Ophelia Snyder had an unconventional route to becoming the co-founder of 21Shares alongside Hany Rashwan in 2018. 21Shares launched in Switzerland and introduced one of the world’s first ever physically backed crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) that year in Europe.

21Shares became the first issuer to launch crypto ETPs across multiple jurisdictions and grew to manage over $11bn in assets across 55 listed products by 30 September 2025. The following month  FalconX, the institutional digital asset prime brokerage, announced it had agreed to buy the asset manager.

Snyder told Markets Media that she was surprised by how much she loved the process of building a company and hitting all their targets was very satisfying.

“We were more successful than in our wildest dreams,” she said. “It was the honor of my life to  work with all those people, build the company, and contribute in some way to the evolution of the sector.”

FalconX completed the acquisition of 21Shares in November last year, resulting in the largest exit by a female founder in crypto according to Snyder. She explained that the sale was not a quick decision but the industry and the job description changed.

“The job went from being all about innovation and getting creative on product structures to being a lot about regulatory affairs and forming partnerships with institutions,” she added.

The 21X founders realized the company needed a different kind of leadership. They did not need to sell, according to Snyder, but began to search for a partner who could help the company build. She said: “It was all about positioning the company for the next stage and the decision to sell came later.”

In January 2025 Russell Barlow joined 21Shares as chief executive from UK asset manager abrdn, where he had been global head of alternative and multi-asset investments, and responsible for more than $200bn in assets. Following completion of the acquisition, Barlow has remained chief executive and 21Shares is independently managed under the FalconX umbrella.

FalconX completed the acquisition last November and Snyder left 21Shares the following month.

“Ultimately I decided it was time for me to move onto other things because my baby has grown and gone to college,” she added.  “If you try to keep your kids at home, you do them a disservice by not letting them blossom into who they are supposed to be.”

She believes the combined company is uniquely positioned for the next chapter of crypto, which is the convergence between traditional and decentralised finance. She added: “That seems to be panning out pretty well and I know our clients are happy.”

Systems thinking 

As an undergraduate Snyder studied Earth Systems at Stanford University and her first real job was making films, mostly about the ocean, for documentaries. She found that she loved the financial side of producing films and putting together all the numbers.

She then completed an MBA at NYU Stern and began working in banking, and said on her Substack that she genuinely thinks she has never been worse at a job in her life. However, she loved the numbers and the complicated financial structures.

Her unconventional background was very helpful, according to Snyder. She explained that it is useful to think things through from first principles when starting a business in a new sector.

“It turned out that if you are trying to do something that hasn’t been done before, starting from how things are done is not always the best,” she added. “Learning how to think deeply is probably the most essential skill.”

She has always enjoyed learning how structures make a system work, how money flows through a system effectively, how organizations work and how people work within them. Snyder argued that once people learn the relationships between all the components in systems they can do anything.

As a result, 21Shares built its infrastructure in-house, which gave the company more flexibility and speed to market, which became one of its main competitive advantages according to Snyder.

Another part of the unconventional route to becoming a founder is that Snyder had not bought an ETF before launching 21Shares. The idea to form the company was inspired by her mother who became interested in crypto but found it too complicated to invest in the asset class. Many people thought Snyder and Rashwan were crazy for launching a crypto ETP issuer back in 2018 as it either could not be done, would not be allowed by the regulators, or obody would want to buy the products even if it did launch.

Snyder told Markets Media that they looked at 27 jurisdictions before landing on Switzerland due to its history of neutrality and the ability to issue a product n European markets.

“The geographic expansion was slow and painful,” added Snyder. “It took us seven years to open the UK market.”

Crypto potential

Snyder believes the crypto market has completely changed in the last year. For example, crypto is becoming an asset class that fund managers cannot ignore, which Snyder said is “a really important shift in mentality.”

“Crypto is becoming infrastructure in a lot of really interesting ways such as stablecoins, DTTC’s  clearing product, JP Morgan’s tokenized deposits, and the list goes on,” she added.

Her bull case for crypto is that it becomes part of the critical path dependency for major financial institutions. She loves being involved in crypto and believes there is nothing more exciting than the combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain, which is going to change the face of capital markets. Snyder gave the example of the initial public offering of SpaceX, ElonMusk’s artificial intelligence and rocket company, as a tiny glimpse of what capital markets could look like in the future.

“You are seeing perpetuals and prediction markets, allowing for pre-IPO price discovery and exploring the line between a public and private company,” she added. “Tokenization doesn’t do anything unless you have sufficient liquidity and it doesn’t intrinsically aid in price discovery.”

Raghu Yarlagadda, chief executive of FalconX, said in a statement when the acquisition completed last November that the combination of FalconX’s institutional trading and risk management platform with 21Shares’ leadership in ETPs puts the firm in an even stronger position to accelerate innovation and broaden access to digital assets.

Barlow told Finews at the beginning of this year that 2025 had been the best year for 21Shares in terms of revenues and identifying new growth markets was a priority. He said in the article: “Operationally, the challenge was to leverage FalconX’s infrastructure in a way that allows us to generate synergies in growth and revenues.”

Eventually, Snyder may found another company but she is currently enjoying writing, reflecting on her experience at 21Shares and advising start ups. Her advice to new founders is that the job description is to make hard choices and they should focus on the few big bets that need to be right for a company to be successful, and not stress about the micro decisions.

“If and when I do this again, I will build from a place of using everything that I’ve learned,” she said.