Opyn Co-founders Depart from Crypto Industry Post CFTC Regulatory Actions

By: Eva Baxter

Zubin Koticha and Alexis Gauba, the co-founders of Ethereum-based options trading platform, Opyn, have announced their decision to depart from their project and exit the crypto industry altogether. This comes in the wake of recent regulatory actions from the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

On Sept. 7, the CFTC charged and simultaneously settled with three DeFi platforms, including Opyn. The regulator alleged violation of registration rules and requirements by Opyn and failure to adopt a customer identification program in compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act. The platform was also accused of unlawfully offering leveraged and margined retail commodity transactions involving digital assets.

Following this, the co-founders, Koticha and Gauba, decided to withdraw from the crypto market. The future leadership of Opyn will be taken over by Andrew J. Keone, the platform's erstwhile head of research. Koticha has expressed his optimism regarding Keone's experience as an MIT engineer and a former Wall Street trader, describing him as a de facto third co-founder.

The departing co-founders, who were involved with related projects since 2017, have hinted towards their involvement in a new non-crypto initiative. The specifics of this project remain under wraps. Both founders were earlier associated with Mechanism Labs, a blockchain research lab, ThunderCore, and the University of California Berkeley's blockchain department. Gauba was also a co-founder of she256, a blockchain educational nonprofit.