On a quiet afternoon in Punta Cana, Michael Levine sat alone on a stretch of white sand. The turquoise water and silence offered the perfect scene for rest—until he realized what was missing. “I didn’t have my phone and I didn’t have my laptop,” he tells us. “That’s what makes me happy… I love doing work from the beach.” It was there, after stepping down as Payoneer’s CFO, that Levine accepted a truth about himself: he wasn’t ready to retire.
Levine had spent 11 and a half years helping Payoneer scale from about 100 employees to 3,000 and from $150 million to more than $80 billion in annual volume. He guided the company from private to public in June 2021 and from unregulated to regulated operations. When he left in 2023, he planned a pause but instead found himself drawn to a new frontier.
Read MoreCalls from crypto companies arrived during what he calls the “crypto winter.” Although he had once avoided digital assets entirely, he became fascinated by “decentralized finance,” “smart contracts,” and the tokenization of real-world assets. A meeting arranged by Spencer Stuart with the CEO of Fireblocks solidified his next move. “When you don’t know which horse to pick in a race,” Levine tells us, “buy the racetrack.”
Fireblocks, he explains, is the infrastructure that secures digital assets for enterprises through self-custody and cyber-grade protection. For Levine, it was a chance to apply a career’s worth of scaling and governance experience to a technology poised to define the next decade of finance.
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CFOTL: Tell us about your journey to Fireblocks—what transpired since we last spoke during your Payoneer chapter?
Levine: Five years ago I was at Payoneer, a fintech that scaled from about 100 employees to more than 3,000 and from roughly $150 million in annual volume to over $80 billion, operating in 190+ countries. We went from small to large, private to public (June ’21), and unregulated to regulated—an 11½-year ride. I stepped down in early 2023 needing a break; being a public-company CFO keeps you “always on.” A month later, sitting on a beach in Punta Cana, I realized I’m happiest working…even from the beach. Inbound interest from crypto firms followed—not because I was a crypto expert (I’d actually avoided digital assets at Payoneer) but due to my scaling, global, and public-market experience during “crypto winter,” when many CFOs weren’t interested.
As I listened, decentralized finance and smart contracts intrigued me. A dinner with the Fireblocks CEO surfaced a framework of three curves: first, speculation/trading; second, stablecoins and tokenization (digitally representing fiat); third, real-world assets (stocks, bonds, commodities, money-market funds). The TAMs and long-term potential were compelling. I didn’t know which “horse” to pick—so I chose the “racetrack.” Fireblocks is infrastructure, positioned to partner with winners across the ecosystem. In simple terms, we provide secure self-custody: digital assets are controlled by cryptographic keys, and our software platform lets enterprises control those assets with enterprise-grade security. Our founders came from cybersecurity and built with that standard from day one, which is why Fireblocks became the dominant player.
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