Blythe Masters is walking a tightrope to her next career in high finance.
The 46-year-old finance whiz, once the most powerful woman on Wall Street, is in high-stakes negotiations with investors for a $35 million financing round at the technology startup she now heads that will value the company at $100 million, The Post has learned.
The company, Digital Asset Holdings, hopes to use the bleeding-edge technology behind bitcoin to shake-up the world of finance — using it to cut costs and speed transactions. DAH hopes to close the funding round by Christmas Eve, but investors aren’t holding their breath, sources said.
For Masters, the stage is a bit smaller than at her last gig — where, as chair of JPMorgan Chase’s global commodities business, she was thought of as a possible heir apparent to Chief Executive Jamie Dimon.
But Masters was forced from the bank in May 2014 after 27 years — having started as an intern — after a government regulator fined JPM $410 million for allegedly rigging the California energy markets.
The bank didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing and Masters was never implicated or charged.
Ten months after she left JPM, Masters signed on with DAH.
While there has been great interest on Wall Street to invest in Masters’ new project — a Nov. 21 e-mail from her, sources said, describes the funding round as being “quite materially oversubscribed” — some are growing impatient with DAH’s slow progress.
Negotiations about the board composition, shareholder voting rights, and how shareholders could sell stock have been rocky at times, sources said.
While the deal is still being negotiated and could fall apart, JPM is expected to lead the investment round with $7.5 million, according to four sources.
Spanish bank Santander, where Masters is a non-executive chairman, is expected to invest about $3 million. Other potential investors include Markit, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Nasdaq.
At the same time, DAH’s wooing of talent hasn’t been so smooth.
Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury Secretary who’s now president of Warburg Pincus, the New York private equity firm, recently turned down an invitation to join DAH’s board.
A Warburg spokeswoman declined to comment.
Spokespeople for JPM, Citi, Santander, BofA, Markit, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and DAH also declined to comment.