For months after leaving the White House amid a tariff tiff with Donald Trump this spring, Gary Cohn appeared to be adrift. As the former Goldman Sachs exec wandered between his Upper East Side apartment and his home in the Hamptons, his future seemed equally murky. “It’s hard to be in the middle of everything, in the most important office in the world, and then have nothing to do,” one person who knows Cohn well told my colleague William D. Cohan. “He’ll want to be back in the mix.” A Wall Street job seemed like a stretch, but rumor had it Cohn was mulling starting his own private-equity firm or becoming the C.E.O. of a tech company. He was even, according to Anthony Scaramucci, considering “crypto.”

Several months later, it appears the Mooch was on the money. Though Cohn is seemingly still in employment limbo, on Friday the Financial Times reported that the former national economic adviser to the president will be joining the advisory board of Spring Labs, a start-up developing blockchain technology to help lenders verify customers’ identities. Working with the company was a “unique opportunity” and “an obvious place to take a very, very analog industry and digitize,” Cohn told the Financial Times. (In August, Cohn had told Bloomberg that while he was spending “two-thirds” of his time playing golf, he had also made calls about an investment “sort of in the cryptocurrency world.” Presumably Spring Labs was the company he was referring to.)

Cohn isn’t the only Wall Street dinosaur to go digital. After railing against the endeavor for months, Wall Street seems to have made an uneasy truce with the blockchain. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, who once called the cryptocurrency “a fraud” that wouldn’t “end well” and would get someone “killed,” announced this summer that his firm is “testing [blockchain] and will use it for a whole lot of things.” Others have been more hesitant to throw their support behind digital assets. Before stepping down from his C.E.O. perch at Goldman earlier this month, Lloyd Blankfein called bitcoin a vehicle for fraud—a confusing pronouncement given that shortly thereafter, the firm announced plans to build a crypto-trading desk. Months later, the firm pulled an apparent 180, reportedly hitting pause on its plans.

But going wholesale from Wall Street to blockchain—albeit with a stopover in the swamp—isn’t unheard of. Goldman Sachs alum Matthew Goetz started a cryptocurrency hedge fund called BlockTower Capital, and former head of J.P.Morgan global commodities Blythe Masters is now running a blockchain company, Digital Asset Holdings LLC. Moreover, instead of focusing on cryptocurrencies themselves, Spring Labs builds the technology behind them, making Cohn’s decision slightly less absurd than working directly with an alternative currency like dogecoin. The downside, of course, is that crypto is as volatile as it’s ever been: on Thursday, the global market lost $6 billion in value. Cohn’s timing, then, leaves something to be desired. But if his time in the White House is any indication, he’s more than willing to weather some reputational damage.