Amber Baldet was an Executive Director at J.P. Morgan. She led the team that developed Quorum (Blockchain), the J.P. Morgan in-house Blockchain project. Baldet lives in New York City. She has been called the "Madonna of Blockchain." In 2018, Baldet left JP Morgan to build her own startup.
Baldet grew up in South Florida, and from a young age dreamt of immersing herself in fast-paced city life as soon as she graduated from college.
Her first job was at a boutique research firm that specialised in data analysis, where her job was to research company headlines to verify data. “For example, the company would research whether or not a drug that got FDA [Federal Drug Adminsitration] approval would mess up peer reviews, or if the mortgages underlying debt securitisations were actually belly-up,” she recalls.
“Starting out in a place that took this contrarian view to all the bullish market exuberance was really important in shaping how I think about the industry,” adds Baldet.
Baldet joined J.P. Morgan in 2012. She was previously a Senior Consultant at Capco, a Managing Partner at Blackwire, a Business Analyst at Old Lane, and an Application Developer at Avalon Research Group.
She launched Quorum, an open-source code based on Ethereum and is designed to cater to big-business’s needs such as scale, performance, and privacy.
Work Experience
Cofounder & CEO
Clovyr
May 2018 – present time
New York
Executive Director
J.P. Morgan
Mau 2012 - Apr 2018
Greater New York City Area
Senior Consultant
Capco
Sept 2009 - May 2012
Greater New York City Area
Managing Partner
Blackwire LLC
2005 — Aug 2009
Business Analyst
Old Lane
March 2008 - Jan 2009
Greater New York City Area
Avalon Research Group
- Application Developer / DBA / Business Analyst
2003 - 2005
- Operations / Client Relations Manager
2003 - 2004
Baldet now spends her time building Clovyr, a decentralised platform that helps people self-custody Web3 and other privacy-conscious applications anywhere from a home server to the cloud.
“We can help you self-custody your favourite blockchain node, but we can also help people host their own blog instead of posting on Medium, or run their own Mastodon instance instead of just posting to Twitter,” she says.
Looking ahead, she believes that the role of cryptocurrencies will play a far greater part in the world of finance, and will become much more integrated with online ecosystems as more people hold cryptocurrencies and rely on digital wallets.
“Tokens will have ever more utility that (hopefully) eclipses the ‘number go up’ narratives. All of that will produce a tonne of data, so we better get serious about building better privacy into these systems, both technically and legally.”
She adds: “Decentralisation increases as we decouple infrastructure from content, not just when cryptocurrency becomes a mainstream payment method.
“I never would have predicted that Gen Z would be talking about what cryptos are hot on TikTok.”
Baldet was selected #31 on Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40 and #9 for CoinDesk's Most Influential People in Blockchain; Both accolades were earned by Baldet in 2017.
