On September 29, 2026, AstraBit announced a significant refresh of its strategic advisory board. The veteran-owned broker-dealer, registered with the SEC and a FINRA member (CRD #331540), welcomed two high-profile professionals—Lisa Wade and Josh Hawes—who will sit alongside John Buckley, the former Co-Chief Operating Officer of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The three advisors bring complementary expertise covering exchange operations, digital-asset market structures, and systematic trading, positioning AstraBit to deepen its bridge between traditional finance and decentralized ecosystems.
The board’s mandate focuses on guiding the firm’s trading infrastructure sharpening risk oversight, ensuring regulatory alignment, and accelerating international expansion. By drawing on the distinct backgrounds of its members, AstraBit aims to provide institutional-grade, secure trading solutions for both retail and professional investors.
AstraBit expands its strategic advisory board
Lisa Wade—digital-asset and central-bank specialist
Lisa Wade arrives with three decades of experience across global trading floors, institutional banking, fund management, and emerging digital-asset ecosystems. She currently serves as Managing Director of Change Investment Management, a thematic funds firm she co-founded in 2009. Prior to that, Wade was Chief Executive Officer of DigitalX Limited (ASX: DCC) and led Digital Innovation and Sustainability at National Australia Bank (NAB). While at NAB, she spearheaded Project Atom, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s central-bank digital currency pilot, and Project Carbon, a global alliance that tokenized voluntary carbon credits—a collaboration now known as Carbon Placet.
Wade’s earlier career includes a nine-year stint at Citigroup, where she specialized in arbitrage, derivatives, and equities trading, and she co-created RARI, Australia’s first responsible-investment ETF. Her governance roles span advisory work for the DFCRC Venture Fund, directorships on ASX subsidiary clearing and settlement boards, and a former co-chairmanship of the Digital Economy Council of Australia (DECA), which concluded in December 2025. Recognized as the 2024 Australian Fintech Female of the Year, Wade also holds board positions at Assetora and WhiteHawk Ltd. In her words, “AstraBit is building the infrastructure that can make digital asset markets more accessible and usable for institutional participants—not only for crypto-native users.” She added, “I look forward to supporting the team as it continues to scale.”
Josh Hawes—systematic-trading and corporate-governance expert
Josh Hawes brings over twenty years of expertise in systematic trading, quantitative risk architecture, and public-company governance. He founded and serves as CEO of Aegis Guild Capital, and holds the chairmanship of Royalty Management Holding Corporation (NASDAQ: RMCO). Hawes also sits as an independent director and Audit Committee Chair for American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ: AREC), while maintaining board roles across several private enterprises.
His capital-markets pedigree includes designing quantitative strategies and algorithmic execution across equities, futures, commodities, and fixed-income instruments. Hawes co-founded the securities-lending platform Delta1X at broker-dealer Drexel Hamilton and has built proprietary models, automated trading infrastructure, and institutional risk-transfer solutions for both domestic and international venues. Complementing his quantitative background, he served as lead investment banker for USA Rare Earth at Four Points Capital Partners and later as Chief Strategy Officer, shaping a U.S. critical-minerals supply-chain solution. An engineering graduate of Auburn University, Hawes continues advanced executive education at Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge. He remarked, “Every maturing asset class follows the same trajectory: fragmentation eventually gives way to institutional demand for transparent execution, robust risk architecture, and enterprise-grade infrastructure.” He concluded, “Digital assets have crossed that threshold. AstraBit is building the deterministic trading rails and controls that institutional capital actually requires to scale.”
Implications for AstraBit’s growth trajectory
The addition of Wade and Hawes equips AstraBit with a rare blend of regulatory insight, market-structure expertise, and quantitative trading know-how. Their guidance is expected to accelerate the firm’s development of deterministic trading rails—precise, low-latency pathways that institutional investors demand for reliable execution. By aligning its platform with the standards of traditional finance while retaining the flexibility of decentralized assets, AstraBit positions itself to attract a broader institutional client base.
Moreover, the board’s international perspective—spanning Asia-Pacific exchange operations (via John Buckley), Australian central-bank initiatives (through Wade), and U.S. capital-markets engineering (through Hawes)—reinforces AstraBit’s ambition to expand globally. The firm’s core mission—to bridge traditional finance and decentralized ecosystems—gains credibility as it now benefits from advisors who have built and overseen large-scale market infrastructures in both legacy and emerging domains.
With seasoned veterans from diverse corners of the financial world, the company is better equipped to navigate regulatory complexities, enhance risk management, and deliver enterprise-grade infrastructure that meets the evolving expectations of institutional capital.
