Smart Contracts Firm Taps Wall Street Vet as President, Chairman

Symbiont, a developer of software for self-executing smart contracts, has hired Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long as president and chairman.

Long worked at Morgan Stanley, most recently as a managing director in global capital markets, until April. She was previously a managing director at Credit Suisse and before that was an associate at Salomon Brothers.

Mark Smith remains chief executive of Symbiont.

Long has been actively following and exploring bitcoin since 2012 and informally collaborating with blockchain startups since 2014, when she served on Morgan Stanley's distributed ledger technology working group. She has been dedicated to advancing the blockchain ecosystem since leaving her job, she said in a Tuesday morning post on the Symbiont blog.

"The journey from Morgan Stanley to Symbiont was amazing, partly because it involved digging into multiple projects with blockchain players," which include start-ups, consulting firms, software companies, regulators and potential consumers, she said in the blog post.

She landed at Symbiont because of its expertise in smart contracts technology, its focus on newly originated assets instead of tokenizing pre-existing assets and its ability to store user data anonymously on a ledger without sacrificing institutional-level speed. Its peers' products are "hybrids that store data and business logic somewhere else, requiring disparate systems to communicate over multiple channels, using the ledger just as a timestamping mechanism," she said.

With Symbiont's strategy, investors "actually own the assets issued on Symbiont's blockchain, which is a huge improvement relative to how securities are owned in today's market structure," she said.

Long also revealed in the blog post that she personally made a "substantial" investment in Symbiont's pending Series A funding round. Neither Long nor Symbiont disclosed any other details about the ongoing raise.