From Wall Street To Crypto: What Eugene Ng’s Career Reveals About Risk Management In Digital Asset Trading

When Eugene Ng moved from trading derivatives at Deutsche Bank to the cryptocurrency industry, he encountered a problem that surprised him: the risk management frameworks he’d spent a decade mastering didn’t fully translate.

After over ten years at Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Citibank where he was rated in the top 5% of Deutsche Bank’s Listed Derivatives & Markets Clearing Sales Asia team in 2018, Eugene Ng had built expertise in managing risk across interest rate swaps, equity derivatives, and futures clearing. He was “instrumental in growing the bank’s footprint in electronic offerings, clearing solutions and collateral services.”

Yet when he transitioned to leadership roles at Matrixport and later as Head of Business Development for Asia-Pacific at Gemini, the disconnect became clear: institutional investors moving into crypto couldn’t simply port their traditional risk frameworks over. They needed to fundamentally rethink their approach.

Ng’s career trajectory from Wall Street’s structured environment to cryptocurrency’s 24/7 global markets offers insights into what actually needs to change when sophisticated traders enter crypto. The challenge isn’t just higher volatility. It’s navigating fundamentally different market structures simultaneously.

Three Distinct Trading Environments

Understanding crypto risk management requires recognising that digital asset trading doesn’t happen in a single, uniform market. Instead, institutions navigate three distinct environments, each with different risk characteristics:

Regulated institutional venues like CME Group, where Bitcoin and Ethereum futures trade with central clearing and familiar regulatory oversight. By late 2024, CME averaged $10 billion in daily volume, a 300% year-over-year surge driven by institutional demand. For traders from Ng’s background, this environment is recognisable. The collateral management and clearing solutions largely apply. But even here, the 24/7 nature of crypto creates new challenges Bitcoin’s most violent moves often happen when traditional markets are closed.

Offshore exchange ecosystem including Binance, Bybit, OKX, and Deribit, where roughly 70-75% of crypto derivatives trading actually occurs. The top exchanges processed $58.5 trillion in perpetual futures volume in 2024, dwarfing CME’s numbers. These platforms offer leverage up to 125x and order books that can thin dramatically during volatility. Margin calls happen in real-time, not on T+2 settlement cycles. Position liquidations occur in minutes if collateral requirements aren’t met. As the FTX collapse demonstrated, counterparty risk manifests differently here than in traditional finance.

On-chain/DeFi landscape where decentralised exchanges processed approximately $1.5 trillion in perpetual trading in 2024. Platforms like dYdX and GMX operate via smart contracts with transparent on-chain order books and non-custodial trading. The risk categories here don’t exist in traditional finance: smart contract vulnerabilities, governance risks where protocol parameters change via token holder votes, and composability risks where multiple protocol layers create cascading dependencies.

The Custody Challenge

One of the most significant departures from traditional finance is custody; how digital assets are actually held and secured.

When asked in a Forkast interview what institutions most want to understand, Eugene was direct: “One of the things that they really want to figure out is the custody of the assets, who exactly hold these assets. If I’m going to be trading on Gemini, who is it that is exactly holding. So that’s the number one concern that most investors have.”

He continued: “It is a departure from our traditional securities where we buy a stock and it gets sent into one of our CDPs (central depository) in Singapore. But in crypto, it is slightly different. The exchange is also the carrier, it’s also the broker, it’s also the custody. So that’s a great departure and that requires a shift in thinking on this investment.”

By 2025, infrastructure has improved significantly. Major custodians including BNY Mellon and State Street now offer bank-grade digital asset custody. The crypto custody market is projected to reach $3.3 billion in revenue. But the fundamental challenge remains: custody operates differently in crypto, requiring institutions to rethink counterparty relationships and operational risk.

Beyond Simple Bitcoin Exposure

The conversation with institutions has evolved beyond simple Bitcoin holdings.

“A second one would be, ‘What else besides bitcoin? What else can I invest besides bitcoin?’ So that’s also another very commonly asked question that we get,” Ng noted.

His response reflects the broader evolution: “With the innovation that we’re seeing in crypto space today, you don’t just buy bitcoin and hold it, there are so many other use cases, you can invest in interest-bearing product, it’s more than just diversifying and it’s becoming more of an investment.”

This expansion into derivatives, structured products, and yield strategies requires corresponding evolution in risk management. The frameworks for managing a Bitcoin futures position aren’t identical to those for managing complex DeFi lending positions or structured notes with embedded options.

What Traditional Finance Gets Right and Wrong

The discipline Ng developed over his decade on Wall Street remains valuable. Position sizing frameworks, correlation monitoring, stress testing methodology, and understanding that leverage can be fatal; these principles are universal.

His education reinforces this foundation: a Master of Science in Global Finance from NYU Stern and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (rated top 20% in the program and invited to Beta Gamma Sigma honor society), plus a Bachelor of Business Management with Summa Cum Laude from Singapore Management University.

But the assumption that market structure is constant; central clearing, standardised hours, regulatory backstops, weekend downtime breaks down completely in crypto. Traditional markets have built-in cooling-off periods. Crypto runs continuously across decentralised global networks.

When establishing institutional relationships at Gemini, including work with “sovereign wealth funds, pensions, insurance companies and regional banks,” Ng observed a pattern: institutions that succeeded were those willing to adapt their frameworks rather than assuming direct portability.

The Dramatic Shift

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ng’s observations is the pace of institutional attitude change.

“When I first spoke with institutions six months ago, the response was very lukewarm. It was ‘we’ll take a look when we have some time,'” he recalled during his Gemini tenure. “Fast forward today, they’re actually sending us a lot of inquiries. It’s all in-bound. So that’s really a 180-degrees change.”

His story about one institutional client is telling: someone pushing crypto initiatives within a large organisation faced “a lot of pushback” and career risk six months earlier. But as institutional interest surged, “today, he’s essentially telling me that everybody has been flooding his email address…he’s getting so many people, even guys who are more senior than him, send him emails requesting for his time.”

The turnaround from pariah to celebrity within the same institution reflects how quickly the risk calculus changed for sophisticated investors.

Building The Bridge

Eugene Ng’s career trajectory wasn’t about abandoning traditional risk discipline. It was about recognising where that discipline applies unchanged, where it requires adaptation, and where entirely new frameworks are needed.

His experience as a top 5% performer at Deutsche Bank, key institutional relationships at Citibank and Barclays, then successfully leading digital asset initiatives at Matrixport and Gemini demonstrates that the bridge between traditional finance and crypto exists. But it’s not a simple crossing.

For institutions entering crypto derivatives markets whether through CME futures, offshore exchange perpetuals, or emerging DeFi protocols, the lesson is clear: bring the risk discipline, but don’t assume existing frameworks are sufficient without adaptation.

The 24/7 markets, novel custody arrangements, and fundamentally different market structures require careful rethinking of what risk management means in this context. Those who do as Eugene Ng’s work with Asia-Pacific institutions demonstrated can navigate these markets successfully. Those who assume direct portability of traditional frameworks will likely learn expensive lessons.

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