Yuval Rooz tried to leave DRW. He had been running a trading operation, but wanted to make something of his own. He told the firm’s founder, Don Wilson, that he was going. Asked what came next, Rooz had ideas rather than a settled destination. Wilson’s reply changed the itinerary: why not start a venture group together?
It was 2012. An attempted resignation became an invitation to invest. Two years later, Rooz would co-found Digital Asset. A dozen years after that, the company would announce a $355 million funding round. The connection between those events runs through a question more personal than any blockchain thesis: how much room does a person need to build?
Permission to wander
Rooz’s first experiments with that question were less diplomatic. At Citadel, he recalled pitching an entrepreneurial idea up the management chain and eventually going directly to the CEO. The idea got a hearing; bypassing his bosses also got him into trouble. Corporate initiative, it turned out, came with a preferred route through the building.
He had been born in Houston and raised in Israel, one of six children in a family with entrepreneurial parents. After studying electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, he went into finance. Mathematics and programming offered a way in. Wanting to start things made it difficult to remain content with the job description.
At DRW, Wilson gave that inclination somewhere to go. Rooz described an environment where employees could explore ideas connected to the business. He ran a team, then helped build the venture operation. Trading and investing put him on different sides of the same question: what could technology make possible that the market had not yet organized?
“At the end of the day, my passion has always been to create something new.”
Yuval Rooz, 2020
The venture work brought him into contact with young companies in Israel and the United States. Cryptocurrency was beginning to attract attention inside DRW. Rooz and his colleagues looked for businesses that matched their developing ideas about financial infrastructure. Eventually, he left to build one. Wilson supported the departure and invested.
First, build a language
Digital Asset started in 2014. Eric Saraniecki brought a product background and experience at DRW; Shaul Kfir brought technical expertise. Getting conversations with financial institutions was its own construction project. The word blockchain carried associations that could close a door before anyone reached the useful part of the meeting.
The underlying problem was prosaic enough. Separate organizations maintain separate records. They need to agree about transactions while protecting information that belongs to them or their customers. Connecting those records becomes complicated when every participant has its own systems, permissions and obligations. Finance has made a profession of managing the resulting paperwork.
Rooz described the company’s early years as a substantial research and development effort. The systems it hoped to improve were central to customers’ operations. You could not expect a financial institution to replace one because an elegant demonstration had gone well. Software had to survive the less flattering conditions of ordinary work.
One answer was Daml, a language for describing agreements and the actions permitted around them. Rooz recalled meeting a team of eleven engineers in Zurich who were developing a language. Joining forces helped form Digital Asset’s Swiss operation. His description of his place among the specialists was economical: “I am the dumb person in the company.”
That joke conveys something useful about the job. A founder can understand engineering without pretending to be every engineer in the room. The task becomes assembling people whose expertise exceeds his own, then finding a business in which their work can matter. In this case, the programming language would become part of the foundation for a network.
The weekend that asked too much
The Australian Securities Exchange offered an early opportunity of unusual scope: replacing the infrastructure behind clearing and settlement of its equity market. Rooz recalled suggesting a practical way to choose a vendor. Invite competing teams to work with the exchange for a week. Have them integrate some functionality. See what happens.
Digital Asset was selected. The audition was an appealing idea, allowing customers to observe a team working rather than admire its presentation. But winning the work and completing a market migration were very different achievements. A week could expose how people approached a problem. It could not contain everything the full replacement would demand.
In November 2022, ASX paused the original CHESS replacement project after an independent review and its own assessment. It announced that A$245 million to A$255 million of capitalized software costs would be written off. The review identified significant design challenges. The existing CHESS system continued operating. The proposed transformation had not delivered the intended replacement.
Rooz later described the danger of trying to move an entire equity market in one weekend. His lesson was to break migrations into components, deliver smaller improvements and learn from actual use. Long waits drain the patience of employees, investors and customers; working releases let all three see progress. They also expose problems while the pieces remain manageable.
This is a less theatrical account of innovation than the usual ceremony of unveiling. It gives experience a job. An ambitious project can leave behind a sharper method, provided the people involved examine what went wrong. Rooz’s later arguments for incremental delivery put that lesson directly into the way he wanted customers to adopt technology.
Banks need doors that close
Rooz became CEO in March 2019, following AG Gangadhar’s period as acting chief executive after Blythe Masters’s departure. He had already served as CFO and COO. His operating responsibilities had included acquisitions, international expansion and hiring senior colleagues. The promotion put someone who had helped assemble the business in charge of deciding what it should become.
Early in his tenure, Daml became open source. The direction allowed the language to reach beyond a single proprietary platform. In a 2019 conversation, Rooz also challenged an easy assumption about faster settlement: immediate payment on every individual trade does not automatically improve a market. Netting can reduce the amount of money participants need to move.
That is the kind of objection a trading background supplies. Speed has consequences for the people financing transactions. An engineering improvement must make sense inside the business it changes. A system can finish an operation quickly and still create a new inconvenience for the person responsible for finding the cash.
Canton’s network announcement in May 2023 brought the connectivity argument into focus. Independent applications could interact while preserving the privacy and controls their participants required. A digital bond and a payment could be joined into one exchange, so that both sides completed together. The interesting part was the agreement across applications.
Confidentiality belongs inside that design. A bank needs to share enough information to transact without putting every customer relationship on public display. Canton’s proposition gives institutions ways to connect without abandoning control of their information. Rooz’s pitch takes the customer’s responsibilities seriously enough to build around them.
From demonstration to daily use
In March 2024, a Canton pilot reported more than 350 simulated transactions across 22 applications. Those were test transactions, covering activities such as funds, cash, securities and financing. The distinction matters: an exercise demonstrates what a coordinated system can do under test conditions. Running a market requires the additional work of making that behavior dependable in production.
March 2024 pilot results. Simulation figures, not live trading volume.
The Global Synchronizer went live in July 2024, supplying decentralized infrastructure for coordinating transactions across applications. Its launch also brought governance arrangements supported by the Linux Foundation. Rooz helped establish the Global Synchronizer Foundation and served as a board member and treasurer. Building a network involved deciding how participants would share responsibility for it.
His work has also taken him to Washington. Appointed to a CFTC advisory subcommittee in 2023, he testified before a House subcommittee that September. He argued that digital money should preserve financial privacy and that public policy should work with private sector technology. The engineer who once wanted room to pursue an idea was now discussing the rules under which many organizations might use one.
Funding followed the expanding network. Digital Asset announced $135 million in June 2025, in a round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb. In June 2026, it announced $355 million led by a16z crypto, with participants including BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, HSBC and S&P Global. In July, Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures joined the investor group.
“Blockchain adoption will be defined by practical, production-grade applications in the world’s largest markets,” Rooz said in June 2026. By October, speaking in Seoul, he was emphasizing economic reasons for institutions to use blockchain and the movement of assets rather than tokenization totals alone. The useful test concerned what happened after an asset arrived.
There is another invitation in Rooz’s public record, on a smaller scale. Introducing himself to the developer community in 2020, he offered help, deferred technical questions to his team and asked New York triathletes to get in touch for a ride or run. For all the institutional machinery, he could still make a straightforward proposal: come along and do something together.
The same invitation has acquired more complicated terms at Digital Asset. It now involves banks, developers, governance bodies and investors, each with reasons to hesitate. Rooz’s task is to give them reasons to proceed, in steps they can manage. A founder who once tried to leave his lane has spent much of his career working out how other people can safely change theirs.