Digital Wealth Partners Announces New President and Board Chairman

Dallas-based Digital Wealth Partners, a firm specializing in digital asset investment management, has named Erin Friez as the company’s president and chairman of the board, joining CEO Max Kahn to scale the business for growth.

It’s not the first time that Kahn and Friez have worked together. Kahn served as director of strategy at Digital Asset Research and YieldX while Friez led operations and legal at those same firms.

Friez co-founded DAR and built partnerships with Bloomberg, Chainlink, and FTSE Russell. She developed the methodology that separated real trading from market manipulation, work that regulators cited when they wrote guidance on virtual currency listings. At YieldX, she ran digital assets and legal through the company’s sale to FNZ Group. Kahn handled strategy, institutional partnerships, and compliance at both firms.

According to Digital Wealth Partners, “They know how each other thinks.”

“Erin understands how to build institutional infrastructure in a space that moves too fast for most traditional players,” Kahn said in a statement. “We scaled two companies together before this. She knows what works and what doesn’t when you’re trying to bring real money into crypto.”

‘Crypto exposure without gambling’

Friez brings 15 years of expertise in law, finance, and cryptocurrencies. She co-founded DAR “back when most institutions still treated digital assets like radioactive material,” Digital Wealth Partners said.

She made a career out of helping banks and asset managers better understand blockchain and begin smart investing, the firm said. At London Stock Exchange Group, she worked on crypto index products for FTSE Russell. At PNC Asset Management, she encouraged a major regional bank to begin investing in digital assets. Most recently, as COO at Digital Ascension Group, she directs operations for the company’s fintech and digital asset focused family office.

“The team at Digital Wealth Partners are solving the right problem,” Friez said in a statement. “Financial advisors need tools and support to serve clients who want crypto exposure without gambling. That takes legal expertise, solid operational standards and products that actually work in a regulated environment. We built that playbook together before and now we’re doing it at scale.”

Digital Wealth Partners said that Friez’s superpower is “getting serious money comfortable with an asset class that still scares most compliance officers.”

She has experience advising on smart contract audits, building risk models that satisfied bank regulators, and structuring investments that blend traditional fixed income with tokenized assets, the firm said. Friez has also spoken at Nasdaq panels, written about data integrity, and fielded questions from large institutions on why clean pricing matters for institutional adoption.

Digital Wealth Partners is a registered investment advisory firm specializing in digital asset strategies for wealth managers and institutional clients. The firm launched client operations in late 2024 and has been scaling since. Kahn became CEO in July 2025. The company said that adding Friez to the leadership team “signals the firm’s push to capture market share as digital assets move from speculative bets to portfolio staples.”