CEO.

The protocol had passed the awkward middle phase — first lenders, first borrowers, first liquidations — and was now meeting the demands that come with depth. Reserve management, oracle integrations, risk parameter governance and the relationship with institutional counterparties all needed an owner who had handled them at scale. The founding team had got the protocol to traction; the board wanted a CEO who could carry it through the next order of magnitude without breaking the underwriting.

The constraints were specific. The brief required institutional credit experience — not a generic finance CV — combined with native fluency in DeFi mechanics. The CEO had to read liquidation cascades, oracle dependencies, and parameter trade-offs the way a TradFi credit head reads a covenant package. Compensation sat between studio-style protocol economics and a senior bank package; geography preferred London or New York, but flexibility was tradable for the right operator.

The operators who fit this profile are rarer than the role description suggests. Most senior credit leaders in TradFi do not yet have the on-chain literacy to govern a protocol; most DeFi-native operators have not run a credit book through a real stress event. The interesting bench sits in the overlap — people who left bank-side credit early enough to learn the protocol layer properly, or DeFi-native operators who took the time to apprentice on the credit side of TradFi.

Our read was that the search would resolve through conversations rather than search strings. The right person would not be on a job market; they would be running a credit function inside a larger firm or advising one. We invested the opening month in mapping that overlap precisely, with Peter leading every first conversation, and brought the studio board into the assessment earlier than usual so consensus was already forming when the right finalist appeared.

The shortlist combined bank-side credit leaders with substantive on-chain history, and DeFi-native operators who had carried a credit book through a real stress event. Each had been chosen because they could speak to the underwriting and to the governance with equal authority. No researchers ran the outreach; every introduction came from Peter.

• Bank-side credit heads with documented on-chain protocol involvement.
• DeFi-native operators who had run a lending market through a liquidation cascade.
• Senior leaders from crypto-native prime brokerage stepping into protocol leadership.
• A small set of risk-and-treasury crossover candidates from tokenised credit platforms.

The placement was an operator who had spent a decade in bank-side credit before moving on-chain and running a lending market through a sharp liquidations event. What made them right was their refusal to separate the two halves of the role: in the second conversation they treated the oracle dependency as a credit decision and the underwriting policy as a governance one, and the board recognised the move immediately.

The close was clean. The studio agreed a structure that aligned the CEO's personal economics to the loan book performance rather than to short-term protocol metrics, which was the candidate's own request. Offer was signed on the twelfth week.

“The lesson was about precision of the overlap. The market reads as "there are no candidates" when the brief is held loosely — credit person, DeFi person, scaling CEO. It reads very differently when the overlap is mapped properly and the conversations are opened by someone the candidates already know. Spectrum's job was to be patient about that mapping in week one and decisive about who really sat in the overlap by week three. The rest followed.”

— Peter Wood