AstraBit Strategic Advisory Board Adds Lisa Wade, Josh Hawes

New appointments deepen AstraBit’s leadership and presence across digital-asset infrastructure, institutional market structure, quantitative risk, and critical mineral markets.

Digital-asset markets are entering a more demanding phase of development.

The conversation is no longer limited to whether blockchain-based markets can attract institutional interest. The more practical questions are now about the infrastructure required to support that interest: How are assets accessed and traded? How is execution managed? What risk controls are necessary? How can market participants operate across traditional financial systems and decentralized ecosystems with greater transparency, consistency, and operational discipline?

Those questions sit at the center of AstraBit’s next stage of growth.

AstraBit is pleased to welcome Lisa Wade and Josh Hawes to its Strategic Advisory Board. They join John Buckley, the former Co-Chief Operating Officer and Head of Exchange Operations at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, as AstraBit continues to deepen its perspective across digital-asset markets, exchange operations, systematic trading, capital formation, and institutional risk management.

The appointments are not simply about adding prominent names to an advisory roster. They bring together three distinct but complementary views of how markets evolve.

Buckley brings deep exchange-operations experience and a global market-structure perspective. Wade brings decades of experience spanning institutional trading, banking, funds management, central-bank digital-currency initiatives, and tokenization. Hawes brings a background in quantitative strategy design, algorithmic execution, institutional risk architecture, and capital-markets development—including work connected to the strategic importance of critical minerals.

Together, their experience reflects the kind of thinking required when financial infrastructure begins to connect multiple market models: public and private, centralized and decentralized, traditional and digital.

Building For The Next Stage of Digital-Asset Markets

As digital assets mature, the expectations around infrastructure mature with them.

For early market participants, speed and access may have been the primary focus. For institutions and more sophisticated market participants, priorities broaden: transparent execution, clear operational controls, credible risk architecture, resilient workflows, and technology that supports real-world use cases rather than speculation alone.

AstraBit is building trading and portfolio infrastructure for that environment.

The company’s work spans digital-asset trading tools, portfolio infrastructure, and technology designed to support users across centralized and decentralized markets. AstraBit operates through CPT Capital LLC, a U.S. broker-dealer registered with the SEC and a FINRA member firm.

That combination—digital-first infrastructure developed alongside an understanding of regulated market expectations—requires broad expertise. It calls for people who understand how global exchanges operate, how institutional participants evaluate risk, how automated execution systems are designed, and how emerging asset classes may fit into a more modern market framework.

This is the context in which AstraBit is expanding its Strategic Advisory Board.

The Board advises AstraBit on trading infrastructure, risk oversight, regulatory alignment, and international expansion. Its role is to help the company maintain a long-term view as digital-asset markets become more interconnected with institutional finance, market-structure development, and real-world economic activity.

Why These Perspectives Matter Together

A strong digital-asset infrastructure business needs more than technical capability. It needs an understanding of the full environment in which the technology operates.

That includes the practical realities of exchange connectivity and trading execution. It includes the governance and risk expectations of institutional market participants. It includes designing transparent systems that can scale. And increasingly, it includes how digital infrastructure may support new forms of access, liquidity, ownership, and market participation across real-world assets.

Lisa Wade and Josh Hawes bring experience that speaks directly to those themes.

Wade has worked at the intersection of institutional markets, banking innovation, digital assets, and tokenization. Her career includes senior leadership roles across global trading, funds management, and financial-services innovation, as well as work on initiatives involving central-bank digital currency and tokenized voluntary carbon credits.

Hawes brings a complementary perspective from systematic trading, quantitative risk, capital formation, and public-company governance. His work spans proprietary models, automated trading infrastructure, institutional risk-transfer solutions, and the operational demands of building market-facing businesses.

Their backgrounds are different, but the connection is clear: both understand that market infrastructure must do more than function technically. It must be built with real-world constraints, risk considerations, and long-term adoption in mind.

Lisa Wade

Lisa Wade brings three decades of experience across global trading floors, institutional banking, funds management, and digital assets. She is the Managing Director of Change Investment Management, the thematic funds management firm she co-founded in 2009. Previously, she served as Chief Executive Officer of DigitalX Limited (ASX: DCC) and as Head of Digital Innovation and Sustainability at National Australia Bank.

During her time at NAB, Wade led Project Atom, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s central bank digital currency pilot, and Project Carbon, a global alliance focused on tokenizing voluntary carbon credits involving NAB, CIBC, and NatWest, now Carbon Placet. Earlier in her career, she spent nine years as a Director at Citigroup, specializing in arbitrage, derivatives, and equities trading. She also co-created RARI, Australia’s first responsible-investment ETF.

Wade serves in an advisory capacity to the DFCRC Venture Fund and is a Director on ASX Subsidiary Clearing and Settlement Boards. She previously served as Co-Chair of the Digital Economy Council of Australia (DECA) for five years, concluding her term in December 2025. In 2024, she was named Australian Fintech Female of the Year. She is on the Board of Assetora and WhiteHawk Ltd.

“AstraBit is building the infrastructure that can make digital asset markets more accessible and usable for institutional participants—not only for crypto-native users,” said Wade. “I look forward to supporting the team as it continues to scale.”

Josh Hawes

Josh Hawes brings over two decades of experience spanning systematic trading, quantitative risk architecture, investment banking, and public company governance. He is the Founder and CEO of Aegis Guild Capital and serves as Chairman of the Board of Royalty Management Holding Corporation (NASDAQ: RMCO), as well as independent director and Audit Committee Chair for American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ: AREC), alongside board roles across several private enterprises.

Hawes’ capital markets background centers on quantitative strategy design and algorithmic execution across global equities, futures, commodities, and fixed income. Throughout his career, including managing systematic investment funds and co-founding the securities-lending platform Delta1X at broker-dealer Drexel Hamilton, he has engineered proprietary models, automated trading infrastructure, and institutional risk-transfer solutions across domestic and international venues.

Complementing his quantitative background, Hawes brings deep corporate finance and transaction experience. He served as lead investment banker for USA Rare Earth at Four Points Capital Partners before joining the executive team as Chief Strategy Officer, where he helped shape the U.S. critical minerals supply chain solution. He holds an engineering degree from Auburn University and continues his advanced executive education across institutions including Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge.

“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,” Hawes said. “Digital assets have crossed that threshold. AstraBit is building the deterministic trading rails and controls that institutional capital actually requires to scale.”

Critical Minerals and Market Infrastructure

Critical minerals sit behind some of the world’s most consequential industrial and technology supply chains. They support electrification, energy systems, advanced manufacturing, defense technologies, and the materials needed to build a more resilient economy.

As these markets become increasingly strategic, the infrastructure around them matters more. Participants need stronger information flows, clearer processes, robust risk frameworks, and market structures that can support long-term capital formation across complex supply chains.

That is one reason Josh Hawes’ background adds a distinct dimension to AstraBit’s Strategic Advisory Board.

Hawes brings experience across systematic trading, quantitative risk architecture, investment banking, and public-company governance. He also brings firsthand experience in the U.S. critical-minerals sector, including his work helping shape a domestic critical-minerals supply-chain strategy.

That combination is especially relevant as financial markets, real-world industries, and digital infrastructure become more connected. The future of market infrastructure will not be defined only by how digital assets trade. It will also be shaped by how institutions assess, structure, access, and manage participation in strategically important assets and industries.

For AstraBit, Hawes brings a perspective spanning execution systems, risk architecture, capital markets, and the real-economy considerations increasingly shaping how new market infrastructure is developed.

Looking Ahead

The addition of Lisa Wade and Josh Hawes strengthens AstraBit’s ability to think across the full landscape of modern market infrastructure.

Wade brings experience in institutional banking, digital innovation, tokenization, and market modernization. Hawes brings expertise in quantitative trading, risk architecture, capital markets, governance, and critical minerals. Alongside Buckley’s exchange-operations and Asia-Pacific market-structure background, the Strategic Advisory Board offers AstraBit a broader set of perspectives as it builds for the next phase of digital-asset adoption.

The work ahead is not about chasing every trend in digital assets. It is about building dependable infrastructure for markets that demand more from their technology: more control, more transparency, more operational resilience, and more thoughtful connections between digital systems and the broader financial economy.

That is the foundation AstraBit is building.

About AstraBit

AstraBit is a digital-first fintech firm building trading and portfolio infrastructure for digital-asset markets. AstraBit operates through CPT Capital LLC, a U.S. broker-dealer registered with the SEC and a FINRA member firm (CRD #331540). This communication is informational only and is not an offer to buy or sell any security or digital asset, or investment advice.