Boss of London Metal Exchange Matthew Chamberlain leaving

The boss of the London Metal Exchange (LME) is leaving less than a year after his drive to shut its famous trading floor failed. 

Matthew Chamberlain will step down from the City institution at the end of April to run an obscure crypto-currency startup. 

Komainu, which is headquartered in Jersey, stores crypto-currencies such as bitcoin for investors to keep them safe. It was founded in 2018 and raised £18.5m last year.

It will mark a drastic change for Chamberlain, who has headed the 145-year-old LME since 2017. 

The exchange runs one of the last ‘open-outcry’ marketplaces in Europe, where traders bark ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ orders to one another around a circular red leather sofa and setting global prices for industrial metals such as copper and aluminium. 

Chamberlain, who has worked in mergers and acquisitions at Citibank and UBS, said he believes digital currency technologies ‘will only deliver their true potential when robust infrastructure exists to make them easily and reliably available to all those who wish to participate in this unprecedented period of financial democratisation’.