Three Ex-Citi Executives Launch Crypto Investment Firm

Three former Citi executives have started a new crypto investment firm named Motus Capital.

Alex Kriete, Greg Girasole and Frank Cavallo started the company after leaving Citi a few months ago following a long stint at the multinational investment bank. The Block reported that Kriete and Girasole worked as co-heads of the Citi Global Wealth digital assets group.

Although details are yet to be revealed, Kriete said in a LinkedIn post that it would aim to bring the trio’s “decades of combined experience advising and managing clients’ wealth” to the crypto sector.

Kriete told The Block before unveiling Motus Capital that “financial institutions have a hard time keeping pace in this market,”  adding that “We’re excited to build something that caters to these people.”

Kriete and Girasole had become in-house experts at Citi in 2017 after starting an internal, crypto-focused newsletter.

According to The Block, their departures in April are just the latest example of talent flowing from Citi out into the wider crypto sector. 

According to a recent report by Blockchain.News, Citi expects the metaverse to be worth between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030.

The report added that despite the metaverse concept being around for a few decades, interest in the virtual world gained steam at the end of 2021 based on the exponential growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

In accordance with a report dubbed “Metaverse and Money, Decrypting the Future,” Citi believes that metaverse users will have grown to 5 billion by 2030.

As per the study: “users should increasingly be able to access a host of use cases, including commerce, art, media, advertising, healthcare, and social collaboration. A device-agnostic metaverse would be accessible via personal computers, game consoles, and smartphones, resulting in a large ecosystem.”

While in November last year, Citi had begun hiring 100 employees as part of a renewed strategy to expand the business of its digital assets.

The digital assets team will offer expertise and outline important strategies on how Citi’s Institutional Client Group (ICG) should pursue digital asset opportunities, including new investments, new products and new clients, Emily Turner, the ICG’s head of business development