BitMEX Compliance Chief Malcolm Wright Jumps to Shyft Network

Malcolm Wright, the former chief compliance officer at BitMEX, has joined Shyft Network, a startup focused on helping cryptocurrency firms comply with global anti-money laundering (AML) rules.

It’s a good fit for Wright, who is also co-lead of the AML working group at policy shop Global Digital Finance and an expert on the Financial Action Task Force’s data sharing requirements for crypto firms, known colloquially as the FATF “Travel Rule.”

Wright said he is a long-time supporter of Shyft’s approach to solving the Travel Rule, which takes a more decentralized bent than some other solutions on the market.

“With DeFi, DAOs and NFTs reaching critical mass over the past 12 months, Shyft is trailblazing the way in addressing multiple challenges for financial services firms and governments that go far beyond Travel Rule,” Wright said in a statement, referring to decentralized finance, decentralized autonomous organizations and non-fungible tokens.

Read more: Inside the Standards Race for Implementing FATF’s 'Travel Rule'

Wright was brought in at BitMEX to oversee the exchange’s compliance function, following the arrests of senior executives who were alleged to have run the Seychelles-domiciled business with little care about regulation.

After joining in late 2020, Wright revamped BitMEX’s know-your-customer (KYC) processes, removing any historic non-KYC’d accounts on the platform, and then set about bringing the firm in line with other FATF requirements.

“Malcolm is coming on board to the core team to really accelerate the development of open-source, cross-ecosystem compliance infrastructure and standards – for Veriscope and CEXs [centralized exchanges] all the way down to DAOs and DeFi,” Shyft CEO Joseph Weinberg said in an email to CoinDesk.