Managing Editor
American Banker
Paul Vigna is the managing editor of American Banker. He has been a journalist for more than three decades, mostly with The Wall Street Journal, where he began covering bitcoin in 2013, one of the first mainstream reporters to do so. His coverage was instrumental in bringing awareness of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to professional, business-oriented audiences. Along with Michael Casey, he published “The Age of Cryptocurrency” in 2015, the first book about bitcoin from a Big Five publisher. They followed it up with “The Truth Machine” in 2018.
He was featured in two documentaries about crypto: “Banking on Bitcoin” (2016) and “Bitcoin: The End of Money as We Know It” (2015).
He has also published “The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin” (2025) and “Guts: The Anatomy of The Walking Dead” (2017).
Banking on the Institutional Digital-Asset Trading Build
The former “build it” guy at J.P. Morgan and Barclays, who spent years building and selling products in options and credit derivatives, commodities, and sales and trading, is now building a platform for institutional trading of digital assets, drawing on all the lessons he learned in traditional markets—but created to power the digital-asset economy.
Getting There First, Going Fast and Playing the Long Digital-Asset Game
There are no barriers to entry when it comes to launching an exchange-traded fund (ETF). The hard part, though, is building and growing a successful ETF. Peter Mintzberg, CEO of crypto asset manager Grayscale, is well acquainted with the challenges of the crypto market and how it figures—mightily—in the traditional world of asset management. His aggressive moves to position the firm early in digital assets is paying off: Grayscale manages a diverse, multi-billion dollar portfolio including Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC), Ethereum trusts, and a list of 27 potential new digital assets for future products, including DeFi and AI tokens. And Grayscale is just getting started.