Zane Suren spent three years at Zodia Custody watching the same problem play out. Asset managers wanted to trade digital assets without scattering holdings across multiple exchanges, yet the infrastructure to make that possible simply didn’t exist.
Now he’s joining the firm trying to fix it.
BridgePort announced Tuesday that Suren will take the chief revenue officer role, leading global revenue strategy as the institutional settlement network prepares for its production launch. The appointment brings aboard someone who witnessed firsthand why traditional custody models frustrate trading firms—and who built operations serving over 50 institutional clients before that.
Suren rose to managing director at Zodia Custody, the digital asset custodian backed by Standard Chartered Bank, where he joined the global leadership team and most recently ran commercial activity across the Middle East and Africa. That vantage point gave him direct sight lines into how asset managers and trading firms evaluate digital asset infrastructure—and where the friction points emerge when custody, execution, and settlement operate in disconnected silos.
“BridgePort is solving the problem I saw every day at Zodia,” Suren said. “Institutions want to trade on venues without fragmenting their assets across multiple exchanges. The infrastructure to coordinate between custodians, exchanges, and trading firms didn’t exist until now. I’ve spent my career at the intersection of trading, custody, and infrastructure, and BridgePort is where it all comes together. The team, the technology, and the timing are right.”
The timing, in particular, matters. BridgePort recently announced partnerships with Anchorage Digital and Deutsche Börse Group’s MiCAR-regulated crypto trading platform, 3DX, signalling momentum ahead of the network going live. Those deals put the institutional middleware—which coordinates pre-trade credit allocation and post-trade settlement—in position to eliminate pre-funding requirements at venues whilst keeping assets secured with custodians.
Suren’s path into crypto began in 2017, when he left commodities trading to focus full-time on digital assets. Before Zodia, he co-founded a digital assets infrastructure firm that served exchanges and OTC desks with B2B technology, building a client base concentrated in EMEA. That startup experience, combined with his tenure inside a Standard Chartered-backed custodian, gives him unusual perspective on both sides of the institutional adoption equation.
Nirup Ramalingam, BridgePort’s chief executive, pointed to that dual background. “Having spent the last few years at the forefront of institutional digital asset adoption with Zodia Custody, Zane deeply understands the operational hurdles that asset managers and trading firms face today,” Ramalingam said. “His unique background spanning traditional commodities trading to building an infrastructure startup makes him the ideal leader to drive our global revenue strategy as we launch our production network and bridge the gap between custody, execution, and settlement.”
The move also underscores a broader pattern in digital asset infrastructure: executives with custody experience migrating toward the coordination layer that sits between custodians and exchanges. That layer has emerged as a critical bottleneck for institutions looking to trade at scale without fragmenting holdings or taking on counterparty risk at multiple venues.
BridgePort operates from New York and Abu Dhabi, reflecting the Middle East’s growing significance in institutional digital asset adoption—a region Suren knows well from his Zodia tenure. The firm is backed by Further Ventures, Virtu, XBTO, Blockchain Founders Fund, Reforge VC, Fun Fair Ventures, and Humla Ventures, giving it financial support from both traditional trading firms and crypto-native investors.
For Suren, the appointment represents a shift from observing operational challenges to building the infrastructure meant to resolve them. His remit includes not just revenue strategy but also commercial architecture, pipeline development, and constructing the sales function as the network scales beyond its initial partnerships.
Whether institutions will pay for coordination infrastructure remains the central question. BridgePort is betting that the pain of asset fragmentation and pre-funding requirements has reached the point where middleware becomes essential rather than optional. Suren’s three years inside a major custodian suggest he’s watched that pain intensify.
The production launch timeline hasn’t been disclosed, though the recent partnership announcements suggest it’s imminent. By then, Suren will need to convert his understanding of institutional frustrations into a pipeline that justifies the chief revenue officer title—and proves that the infrastructure gap he observed at Zodia was wide enough to build a business around closing it.