Talos has appointed Kelly Ye as Head of Research, strengthening its institutional digital-asset data and research push following the 2025 acquisition of Coin Metrics. The company announced the hire on October 28, 2026, positioning Ye to oversee research across market structure, liquidity, emerging opportunities and onchain finance for asset managers, hedge funds, banks and brokers.
Ye brings nearly two decades of experience across traditional finance and digital assets. She spent 14 years in traditional finance spanning research, portfolio management and product development, and held investment leadership roles in digital assets at Avenir Group and Decentral Park Capital. She also served in research and product leadership roles at Fidelity Digital Asset Management and CoinDesk Indices. Most recently, she was building Coinbridge, a company focused on bridging the capital gap for tokenized real-world assets. Ye holds a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Peking University, a master’s degree in operations research from MIT, and is a CFA charterholder.
Talos CEO and co-founder Anton Katz said data has been part of the company’s vision since the beginning, and the Coin Metrics acquisition made it central to the platform. “Kelly has built research and investment products at both traditional and digital asset firms, and she understands how institutions use research to make decisions. She will help our clients interpret markets as more assets move onto digital rails,” Katz said.
Ye will direct Talos’s research program, including the weekly State of the Network newsletter on onchain finance, the State of the Market dashboard, weekly market commentary, deep-dive special reports, and quarterly and annual market reports. Her appointment follows Talos’s 2025 purchase of Coin Metrics, which brought market data, network data, indexes and onchain analytics into Talos’s order and execution management and portfolio management systems.
Ye framed the move as part of a broader shift from digital assets toward digital markets. “Institutions need rigorous research that explains how this shift changes liquidity, market structure and investment opportunities,” she said. “Talos brings together execution management, portfolio management and institutional data, giving our research a practical grounding in how these markets operate.”
The appointment also highlights growing institutional attention to crypto market data quality and onchain finance. The release and related commentary noted that crypto data is dispersed across exchanges, blockchains and wallets, making consistent identifiers, formats and timestamps difficult. Research connecting exchange and onchain signals could help institutions compare market conditions across venues and networks, especially as tokenized funds and real-world assets create new forms of issuance, access and collateral workflows. The commentary referenced Aviva Investors’ recent launch of a sterling liquidity fund share class on the XRP Ledger as part of the expanding tokenized fund landscape.
Talos has not announced new research products or changes to its data offering alongside the hire. The immediate development is a leadership appointment intended to broaden an existing research program and connect data, research and trading tools more closely for institutional clients.
