Former Crypto.com Executive Joins BYTEX As Co-Founder

Diana Pires has joined Singapore-based trading infrastructure company BYTEX as co-founder. She will oversee commercial operations, institutional partnerships and market strategy as the company expands its open-source software for enterprise users.

Pires will work on building relationships with institutional clients, developing new distribution channels and expanding BYTEX into additional markets. The company is developing infrastructure for automated, AI-driven and agentic trading, beginning with digital assets and later targeting other financial markets.

Pires spent more than seven years in digital assets and financial technology, mainly in commercial roles. She was vice president of institutional sales at Crypto.com from 2019 to 2022, covering professional and institutional trading clients. Before that, she was an assistant vice president at OKX from 2018 to 2019. From 2022 to 2025, she advised and consulted for companies in the sector.

She has spoken at TOKEN2049, Consensus and Digital Asset Summit NYC about institutional adoption, governance for autonomous systems, and women in AI and fintech leadership. Pires holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Brunel University of London and paused a master’s degree program in blockchain and digital currency at the University of Nicosia.

Pires described BYTEX’s open-source model as a key reason for joining the company. “Closed infrastructure is a hard sell right now. Firms want to inspect the software that touches their critical processes, and open-source is the only honest answer to that,” she said.

BYTEX’s Core product is an open-source, event-driven trading engine released under the Apache-2.0 license. Users write strategies as documents that the engine can run in backtesting, paper trading and live execution without rewriting them for each environment. Studio adds a visual interface for creating and testing strategies on a canvas.

The system allows AI agents to operate within set limits. It includes permissions, exposure controls, position limits and execution restrictions, and records decisions made by an agent. Exchange keys are stored separately from Studio, which does not access them.

Research published in 2026 by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found that 52% of financial-services respondents had adopted agentic AI. Of those surveyed, 23% said their organizations were scaling or transforming such systems, while 81% expected agentic AI to reach meaningful adoption by 2030.

“Adoption is running ahead of the tooling required to support it, and that gap is where BYTEX operates,” Pires said. She added that her work would focus on showing that open-source infrastructure can meet institutional requirements while allowing clients to retain control of their systems.