Ted Rogers and Jimmy Song join Unchained as senior advisors

With Bitcoin 2021 just around the corner, we are very excited to announce that Ted Rogers and Jimmy Song have joined the team at Unchained Capital as senior Advisors. This past year has been transformative for us at Unchained and not just because of increasing bitcoin adoption and awareness. We’ve experienced significant acceleration across every metric, including client onboarding, bitcoin secured, OTC trading, and collateralized lending. Our partnership with NYDIG has been a huge success, allowing us to scale more aggressively and unlocking value for our platform and our clients.

As we look to the future, we will continue to bring on individuals and partners that further set Unchained apart as the premiere financial institution for individuals and businesses securing long-term wealth in bitcoin, and especially those clients that demand private key ownership. To build on top of our success to date and with further rapid scaling in mind, we have brought on these two veterans from the bitcoin community to contribute and help shape the vision and direction of our company.

Ted Rogers was the first employee at Xapo and was a partner to Wences Casares, serving as the company’s President and Chief Strategy Officer. Ted helped lead and scale Xapo through critical years from 2014 to 2019, culminating in the sale of Xapo’s institutional business to Coinbase. Xapo was and continues to be a standard bearer in bitcoin and paved the way for many bitcoin-only focused businesses like Unchained Capital to flourish in recent years. Ted’s professional career began in the NFL, where he played linebacker for Hall of Fame Head Coach Joe Gibbs from 1991-1993 (Washington won the Super Bowl in January 1992). He earned a law degree at Georgetown before spending 15 years in finance and technology. He is a bitcoiner and natural leader with the highest integrity. Ted will be advising Unchained’s executive and business development teams on strategy and growth initiatives to further institutionalize our platform. We’re thrilled to have Ted, a seasoned operator who has faced many similar challenges, join the team. His experience will be invaluable to us as we move forward.

Like Ted, Jimmy Song is a long-time veteran in the bitcoin community. Jimmy served as the VP of Engineering at Armory, one of the earliest secure wallet providers for bitcoin, from 2014 to 2016.  Later he served as the Principal Architect at Paxos, which today operates as a bitcoin exchange provider, from 2016 to 2018. Jimmy is also the founder of Programming Blockchain, through which he has educated and trained more bitcoin developers than just about anyone. In addition to Programming Blockchain, Jimmy is the author of Programming Bitcoin, published by O’Reilly Media in 2019. Since its publication, Jimmy has also co-authored The Little Bitcoin Book and Thank God for Bitcoin. Jimmy is a leader and mainstay in the Austin bitcoin community and has been a long-time friend of Unchained Capital. We could not be more excited to have Jimmy advising our engineering team and contributing to our engineering strategy in a more formal capacity. Bitcoin development, engineering, and security is our core asset at Unchained and having Jimmy on board to help us scale will help further entrench our team and platform as a technical leader.

Why is Unchained Capital an important company and project to contribute time to in an advisory capacity?

I want to help companies, like Unchained Capital, that are fully committed to Bitcoin and to improving the user-experience of Bitcoin-native applications. For example, in order for Bitcoin to reach its full potential, user experience with self-custody must improve.  Unchained Capital focuses on this and in fact their collaborative custody solution is the best I’ve ever encountered.

Where do you see yourself providing the most impact in helping the Unchained executive and business development team?

I spent much of my time at Xapo focused on the HNW/Institutional side of the business.  Unchained faces many of the same challenges and opportunities that we faced while scaling Xapo into the largest Bitcoin custodian.  It’s uncanny how familiar the situation feels. I’m looking forward to sharing experiences and lessons from that time.

What have you learned in your past experience as an executive which would most benefit companies like Unchained Capital?

“Blame no one. Expect nothing. Do something.”

Why is Unchained Capital an important company and project to contribute time to in an advisory capacity?

For store-of-value, security is of utmost importance. Being able to be your own bank is a great ideal, but it takes some learning and personal responsibility. Unchained Capital helps people to secure their own wealth and this is an important part of keeping the Bitcoin ecosystem decentralized. I believe the tools that Unchained Capital are developing will be integral, not just to individual users, but to the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.

Where do you see yourself providing the most impact in helping the Unchained engineering team and engineering strategy?

The multisig collaborative custody model really needs to be robust, secure and user friendly for more people to use it. I hope to get the word out on the important things this company is doing, recruit more developers and help create products I’d want to use.

What specific engineering project or focus area are you most excited to help contribute toward?

Multisig/Taproot security. I think graceful degradation via timelocks looks really interesting for collaborative custody.Our success to date is a result of our team’s commitment to deliver value to all long-term bitcoin holders, and especially to our clients, partners and capital providers. Having both Ted and Jimmy now as senior advisors will help take Unchained Capital to new heights. Their commitment and willingness to contribute to Unchained is a signal of the values we carry forward every day. With their support, we will be better positioned to execute on our mission and have already benefited immensely from their counsel. This is good for bitcoin!

Stay tuned for more announcements of additional senior Advisors in the coming months.