TRM Talks: Cowboys and Crypto

Albert Forkner serves as the Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and Director for Two Ocean Trust, a Wyoming chartered trust company based in Jackson Hole providing trust and investment management services to ultra-high net worth individuals, private trust companies, and foundations. Albert has over 25 years of experience regulating and operating financial services companies.As the former State Banking Commissioner, a position he held for 10 years, he was responsible for the supervision of all state-chartered banks, trust companies, and non-depository financial entities in Wyoming. Additionally, he played a key role in the establishment of the novel, digital asset focused Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI) bank charter.

Albert served as the Chairman of the Board for the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and Chairman of the Board of Managers of the State Regulatory Registry, owners and operators of the NMLS. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Wyoming and is a graduate of the Graduate School of Banking at Colorado and the Cannon Financial Institute.

Dr. Chris Rothfuss is the Senate Minority Leader of the Wyoming Legislature.  First elected in 2010, he represents Senate District 9 in Laramie, Wyoming.  Senator Rothfuss co-chairs the Wyoming Blockchain Select Committee and serves as the ranking member of the Education Committee and the Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee.

Outside of the Legislature, Chris is an advanced technology consultant and a professor for the University of Wyoming Honors College.  He has worked as a consulting inventor since 2010, providing technology solutions that have resulted in over 25 patent applications and 15 granted patents ranging from 3d printing to augmented reality to energy storage.

From 2003-06, Chris was an AAAS Science and Technology Diplomacy Fellow at the U.S. Department of State in the Office of Space and Advanced Technology.  He served as the U.S. lead for nanotechnology foreign policy, and as a delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Dr. Rothfuss received his PhD in Chemical Engineering and MS in Applied Physics from the University of Washington; and his MS in Chemical Engineering and BA in International Studies from the University of Wyoming where he competed as a member and captain of the Cowboy debate team.  Chris lives in Laramie with his wife, Dr. Heather Rothfuss, and their 4 children - Connor, Zane, Finn and Cora.

David Kinitsky is a Managing Director at Kraken and the CEO of its affiliated Special Purpose Depository Institution entity.  He has spent the past ~15 years of his professional career within the Financial Services and FinTech industries focused at the intersection of traditional finance and newly emerging alternative asset classes, financial markets, and economic networks, including substantial experience within the cryptocurrency space.

Mr. Kinitsky recently joined Kraken from Circle Internet Financial where he led Corporate Development & Strategy and Business Development across the company’s payments and stablecoin platform, and its cryptocurrency trading and exchange markets.

Previously, Mr. Kinitsky had been with Fidelity Investments where he was a co-Portfolio Manager of an internal proprietary crypto asset investment fund under its Devonshire Investments arm, and led the company’s cross-organizational thematically-dedicated innovation research efforts out of its Bitcoin and Blockchain Center of Excellence at Fidelity Labs and the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology.  During this time, Mr. Kinitsky also served as a Scientific Advisor to the University College London’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies.

Before Fidelity, Mr. Kinitsky was the founding General Manager of the Digital Currency Group subsidiary, Grayscale Investments, and its flagship Grayscale Bitcoin Trust: a passive bitcoin-backed tracking fund with more than $2 billion in assets under management that trades on the OTCQX market under the GBTC ticker symbol.

Prior to the formation of Digital Currency Group, Mr. Kinitsky was with its predecessor company, SecondMarket, where he served in a variety of senior operations and product related roles, and helped build and run the pre-IPO private company securities platform business, which was acquired by Nasdaq as a spin-out and now operates as the Nasdaq Private Market.

Mr. Kinitsky has also spent time raising seed capital for alternative investment hedge fund managers and working on transactional corporate, securities and intellectual property law matters, earlier in his career.  He holds both a bachelor’s degree in Political Economy from the University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.