Nico Pasquariello
Digital Asset Specialist, Cantor Fitzgerald
Pasquariello is the digital asset specialist whose reading of the August 2026 Coldcard exploit framed it for Cantor Fitzgerald's clients as a question of where bitcoin is custodied rather than of where its price is going.
Why the room needs them.
Nico Pasquariello is a digital asset specialist at the New York investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald. Pasquariello spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 in a fireside on digital asset treasuries, and wrote Cantor's August 2026 client note on the Coldcard wallet exploit.
The full account.
Nico Pasquariello is a digital asset specialist at Cantor Fitzgerald, the New York-based investment bank and financial services firm founded in 1945, and covers digital assets for the bank's institutional clients.
Pasquariello's public record is made up of the research Cantor sends to those clients rather than by-lined articles or broadcast work. In the note the bank issued on Wednesday 5 August 2026, after an exploit of the Coldcard hardware wallet drained bitcoin from holders who managed their own private keys, Pasquariello wrote: “The read-through is second-order but we would expect that token flows to custodians and exchanges will increase following the hack.” CoinDesk carried the comment on 5 August 2026 and TheStreet on 6 August 2026, both identifying Pasquariello as a digital asset specialist at the bank. The same note argued that the breach could push Coldcard users towards managed custody providers, and named Robinhood Markets, Coinbase Global, BitGo Holdings, Bullish, eToro Group and Gemini Space Station as firms that might see increased customer inflows as a result. The position read the failure of one device as a question about where bitcoin is held rather than as a call on its price.
Pasquariello spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026, the invitation-only executive summit organised by X Ventures and held on 2–3 June 2026 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre Palace, Paris. The appearance was a fireside on the Taostats Stage on 2 June 2026, from 13:10 to 13:30, titled “The Role of Digital Asset Treasuries and the Investment Case Ahead”. Hyunsu Jung shared the session and Hadley Stern moderated it. The programme billed Pasquariello as “Digital Assets Specialist, Cantor”, without specifying which Cantor entity.
The CfC St. Moritz digital assets conference also lists Pasquariello among its speakers, under the title Digital Asset Specialist and the Cantor Crypto mark, though that listing carries no date and no session. Beyond the research work, no employer biography page, dated career profile, education record or personal publishing channel for this Nico Pasquariello could be verified from a primary source.
What Nico believes about the next ten years.
Years of shipping.
Lines that keep proving correct.
“The read-through is second-order but we would expect that token flows to custodians and exchanges will increase following the hack”
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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