Caitlin Long

Caitlin Long grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, a university town on the high plains where her family had deep roots. She has often credited the state's frontier habits of self-reliance and skepticism toward distant authority with shaping her later views on money and banking ^[1].

She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Wyoming, then moved east for graduate study at Harvard, where she completed a law degree at Harvard Law School alongside a master's in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government ^[1]. The combination of legal training and public policy education would prove useful decades later, when she found herself drafting state statutes and arguing with federal regulators.

Anyone asking who was Caitlin Long before cryptocurrency finds a conventional, even textbook, path into high finance. Like many ambitious graduates of her generation, she headed for New York rather than back to the Mountain West, and she would not return professionally to Wyoming for more than twenty years.

Long began her career at Salomon Brothers, the storied bond trading house, in the mid 1990s. She later moved to Credit Suisse, where she worked in the insurance and pension businesses, before joining Morgan Stanley in 2007 ^[2].

At Morgan Stanley she rose to managing director and ran the firm's pension solutions group, advising corporate clients on managing and transferring the risks embedded in large defined benefit pension plans. The work placed her at the center of one of the era's major corporate finance trends, as companies such as General Motors and Verizon moved billions of dollars in pension obligations to insurers ^[2].

Her twenty two year run on Wall Street gave her an insider's understanding of clearing, settlement, custody, and collateral, the unglamorous plumbing of the financial system. That expertise became the foundation of her later argument that blockchain technology could remove layers of intermediation and risk from securities markets, a theme that dominates any serious Caitlin Long biography ^[3].

Long first bought bitcoin in 2012, initially as a personal experiment, and grew convinced that distributed ledgers addressed real structural weaknesses she had observed in post trade settlement ^[3]. While still at Morgan Stanley she began speaking publicly about the technology's potential for pension funds and securities processing.

In 2016 she left the bank to become chairman and president of Symbiont, a New York startup building smart contract technology for institutional markets. During her tenure the firm worked on projects including a blockchain pilot with the state of Delaware and a partnership with Vanguard on index data ^[3].

She also became a prolific public commentator, writing regularly as a contributor for Forbes on the intersection of cryptocurrency, banking, and regulation ^[4]. Her columns, which combined technical detail with sharp criticism of legacy market infrastructure, built her a large following among institutional investors and digital asset advocates.

A chance discovery pulled Long back to her home state. In 2017 she tried to donate appreciated bitcoin to the University of Wyoming and found that state money transmitter rules made the gift impractical. She responded by co-founding the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition in 2018 and volunteering to help legislators rewrite the rules ^[1].

Over the following years Wyoming enacted a series of statutes, more than a dozen in total, clarifying the legal status of digital assets, exempting certain tokens from state securities and money transmission laws, and recognizing direct property rights in digital assets ^[5]. Long served on the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, the legislative body that drafted much of this framework, and testified repeatedly in Cheyenne.

The most consequential product of that effort was the 2019 law creating the special purpose depository institution, or SPDI, a new state bank charter designed for companies that custody digital assets. The charter required full reserves against deposits and prohibited lending, a deliberately conservative model ^[5]. Among Caitlin Long achievements, the Wyoming legal framework is arguably the most durable, since it has been studied and partially imitated by other states.

In early 2020 Long announced Avanti Financial Group, later Avanti Bank & Trust, and applied for one of Wyoming's new SPDI charters. The Wyoming Division of Banking approved the charter in October 2020, making Avanti one of the first crypto native banks chartered in the United States ^[6]. The company raised venture funding from investors and set out to offer custody of bitcoin alongside dollar payment services for institutional clients. In 2022 the firm rebranded as Custodia Bank ^[6].

The business plan depended on obtaining a master account at the Federal Reserve, the account that lets a bank settle payments directly with the central bank rather than through a correspondent. Custodia applied in October 2020 and waited. In June 2022, after nineteen months without a decision, the bank sued the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in federal court in Wyoming, arguing that the delay was unlawful ^[7].

In January 2023 the Kansas City Fed formally denied the application, and the Federal Reserve Board separately rejected Custodia's bid for Fed membership, citing risks in its crypto focused business model ^[7]. Custodia pressed on with litigation. A federal district judge ruled against the bank in 2024, and the case moved to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, becoming a closely watched test of whether the Federal Reserve has discretion to refuse legally chartered banks access to the payment system ^[7]. Throughout the dispute Long argued publicly that regulators were conducting a coordinated effort to cut lawful crypto businesses off from banking, a campaign she and others labeled a new Operation Choke Point ^[4].

Despite the setbacks, Custodia continued operating under its Wyoming charter, and in 2025 the bank worked with Vantage Bank Texas to issue a tokenized dollar deposit on a public blockchain, an early demonstration of bank issued stablecoin style instruments ^[6].

Long has become one of the most visible advocates for bringing digital assets inside the regulated banking perimeter rather than leaving them offshore. She testifies before Congress and state legislatures, appears frequently in financial media, and maintains an active public presence where she dissects Federal Reserve policy, stablecoin legislation, and bank supervision ^[4].

Her influence is easiest to measure in law. The Wyoming statutes she helped shape created the first comprehensive state framework for digital asset banking in the United States, and the debates her lawsuit provoked fed directly into congressional discussions over master account transparency, which produced new disclosure requirements for the Federal Reserve ^[5]. Among notable Caitlin Long facts, she is one of very few people to have both run a Wall Street pension business and chartered a bank from scratch.

Supporters view her as a principled reformer who exposed inconsistencies in how regulators treat new entrants. Critics within the regulatory establishment have countered that caution toward crypto focused banks proved justified after the industry's 2022 failures. Either way, her career links three worlds that rarely meet: traditional securities finance, state level lawmaking, and cryptocurrency, and her litigation may shape the boundaries of central bank power for years to come ^[7].