Aevo's Julian Koh on Self-Custody, DeFi Transparency, and Crypto Derivatives

Julian Koh's journey from Coinbase engineer to co-founder and CEO of Aevo began when he left Cornell University after two years to pursue cryptocurrency research.

Koh worked part-time at Numerai, a firm using crowdsourced machine learning to trade markets, for seven months during his gap year. He then joined Metastable Capital, a crypto hedge fund, as a consultant tracking market trends.

Koh's time at Coinbase gave him firsthand insight into how a major exchange manages infrastructure at scale. There, he built side projects with a roommate and eventually left in November 2020 to co-found Ribbon Finance with Ken Chan, a fellow former Coinbase engineer.