1138: Stablecoins, Real Utility, and the Next Curve | Michael Levine, CFO, Fireblocks

On a quiet afternoon in Punta Cana, Michael Levine sat alone on a stretch of white sand. The turquoise water and silence offered the perfect scene for rest—until he realized what was missing. “I didn’t have my phone and I didn’t have my laptop,” he tells us. “That’s what makes me happy… I love doing work from the beach.” It was there, after stepping down as Payoneer’s CFO, that Levine accepted a truth about himself: he wasn’t ready to retire. Levine had spent 11 and a half years helping Payoneer scale from about 100 employees to 3,000 and from $150 million to more than $80 billion in annual volume. He guided the company from private to public in June 2021 and from unregulated to regulated operations. When he left in 2023, he planned a pause but instead found himself drawn to a new frontier. Calls from crypto companies arrived during what he calls the “crypto winter.” Although he had once avoided digital assets entirely, he became fascinated by “decentralized finance,” “smart contracts,” and the tokenization of real-world assets. A meeting arranged by Spencer Stuart with the CEO of Fireblocks solidified his next move. “When you don’t know which horse to pick in a race,” Levine tells us, “buy the racetrack.” Fireblocks, he explains, is the infrastructure that secures digital assets for enterprises through self-custody and cyber-grade protection. For Levine, it was a chance to apply a career’s worth of scaling and governance experience to a technology poised to define the next decade of finance.