State Street to Bitcoin Bull: Blockchain Boss Leaves to Launch Crypto Startup

Institutional investors have a hard road when it comes to buying large amounts of cryptocurrencies.

The market's shallow, unorganized pools of liquidity mean investors looking to buy more than $20 million-worth of a cryptocurrency often find themselves pulling together investments the old-fashioned way – by cold-calling people they know and putting together the order manually.

But, as global banks and accounting firms show increasing willingness to talk about the potential benefits of investing in cryptocurrencies, ex-State Street executive Hu Liang sees a looming problem: he believes that these large institutions will soon be looking to make massive investments in the asset class.

So, earlier this week, Liang left his position as senior managing director of State Street Bank & Trust's Emerging Technologies Center to meet that demand.

As revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the platform, code-named "Project Omni," is being designed to serve as "the first large-scale institutional infrastructure specifically targeted towards crypto assets."

"I’m not building a blockchain application," said Liang, who has already gathered a core team of founders, and is currently seeking investment.