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WisdomTree Expands Crypto App to New York Amid Internal Conflict
Wealth management giant WisdomTree has launched its digital asset app, WisdomTree Prime, in New York, even as its CEO faces pressure from shareholders over the company’s push into cryptocurrencies.
The app, already available in 21 states, allows users to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, dollar-backed stablecoins and gold tokens, and has received a charter to operate as a limited purpose trust company under the New York Banking Law earlier this year.
However, WisdomTree’s foray into the cryptocurrency sector has seen the company’s largest shareholder, Graham Tuckwell, at odds with CEO Jonathan Steinberg’s aggressive decentralized finance (DeFi) push.
Tuckwell, president of ETFS Capital, reportedly urged investors to vote against Steinberg’s reappointment, arguing that the CEO’s DeFi initiatives were “a huge and completely unsuccessful distraction.” Tuckwell became a major shareholder of WisdomTree in 2018 through the acquisition of the European arm of ETF Securities, a company he founded.
WisdomTree first entered the cryptocurrency market in 2019 with the launch of a Bitcoin exchange-traded product on the Swiss SIX exchange. Earlier this year, he became one of the largest issuers of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US, with his fund seeing inflows of around $70 million, while others, including BlackRock’s IBIT, saw inflows of billion.