BYJeff John Roberts fortune

Peter Mintzberg is CEO of one of the world’s most famous crypto brands—but, even within the industry, he is not a familiar name. Unlike his predecessor at Grayscale, who was a fixture of TV and social media, Mintzberg has stayed entirely out of the public eye since the company announced his appointment nearly a year ago. That silence has been strategic.

Mintzberg is a longtime Wall Street insider—his most recent stint was global head of strategy at Goldman Sachs—but is a relative newcomer to crypto, which has a distinctive culture of its own. Lying low has given him time to fully immerse himself in the world of digital assets, and it has also bought time for Grayscale to navigate a competitive landscape that has changed dramatically.

A pioneer in the early digital asset industry, Grayscale went on to become the face of a bold legal fight to expand access to Bitcoin through ETFs. Now, though, the company finds itself competing with both traditional crypto firms and giant newcomers like BlackRock, while also figuring out how to offset huge outflows from what was long its core product. This was the challenge awaiting Mintzberg when he took the reins. In his first interview as Grayscale CEO, he revealed he is now ready to step into the public eye and shared plans for the company’s future.

Grayscale’s strategic challenge

Mintzberg, who is in his fifties, has a salt-and-pepper beard and a friendly affect that masks an extraordinary drive and ambition. Born in Rio de Janeiro to a lower-middle-class family, he was determined at a young age to ascend to the top of the U.S. business world, and worked incessantly to get there.

Landing an analyst job with McKinsey in Brazil after college, Mintzberg’s embrace of 15-hour days led the company to sponsor his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he recalls reading three cases a night while bringing his English up to speed. Upon graduating, Mintzberg cofounded an asset management company before moving up rapidly in the world of finance, ascending to senior management positions at BlackRock, OppenheimerFunds, and Apollo. His most recent role at Goldman Sachs included overseeing digital assets under the firm’s wealth management business.

Mintzberg has proved he can operate at the highest levels of Wall Street, but now he must prove he can transfer those skills to the crypto context. At Grayscale, he enjoys the benefit of a familiar brand and reliable cash flow, but he also faces a major strategic challenge.

For years, Grayscale enjoyed a first mover advantage by building a series of trusts to hold crypto—most famously the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust or GBTC—that could be bought in the form of shares on the stock market. At a time when regulators had yet to approve a Bitcoin ETF, Grayscale raked in revenue thanks to annual 2% management fees it charged to hold its customers’ pool of Bitcoin assets, whose value at one point swelled to nearly $28 billion.