Opyn co-founders to step down citing recent CFTC action

Opyn’s co-founders are stepping down after the DeFi options protocol was sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in September.

CEO Zubin Koticha said today in a post on X that he and co-founder Alexis Gauba had decided to leave crypto, citing the recent regulatory actions against Opyn.

The CFTC said in September that it had filed and settled charges against Opyn and two other DeFi players. Opyn was accused of several registration errors, failing to implement a customer identification program and illegally offering leveraged and margin commodity transactions in digital assets. Opyn was ordered to pay a $250,000 fine and violate the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations.

“We have spent the last six years working on incredible things that would never have been possible in TradFi – groundbreaking work in structured products and derivatives,” Koticha said in the post today. “We thought we would be in crypto for the rest of our lives. But unfortunately and unexpectedly, this is the end of the road.”

He added that Andrew Leone, head of research at the company, will take over as CEO of Opyn. Leone previously spent six years as a vice president at Nomura, the Japanese bank, where he led VIX and structured volatility trading, according to his LinkedIn profile.