Christopher King

Christopher King did not go looking for cryptocurrency. It found him in a classroom. As a finance undergraduate at Penn State University, he was handed a case study with an unusual premise: how should the government tax virtual currency? He researched the question, presented his answer to partners at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and walked away with something more durable than a grade - a fascination that would define his working life.

"I fell down the rabbit hole," King has said, "because it intersected with my interests in technology, finance, emerging asset classes and macroeconomics." That intersection is the whole story in one sentence. Most people encounter crypto through price charts. King encountered it through the plumbing - the rules, the accounting, the way a new asset class actually has to be handled before ordinary investors can touch it.

He came by the finance instinct honestly. King grew up around the advisory business; his father has spent roughly 35 years as a financial advisor, and a young King interned in his office. He absorbed the rhythms of wealth management early - the client relationships, the trust, the slow-moving compliance that governs how money is managed for other people. Years later he would take that inheritance and point it squarely at bitcoin.

By 2014 he had started investing in digital assets on his own. In 2018, at 22, he joined Morgan Creek Capital Management, a venture capital firm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he invested in cryptocurrency companies, funds, and liquid positions. It was an apprenticeship in the infrastructure of the market rather than the hype around it - and it gave him a front-row view of a gap nobody had filled.

The gap King saw was simple to describe and hard to fix. Financial advisors had clients asking about crypto, but no clean way to give it to them. There was no workflow that fit inside their existing systems, no tax tooling, no trusted custody that a compliance officer would sign off on. Retail apps existed for individuals. Institutions had their own desks. The registered investment advisor - the person managing an ordinary family's retirement - was stuck in the middle with nothing built for them.

So in 2019 King founded Eaglebrook. The bet was not that crypto prices would rise. It was that advisors would need a bridge, and that whoever built the most trustworthy one would win a durable business. Eaglebrook offers tax-optimized bitcoin and ethereum separately managed accounts - SMAs - held at an institutional qualified custodian, wrapped in the reporting and tax-loss harvesting features advisors already understand.

The only way to figure it out is to learn by doing. - Christopher King

"Separately managed accounts are the best way to get access," King has argued - not the flashiest way, but the one that fits how advisors actually work. It is a telling choice. He picked the least glamorous customer in crypto and the least glamorous product structure, and made both the center of the company. Boring, in this corner of the market, turned out to be the point.

The breakthrough came in 2020, when Eaglebrook partnered with Mariner Wealth Advisors to launch the Eaglebrook Bitcoin SMA. One credible partner opened the door to others. Firms like Dynasty Financial Partners followed. King, still in his mid-twenties, was suddenly running infrastructure that established wealth managers were willing to plug into.

Eaglebrook's cap table reads like a vote of confidence from people who do not chase hype. The company raised a $20 million Series A, with investors including Castle Island Ventures, Brewer Lane Ventures, and asset-management giant Franklin Templeton. Beyond the firms, King won over individual wealth-management heavyweights - Marty Bicknell of Mariner Wealth Advisors and Mark Casady, the former CEO of LPL Financial, among the early believers.

What those backers were buying was not a crypto trade. It was a distribution thesis: that digital assets would eventually flow into ordinary portfolios through the advisors people already trust, and that Eaglebrook would be the pipe. "This will be a part of every client's portfolio over the next 10 years," King has said. He is not selling a coin. He is selling the certainty that the wealth management industry will need rails - and building them before the traffic arrives.