At Monday’s Annual General Meeting of A.P. Møller – Mærsk, Blythe Masters will be proposed as a board director. Along with IBM, Maersk owns the TradeLens blockchain container management solution, which includes five of the top six ocean carriers.
Shortly before Christmas 2018, it was announced that Masters had resigned from Digital Asset for personal reasons. A 27-year veteran of JP Morgan, Masters took the reigns of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) firm in 2015, during the very early days of enterprise blockchain.
Digital Asset is best known as the company behind the revamp of the Australia Securities Exchange (ASX) settlement system, CHESS. Since Masters’ departure, co-founder Yuval Rooz has taken over as CEO, and the company has pivoted to focus on its smart contract language DAML, which is compatible with most of the major enterprise blockchains as well as databases.
Under Masters’ leadership, Digital Asset raised $110 million with a high profile list of investors that include Broadridge, Citi, DTCC, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and technology companies IBM and Accenture. She is still a board member and adviser and also chaired Hyperledger for three years, which Digital Asset was involved in founding.
At JP Morgan, Masters was head of global commodities. At one stage she was co-head of Asset-Backed Securitization and is credited as the creator of credit default swaps (CDS). She’s now on the advisory board of blockchain lending securitization unicorn, Figure. Another current advisory board role is with Banco Santander.
At the end of last year, Masters became a partner at private equity firm Motive Partners, which focuses on financial technology.
