between those worlds.

Thornton said the differences between the emerging tech and traditional finance worlds can, at times, be stark. Crypto markets, unlike regular markets, never close. And whereas TradFi systems “usually have maybe two decimal places on a share quantity,” cryptocurrencies can go out to eight or 12 decimal places.

Those differences inform Thornton and her colleagues’ work to manage crypto-focused portfolios much in the same way they used to manage TradFi portfolios, with an aim to create balance, reduce slippage, and tighten market exposure. 

“When you trade an asset with a price as large as Bitcoin, it matters if you’re trading 10.48 or 10.483527397—and you have to get that level of precision,” Thornton said. “They hired me at Bitwise to manage the funds with the same level of precision and rigor and professionalism that we did at BlackRock.”

Asked if she feels the gap between the professionalism that guides interactions in the TradFi world and the somewhat cultish espirit de corps of the Crypto Twitter (aka X) trenches, Thornton said, “I’m more of a lurker, to tell you the truth.”

Edited by James Rubin