Head of Business Development for digital assets, remote across Europe

What a Head of Business Development for digital assets does

A Head of Business Development, or Head of BD, finds the customers and partners a crypto or digital asset company needs, negotiates the terms and closes the agreements. Job ads ask for partner research and a business case per partnership, and one ad I read asks for a network of institutional contacts in the DACH region. I did this work from 2022 at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, first as Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then as Chief Information Officer, a role that included growth and marketing.

Partner types of a digital asset data product, 2023

In 2023 I worked on the agreements of a crypto market data product with each of these partner types. The middle column says what the partner meant for the product.

Partner type	Role for the product	Documents I worked on
Oracle network	Carries the prices to smart contracts, above all to decentralized exchanges	Agreement with the oracle network
Crypto exchange	A trading venue; the product drew prices from centralized and decentralized exchanges	Agreement with a crypto exchange
Stock exchanges	Decision-makers I presented the product to, and contract partners	Agreements with stock exchanges
Banks	Customers that need compliant prices on digital assets	Agreements with banks; terms and conditions; service and price definitions
Enterprise customers	Commercial users of real-time and historical data, such as T-Systems	Terms and conditions; market data manifest; API methodologies
Referral partners	Recommend the company’s services to third parties and earn from it	Legal framework of the partner program
Licensees	Use the company’s intellectual property	Usage license agreements

My business development work, newest first

• January 2023 to October 2024: Chief Information Officer at Blocksize Capital, with procuration from May 2023 to represent the company in legal transactions. I created and updated the legal framework of the partner program and designed the agreements in the table above.
• 2022: Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations. I designed the product marketing of the market data product, spoke with stock exchanges and banks, and onboarded institutional customers. In September 2022 I met business partners and customers at SmartCon, the Chainlink conference in New York City.

Profile at a glance

Role	Head of Business Development (BD) for digital assets, crypto and DeFi
Engagement	Permanent, remote for the most part, on-site days in Frankfurt Rhine-Main; interim; freelance
Location	Frankfurt, Germany; remote for companies across Europe
Customers	Institutional and professional users of crypto market data; stock exchanges and banks as partners
Memberships	Finance Loop, Bitcoin Bundesverband, Digital Euro Association
Languages	German, English

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke. I have worked in IT and media for more than twenty years, and I sell what I understand technically: I wrote the concept of the data product before I presented it to exchanges. I have taken part in due diligences on the buyer’s and on the seller’s side, and I write about digital assets for the business magazine Business Punk. Outside digital assets, I am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers.