Whether you are a hedge fund, OTC desk, fintech, gaming studio or bank, crypto operations is one of the hardest and most important job functions in your organization. Operations is responsible for the safeguarding of assets at all times – at rest and in motion, from internal (rogue employees) and external threats (counterparties and hackers) – while also needing your organization can move quickly, efficiently and ensure there are zero mistakes.
Crypto operations are much easier when everyone is working face to face, in the same office together but today’s workforce is distributed. Key decision makers and critical personnel are working from home, in different countries or in different regulatory jurisdictions. This presents new challenges for distributed teams like building trust, utilizing a “four-eyes” policy, or potentially stretching a team too thin given the 24 / 7 / 365 nature of the market.
How do you efficiently run crypto operations with a remote team?
Set up crypto transaction policies
Remote work means operations need to be very focused on security but also on automation and scalability.
Setting a transaction policy (link to what is a Tx policy piece when its live) – essentially rules that govern who in the organization can interact with which assets, in what amounts, with which partners and who needs to approve – is a cornerstone for secure risk management in a remote or distributed workforce.
Transaction policies allow teams to enforce risk rules from anywhere, which means decisions can be made quickly but also with the proper oversight – ensuring that security and efficiency are foundational in the process.
Define trading venues and counterparties
It’s important to define what counterparties or execution venues or trading partners you will need in order to achieve your objectives while keeping the scalability of your team and your transaction policies in mind.
Are there regional issues that need to be dealt with such as regulatory schemes, or jurisdictional issues given where the company is located? Are there specific partners or venues that will handle specific assets or parts of your business? Are people on your distributed team prepared to handle 24 hour trading or operations needs?
Is your crypto operations team is setup for success? Download the Crypto Operations Checklist
One other aspect of trading partners and counterparties that can add scalability to your team is testing and automating address whitelisting. This can both prevent human error and save time by doing away with manual copy and paste. This is also a part of the business where policies can be put in place to automate how addresses are whitelisted (which ones and who approves).
Find the right custody stack
There is no one size fits all custody model. Each business needs to find the right custody stack to execute on their strategy and business objectives. However, there is also a distributed team dynamic here, so ensuring you are utilizing a custody stack that is flexible enough to take advantage of market or user needs while also being as secure as possible.
Utilizing a mix of hot / warm / cold storage can certainly make sense depending on how strategy or user needs but be aware that with a heavy cold storage focus, there can be issues with scale, timing and security – as you are now subject to either a custodian’s rules and hours of operations or you are introducing security / key-man risk with non-internet connected devices.