Chief Strategy Officer of Digital Investment Company Coinshares

Meltem Demirors | Biography

In 2019, She Spoke Before the House Financial Services Committee About Bitcoin’s Relevance

• By Ashna Tamrakar
• Original : August 24, 2021

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Meltem Demirors is a digital market investor and the chief strategy officer of Coinshares, a digital asset investment and management company. She is also a course designer and lecturer at Said Business School and Oxford University.

Since 2016, Demirors has also been associated with the World Economic Forum. In addition, from October 2016 to October 2020, she was the inaugural member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain. She was then promoted as the co-chairperson at the Cryptocurrency Governance Council’s steering committee.

In 2019, she spoke before the House Financial Services Committee about bitcoin’s relevance.

Who Is Meltem Demirors?

Meltem Demirors is a cryptocurrency investor, consultant, and advocate. She entered the cryptocurrency world in 2015 and would later work as the development director for the Digital Currency Group (DCG). 

Early Age

Meltem Demirors was born in 1987 in Netherland as the youngest child of Turkish parents living in England. She has an older brother three years older than her (born 1984). Sharing her childhood days with her brother, she said, “Together with my brother, we were two adorable but mischievous toddlers. We had a wonderful childhood, and although our family didn’t own anything extravagant, we had a wealth of experience and stories.”

Her parents were born and raised in a small farming town in southern Turkey, deep in the Taurus Mountains. While her father holds a Ph.D. degree from Manchester Institute of Technology, her mother is an accounting major graduate from Aegean University. Her parents moved to England after getting married in the early 1980s. She says that her parents then were “young and idealistic, engaged in a protracted ideological conflict between the right-wing Islamists and the left-wing intellectuals that has since defined the social and political landscape in Turkey.”

After her mom got pregnant with her, the family then relocated to the Netherlands, where her father worked at a chemical company as a young researcher. According to Demirors, her parents worked really hard. They encountered numerous obstacles while assimilating into a new culture, learning another language, and adjusting to an entirely different life with two rambunctious children.

When Demirors was ten years old, her family moved again, this time to New York, United States, in 1996. She would later describe her teenage self as “gangly and awkward.” She enjoyed reading books and playing the piano. She was also interested in baking cookies for neighbors, mowing lawns, or providing piano lessons to earn some pocket money. 

Education

Demirors recalls her student days as a good student, competitive athlete, and huge nerd. Although she had her heart set on studying biochemistry and eventually becoming a doctor, she studied mathematical economics for her bachelor’s. 

In 2009, Demirors graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematical Economics from Rice University, a small school in Houston, Texas. Later, she enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in 2013 and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration in 2015. She also attended the University of Cambridge.

Introduction to The Cryptocurrency World 

While in graduate school, Demirors met Barry Silbert, the CEO, and founder of Digital Currency Group, and joined the company in April 2015.

She would eventually land the position of vice president at Digital Currency Group, one of the world’s leading crypto investment firms based in New York. In that role, she helped launch now-famous companies such as Coinbase and Ripple. She worked there for almost three years before quitting in February 2018.

Professional Journey 

Demirors began her professional journey amid one of the greatest economic recessions in recent history. Despite it, she received multiple employment offers, and she ended up earning a position in management consulting. 

Between April 2007 and May 2008, she worked as an analyst at Dow Chemical in Zurich, Switzerland, and Texas-based company, Tradax Energy. Later, Demirors served as a strategy consultant for almost four years at Deloitte Consulting from July 2009 to May 2013. She then went on to work as a corporate treasury at ExxonMobil in Dallas, Texas, for a few months. She then joined the MIT Media Lab in March 2015 as an advisor for the course’ Future of Commerce.’

Position at Coinshares 

In May 2018, Demirors was appointed as the Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares. The CoinShares Group is a digital asset investment firm that manages billions in assets on behalf of a global investor base. In her position, she is developing CS Treasury, a service that would enable crypto enterprises and projects to optimize treasury resources using structured methodologies to make financial decisions and calculate risks. She also oversees the firm’s US operations as managing director.

Other Works 

Demirors has been a course designer and professor at Said Business School and Oxford University since January 2018. She is also engaged in the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme. She also leads the yearly Crypto Springs conference in Palm Springs and a weekly podcast dubbed “What Grinds My Gears,” which investigates the convergence of money, history, and technology.

Since early 2017, Demirors has been writing a blog called Leaders Series in which she interviews bitcoin thinking leaders (all of whom are women) and highlights their efforts in the industry.

Did You Know?

Demirors is yet to feature exclusively on a Wikipedia page.