Walton Comer — Co-founder & CIO, XBTO Group

Walton Comer is co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of XBTO Group, an institutional digital asset platform he helped launch in 2015, where he oversees trading, risk management, and the firm's proprietary trading algorithms. XBTO was the founding investor in Deribit, the crypto derivatives exchange that Coinbase acquired for roughly $3 billion — one of the largest exits in the sector's history and a marker of how early XBTO's team identified where institutional crypto infrastructure was headed.

Before crypto, Comer built a career in quantitative and systematic trading: he was a Founder and Principal at Falcon Bridge Partners, a high-frequency commodities trading platform; VP of Risk at SAC Capital; and Director of Research at Thornhill Partners, a trading consultancy. He was also a partner at Instant Gravity LLC, developing new media and financial technology, and in 2010 co-founded the martech company Lucid with his brother Patrick — a venture that was later acquired by public company Cint for roughly $1.1 billion. He now also serves as CIO of Derivee Capital Management, trading liquid assets with systematic strategies. Comer holds an M.A. in Mathematics of Finance from Columbia University and undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics.

Comer was one of the earliest algorithmic traders to provide liquidity on major crypto exchanges and played a role in shaping CME's approach to crypto futures.

On the Roundtable 100 Blue Ribbon Committee, Comer brings a rare combination of traditional quantitative-finance rigor and first-mover crypto market-structure experience, valuable for assessing liquidity, market dominance, and leadership within digital assets.