Name: Permissionless IV
Start: 2025-06-24T00:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-06-26T23:59:59-04:00
Location: Industry City

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Henri Stern is the cofounder and CEO of Privy. Privy builds user onboarding and wallet infrastructure to enable better, safer products built on crypto rails.

Henri Stern

mteam.eth

Abhay Kumar is an engineer and entrepreneur dedicated to creating products that connect every person and device. He currently serves as the Head of Protocol for Helium, overseeing the development and evolution of decentralized wireless networks powered by community-driven infrastructure. Helium aims to provide secure, cost-effective, and people-powered wireless coverage globally.



Abhay has been deeply involved in the Helium ecosystem since its inception. He began as a Hotspot deployer, transitioned into a core developer role on the Helium blockchain, and later served as CEO of the Helium Foundation from 2022 until recently. His leadership helped guide Helium through significant milestones, including its migration to Solana and the expansion of its decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN).



Prior to his work with Helium, Abhay was a lead engineer specializing in scalable payment infrastructure at Square and distributed systems at Powerset. His technical expertise and vision continue to drive innovation in connecting devices and people worldwide.

Abhay Kumar

Thomas Short

Swen Schäferjohann

Gwart

Merlin Egalite

Michael is the co-inventor and CEO of Abstract, a consumer crypto blockchain focused on mass market consumer adoption.



Helped incubate and launch the ZKsync protocol (ZK), a cutting-edge zero-knowledge technology designed to scale Ethereum to millions of developers.



As Vice President at Activision Blizzard, he played a pivotal role in launching five iconic games that captivated over 400 million players across 190 countries — titles included Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Overwatch II, and Diablo 4.



Started during the formative years of Bitcoin (2012) and Ethereum (2015), as well as Kubernetes (originated by Google), where he led adoption efforts to 72% of Fortune 500 companies, driving $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in just 26 months and contributing to a successful IPO shortly thereafter.



His diverse background also includes creating television properties for ABC, Comedy Central, and Showtime, as well as starting his career on Wall Street at Salomon Brothers.

Michael Lee

Ash Pampti

Donovan Choy

Danny Knettel

Kate Irwin

Debbie Soon

Luke Leasure

Nick Carpintino

Dmitriy Berenzon

Felipe Montealegre

Sean Hu

Michael Rihani currently leads teams at Coinbase focused on non-trading products in the main retail platform, including Cash, Card, Payments, DeFi, and Staking. His career is grounded in delivering software and services to hundreds of millions of people around the world, with a focus on large-scale consumer experiences. Prior to Coinbase, he led product management at Cash App, launching Cash App Lightning Network, Square Bitcoin Conversions, and Block's BTC treasury program. Before that, he oversaw product and tech teams at Tesla and Apple Pay building consumer software and services. Rihani holds an undergraduate degree from Virginia Tech, and a Master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech.

Michael Rihani

Ian Barile

Tzvi Wiesl

Pat Kim

Rick Latona

Yannik Schrade is the CEO and Co-Founder of Arcium, a global supercomputer for a hyper-encrypted web. As the lead architect and visionary behind Arcium, Yannik created the project by leveraging his expertise in cryptography with the goal of advancing data security and confidentiality.



A renowned thought leader, Yannik has spoken at several prominent industry conferences, including the 2024 World Economic Forum, where he challenged TradFi leaders on the importance of decentralization, privacy, and trustlessness.



He previously founded ShiftScreen, an iOS app, which attracted over 100,000 paying customers and was a regular top-seller globally. Yannik studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the Technical University of Munich, and he also studied law, adding another dimension to his extensive portfolio.

Yannik Schrade

Daniel Shapiro

Sam Kazemian is the founder of Frax Finance, a DeFi stablecoin protocol that bills itself as the decentralized central bank of crypto. Frax Finance also develops the modular rollup, Fraxtal. Before founding Frax, Sam was cofounder of IQ.wiki, a decentralized knowledge base on the blockchain.

Sam Kazemian

Hart is the Co-Founder of Risk Labs, the foundation supporting the UMA and Across protocols. UMA is an optimistic oracle that can verify arbitrary data on-chain. Across is a "intents-based" bridge offering cheap and near-instant cross-chain interoperability.



Hart studied computer science before working as an interest rate trader at Goldman Sachs through the financial crisis. In 2013 he co-founded Openfolio, a personal finance tracking platform that was acquired in 2017 by an asset manager. He now leads a team of oracle and interoperability researchers at Risk Labs.

Hart Lambur

Macauley was an editor and content creator in the professional chess world for 14 years, prior to joining Blockworks. At Bucerius Law School (Master in Law and Business, 2020) he researched stablecoins, decentralized finance and central bank digital currencies. He also holds an MA in Film Studies; film credits include Associate Producer of the 2016 Netflix feature documentary, "Magnus" about World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen. He is based in Germany.

Macauley Peterson

Stani Kulechov is a pioneer in decentralized finance and web3 social, a strong believer in decentralized solutions, and an advocate for a more open and fair internet. He is the Founder and CEO of Avara, the software development company behind decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Aave, stablecoin GHO, web3 social protocol – Lens, and mobile crypto wallet, Family. Avara’s vision is a people-powered internet that benefits all.

Stani Kulechov

Kyle Samani is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital, a thesis-driven cryptofund that invests in tokens and companies reshaping entire sectors of the global economy. Prior to Multicoin Capital, he co-founded Pristine (Upskill, 2017), an enterprise software company that enables deskless workers with solutions for smart glasses. Based in Austin, Texas, Samani is widely recognized as a thought leader on blockchain and cryptoeconomics. He holds degrees in Finance and Management from NYU Stern and has been programming since he was 10 years old. 



Follow him on Twitter @KyleSamani.

Kyle Samani

Michael Ippolito is a co-founder at Blockworks in charge of content and finance.&nbsp; Previously to co-founding Blockworks, Michael was a consultant where he advised mid-market manufacturing-focused companies on operational and capital efficiency as well as M&amp;A strategy.

Michael Ippolito

Eugene is a cofounder at Ellipsis Labs, which designs and builds sustainable DeFi protocols from first principles. Ellipsis Labs is a core contributor to Phoenix, a limit order book DEX on Solana. Prior to co-founding Ellipsis Labs, Eugene worked on DeFi protocol design, MEV, and HFT. He is also a contributor at Umbra Research.

Eugene Chen

I do research at Scroll. Specifically, I focus on bridge design and protocol decentralization. My background is in computer science and I have been in crypto full-time since 2018.

Toghrul Maharramov

Sreeram Kannan is Founder of EigenLayer and CEO of Eigen Labs, a Seattle-based technology company pioneering protocols for verifiable applications and services. Previously, he was a tenured associate professor at the University of Washington, where he directed the UW Blockchain Lab. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. Kannan left academia in 2018, recognizing blockchain's potential to accelerate human coordination. At Eigen Labs, his team is building the tools to extend crypto's trustless verification to any developer building any application. Today, hundreds of applications and rollups are building on EigenLayer's verifiable services (AVS) backstopped by billions of dollars in staked Ethereum and EIGEN.

Sreeram Kannan

Haseeb is a Managing Partner at Dragonfly. He was previously a partner at Metastable Capital, and has a background in software engineering at Airbnb and Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase).

Haseeb Qureshi

Dan Smith

David Rodriguez

Westie

Ceo @ <a href="http://helius.dev/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">helius.dev</a>, co-host of the Ligntspeed podcast.

Mert Mumtaz

David Hoffman is co-founder of Bankless and is a steward of crypto culture. David focuses on writing fundamental investment theses for Ether&nbsp;and Ethereum, while also making deep connections to impacting culture and the psyche of those who adopt a crypto lifestyle. David&nbsp;holds 99% of&nbsp;his wealth outside of Banks and inside of Ethereum, and is focused on leading the way for others to do the same.&nbsp;

David Hoffman

Jason Yanowitz

Barry is the cofounder of <a href="https://events.trustifi.com/api/o/v1/click/65c23bc8f626382a3afbcd5b/fff0f6/330618/38c45c/eb3beb/0a1240/119436/f394ce/c4bf49/e8666a/ef542d/85972d/627493/9a11d6/1f4096/1d247f/d58d79/c530d9/839df2/bdfa01/7316c5/c788a3/f74902/a30c45/38dabe/f58113/4f8f27/36d8f7/9ee4f4/99129c/db2655/8d1e66/9e626e/290212/fc3550/6d7b1f/38082b/616b1b/af8c50/8ebcbb/0df7b0/6423c4/c07c0b/e6dd1c/ba8ce6/6803c4/c37876/920221/297bc7/5a440b/f85ffc/ca2926/bacf60/3d1195/dc47d9/40aefc/e48a96/0052d7/57fa75/8cf655/c16b6b/f92718/0e7d73/abcb55/0dd73b/1b064a/069f8a/d5bc25/7c51b1/b0bcbd/28ac11/48d164/a0df45/7476ec/8558c8/dbcc78/521501/f2f211/13e330/aab4a2/b0ca1a/dd21ab/280ef4/e749da/debe9d/4974dc/0fb4a3/78f438/fb99c5/187646/4b3a51/0845db" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Skip</a> — the leading infrastructure platform for app chains. Skip's products deliver users, tokens, and data to the best app chains in crypto — Osmosis, Stride, dYdX, Celestia, and many more.

Barry Plunkett

Muneeb Ali is the Co-Founder and CEO of <a href="https://trustmachines.co/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trust Machines</a>, the company building out the Bitcoin economy. Earlier, he co-created <a href="https://stacks.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stacks</a>, a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts. He received his Ph.D. in Distributed Systems from Princeton. He is one of the main characters in George Gilder's book Life After Google and was a technical advisor to the HBO show Silicon Valley.

Muneeb Ali

<div class="wp-block-group">
Mike dudas is a founding partner of <a href="https://www.6thman.ventures/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">6th man ventures</a>, an early stage crypto vc firm. mike is also founder of <a href="https://linksdao.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">linksdao</a>, a community-first, nft-membership enabled golf &amp; leisure clubpreviously, mike was the founder &amp; ceo of <a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the block</a>, a leading research &amp; media company in cryptodudas earned a ba from Stanford and an mba from kellogg.
</div>

Mike Dudas

Bryan Pellegrino is a co-founder of LayerZero. He is focused on building an interoperability solution that scales to every chain while maintaining the core principles of censorship resistance, permissionlessness, and immutability. Before LayerZero, Bryan worked in AI research and ranked among the best poker players in the world.

Bryan Pellegrino

Keone Hon is the co-founder/CEO of Monad Labs, a team of systems engineers bringing parallel execution and high performance to the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Keone Hon

Casey Caruso is the founder and managing partner of Topology, an engineering-centric frontier tech VC firm. Casey started her career as an engineer at Google and went on to become Bessemer Venture Partner's crypto specialist. She was recruited out of Harvard to join Paradigm as an Investment Partner and is Forbes 30 Under 30 awardee for Venture Capital. Casey holds her B.S. in Computer Engineering, and MS in CS/AI.

Casey Caruso

Jon is the co-founder of Hyperlane, the open framework for interoperability and the CEO of Abacus Works, a core contributor to Hyperlane. Prior to founding Hyperlane he had spent several years co-leading Galaxy's investment team, while also leading many of the firm's bleeding edge initiatives. He spent the years prior to Galaxy as a crypto investor at Passport Capital, and Fixed Income trader at Morgan Stanley.

Jon Kol

Uma Roy is the co-founder and CEO of Succinct, which builds infrastructure tooling to make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to any developer.

Uma Roy

Jill is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Espresso Systems, working on bringing interoperability and decentralization to rollups. Previously, Jill ran crypto investments for early stage venture capital fund, Slow Ventures. Jill was also a co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit organization that researches how those without access to a free and open financial system manage their money. Jill has also conducted academic research on the use of cryptocurrencies in emerging markets as part of her graduate studies at Oxford University. She started her career as a fixed income trader at Goldman Sachs. She received an A.B. in Classics from Harvard University.

Jill Gunter

Samara Cohen, Senior Managing Director, is BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer of ETF and Index Investments and a member of the firm’s Global Executive Committee (GEC).



As CIO for ETF and Index Investments, Samara leads the teams delivering the market quality and investment integrity of roughly $6.6 trillion of BlackRock’s index funds and iShares ETFs. Encompassing portfolio managers, risk managers, platform architects, and market structure developers, her teams continuously pursue better ways for clients to access expanding investment opportunities and seek to lead in the modernization of the indexing industry and ETF markets.



Samara is a member of the GEC Investment Subcommittee and the GEC Talent Subcommittee. She is also the GEC sponsor for BlackRock’s Women’s Initiative &amp; Allies Network (WIN) and Co-Head of the Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Steering Committee.



Prior to rejoining BlackRock in 2015, Samara was a Managing Director in the Securities Division of Goldman Sachs, where she built and led the Global Market Transition team to develop and deliver solutions to clients in the evolving market structure and regulatory environment following the 2008 global financial crisis. Samara first joined BlackRock in 1993 as an analyst in the Institutional Client Business.



Samara has been recognized for her leadership in the financial services industry. In 2023, she was named one of American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Finance and she has been honored as one of Barron’s Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance in 2022, 2023, and 2024. She is a member of the Board of the Directors for the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), and a member of the Board of the BlackRock Foundation.



She earned a BS Econ in Finance from the Wharton School and a BA in Theatre Arts from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Samara Cohen

I am a cofounder and the CTO of&nbsp;<a href="https://megaeth.systems/">MegaLabs</a>, a start-up that is building MegaETH, the first Real-Time Blockchain. I recently finished my PhD in Computer Science at MIT, advised by&nbsp;<a href="https://people.csail.mit.edu/alizadeh/">Mohammad Alizadeh</a>. I was part of the&nbsp;<a href="http://nms.csail.mit.edu/">Networks and Mobile Systems Group</a>&nbsp;(NMS) of MIT CSAIL. My thesis is on efficient consensus and synchronization for distributed systems. I received my SM from MIT in 2020 and my BS in Computer Science from Peking University in 2018.



I love designing and building systems that are robust, performant, and easy to use. My current research focuses on computer network problems in the setting of blockchains. Some examples are&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/yangl1996/dispersed-ledger">DispersedLedger</a>, a framework for building BFT state machine replication protocols that run fast on fluctuating networks;&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/yangl1996/riblt">Rateless IBLTs</a>, a family of universal and near-optimal rateless codes for reconciling set differences. I have also published on the security aspect of blockchain protocols. My work has been supported by generous gifts from the Ethereum Foundation.



Occasionally, I write about what I do in&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.leiy.me/">my blog</a>. When away from the keyboard, I enjoy hiking, cycling, sailing and travelling. Plus, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. My callsign is KC1NOR.

Lei Yang

Smokey is one of the original co-founders of Berachain, an EVM-identical L1 powered by Proof of Liquidity. He studied engineering at the University of Waterloo, and was previously a healthcare startup founder, then seed/growth stage VC prior to founding Berachain. He has been a cryptocurrency investor since 2015, and is an active angel in infrastructure, DeFi, and UX tooling startups, while serving as a venture partner at Hack VC.

Smokey the Bera

Alex Watts

Lead Economist at Anza

Max Resnick

Ryan Connor

Felix Jauvin

Wei is a research partner at 1kx, where he focuses on research and investment around crypto deep tech and infrastructure. Before joining 1kx, he was a research partner at Bain Capital Crypto and served as technical advisor to numerous crypto startups. Prior to his investment career, he has published over a dozen academic papers around Cryptography and blockchains. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of California San Diego.

Wei Dai

18+ years in SaaS businesses starting in payments and online gaming with a successful exit. Previously held positions in growth stage companies as Creative Director/CTO. Founder and lead architect of Supra and co-designer of SupraBFT Consensus Algorithm.

Joshua Tobkin

Hadley is the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of Marinade, a leading company in the Solana DeFi ecosystem that has built the chain’s first and most robust non-custodial native staking protocol. He helps TradFi institutions explore, then decide how to benefit from the innovation happening on Solana. Hadley has been working in crypto assets and blockchain (for institutions and for startups/scaleups), since 2014 when he was SVP of Fidelity Labs. This is Fidelity’s in-house technology incubator where, from 2007 onwards, he led the design, development and product management teams to research and pilot several emerging technologies for the business divisions, including wearable computing, VR/AR, mobile applications (including the company’s first-ever app and app brokerage), AI, and others. He knew then that blockchain and cryptocurrencies would become increasingly relevant to global finance, and, at the behest of senior management, he began the company’s blockchain-specific incubator and digital currency group as SVP of the newly minted Bitcoin Incubator. Here, they developed Fidelity’s earliest digital asset products, including the ability to donate bitcoin to Fidelity Charitable, as well as launching Fidelity’s first bitcoin mining operation. These early successes put Fidelity on the map as one of the only institutions embracing crypto, which led him to join and help build Fidelity’s Digital Asset Services division in 2016. This brought the firm fully into the web3 world with several digital asset-related products and services, including the trading and custody of digital assets. Eager to bring more institutions on board, he jumped to the service side in 2018 to become COO at the blockchain infrastructure company Bloq, where he helped the firm significantly boost its revenue and diversify its product roadmap for enterprises. After Bloq, he headed up the AWS Innovation Lab, which allowed him to work with global brands on technological experimentation and deployment - and re-explore other emerging technologies, including AI, quantum computing, and others. From there, he was recruited to lead global digital asset custody for the Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM), where they launched the industry’s first bank-grade platform for digital asset custody (on bitcoin and Ethereum). While his day job remains focused on crypto assets, he also advises emerging technology businesses and startups in other sectors, including data storage/security (as well as blockchain analytics, institutional DeFi, and other web3 areas). This allows him to combine his other professional experiences, including the 17 years he spent at Fidelity and his training in product and design, to help new companies grow. Society-shifting technologies, like blockchain, require innovation of all types to thrive - not just in software &amp; hardware, but business ops, marketing, regulatory, risk, compliance, security, design mindsets, too. He received a B.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design as well as from Concordia University, where he studied Western civilization, culture, and design (which is why he firmly believes an understanding/appreciation of the liberal arts is critical for anyone (indeed, everyone) working on societal-shifting technologies!)

Hadley Stern

With 7 years of experience across investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity, Guy has built a strong foundation in the financial sector. Prior to founding Ethena, he spent 6 years at Cerberus Management, a firm with $60 billion in assets under management, where he focused on investing in financial services businesses across the capital structure.

Guy Young

Jon Charbonneau

Konstantin Richter is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. He has been active in the blockchain ecosystem as an advisor and contributor since 2015, with the likes of Gem,&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="http://po.et/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Po.et</a>, and MadHive. In 2017, he created Blockdaemon in order to bring institutional-grade infrastructure to blockchain protocols, crypto native and traditional financial institutions. Subsequently, Konstantin has helmed Blockdaemon through three major funding rounds raising $400M to date. The most recent being a Series C raising $207M at a $3.25B valuation led by Sapphire and Tiger Global with previous backers SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase Strategic Investments and Citi Ventures. Blockdaemon is the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure company for node management, MPC tech, and staking.

Konstantin Richter

Miguel Morel is a technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Arkham, a crypto exchange and data analytics company, backed by Bedrock Capital and founders of Palantir and OpenAI.

Miguel Morel

Pete Rizzo conducts archival research on Bitcoin’s history, working to identify the people and events that most impacted its development.

Pete Rizzo

A graduate of UF with a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy, he co-founded The Rollup (formerly DeFi Slate) in 2020, building one of the most respected media platforms in crypto. Now, Robbie consults for early-stage blockchain startups, exploring Bitcoin rollups, AI-driven finance, and tokenized governance while pushing the frontiers of knowledge through The Rollup Podcast and The Rollup Ventures.

Robbie

5+years of online business experience, self-made entrepreneur. Attended University of FL, dropped out after two years to start online marketing business. Grew it for two years, helped dozens of clients scale to 6-7 figures with email marketing, sales letters, paid ads, funnels and info products. Andy, Co-Founder of the Rollup and The Rollup Ventures is a crypto visionary who believes in the transformative power of AI agents and modular blockchains for the future of finance. He's betting big on 2025 being a breakout year for crypto, especially for those who've been building during the bear market.

Andy

Zano Sherwani

Kain Warwick is a DeFi pioneer - the Founder of <a href="https://www.synthetix.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Synthetix</a> in 2017 and <a href="https://infinex.xyz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Infinex</a> in 2023. In 2020, Kain popularized the concept of yield farming, helping spark the DeFi Summer boom and earning the moniker, ‘The father of modern agriculture’. Today, Infinex is his focus.



Infinex is a new kind of crypto app that provides access to onchain protocols, services and applications. It is designed to replace centralized platforms as the primary point of interaction for crypto users. Infinex has an extraordinary story so far. In 2024 it netted $67.70m from a sale of Patron NFTs, which sold 43,284 NFTs to venture capitalists, angel investors and the community. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund were among the participants, alongside angel investors such as Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik. To learn more, please visit <a href="https://infinex.xyz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://infinex.xyz</a> and Infinex on <a href="https://x.com/infinex_app" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">X</a>.

Kain Warwick

Ed Felten is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, a leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. His recent work focuses on blockchain scalability and security, including significant contributions to EIP 4844 and innovative research on Layer 2 data availability solutions. He previously served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer (2015-2017) and Chief Technologist at the FTC (2011-2012). A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Felten's current research advances crucial blockchain infrastructure development and security mechanisms.



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://x.com/EdFelten" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-felten-275171/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LinkedIn</a></li>
</ul>

Ed Felten

Jordi Alexander is the Founder of Selini Capital, a leading firm within Digital Assets trading and investing. Selini has its roots in traditional markets and High-Frequency Trading, but is currently one of the most active firms in onchain DeFi as well as early stage venture investing. Jordi is an advisor to projects innovating in the space including Mantle, and is cohost of the weekly Steady Lads podcast.

Jordi Alexander

Andre Cronje is a pioneering blockchain architect and the "Godfather of DeFi," whose innovations have reshaped decentralized finance. With over 25 years of experience in the financial and technology sectors, his contributions have led to the creation of multiple unicorn projects, including Yearn Finance (YFI), Fantom (FTM), Keep3r Network (KP3R), and Sonic (S).



Cronje's ve(3,3) tokenomics model has become the foundation for leading billion-dollar decentralized exchanges on most major Layer 2 networks, optimizing liquidity incentives and governance. His smart contract designs have set new standards in automated yield strategies, decentralized liquidity management, and protocol sustainability.



Beyond development, Cronje is also a published researcher, with peer-reviewed papers on ArXiv, contributing to blockchain and financial cryptography. His work has accumulated hundreds of citations, reinforcing his influence in both academic and applied DeFi innovation.



Recognized as one of the most influential figures in crypto, Cronje has received multiple "Most Influential in Crypto" awards from major media outlets. His work continues to shape the future of decentralized finance and blockchain infrastructure.

Andre Cronje

Zon is the co-founder of initia. He likes opinionated infra and uses the chain everyday. He’s one of the last defenders of the appchain thesis, spends too much time in etherium DeFi, and was originally a smart contract dev in cosmos. Zon studied computer science at Penn and operations at Wharton.

Boccaccio

Alex Blania is the CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the technology company building tools for World Network. He is also a co-founder of World Network with Sam Altman and Max Novendstern. Alex is responsible for leading strategy, development and execution of the technology and tools enabling World Network to ensure everyone benefits fairly from the opportunities AI presents.



World is a network of real humans built on a privacy-preserving proof of human and a globally inclusive financial network. Alex led the development of World’s custom, privacy-protecting device, the Orb, which has verified proof of human and uniqueness of 11+ million individuals worldwide; World ID, which is a privacy-preserving proof of human for the internet; and World App, which is one of the fastest-growing and most accessible self-custodial wallets available.



Alex holds degrees in Industrial Engineering and Physics from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and studied physics at Caltech before dedicating his full time and attention to supporting World. You can follow and interact with him on X/Twitter&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/alexblania" rel="noreferrer noopener">@alexblania</a>.

Alex Blania

Hayden Adams&nbsp;is the Founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs and inventor of the Uniswap Protocol, the largest decentralized exchange protocol. He began building in crypto in 2017. As his first project, he set out to build an application that fully embodied the unique properties of Ethereum: decentralized, trustless, permissionless, and secure. This project eventually became Uniswap.



As of April 2024, the Uniswap Protocol has processed over $2 trillion in lifetime volume. It competes head-on with centralized exchanges, offering 2x more liquidity than both Binance and Coinbase (two of the largest centralized exchanges) for popular pairs like Ethereum to stablecoin trades.



Today, Uniswap Labs contributes to the development of the Uniswap Protocol and builds products for users to safely and securely access DeFi — including the Uniswap Interface and the Uniswap Wallet, which collectively have served millions of users.

Hayden Adams

Robert Habermeier is a founding engineer of the Polkadot Network. During his 7-year tenure at Parity, Robert was responsible for the vast majority of Proof-of-Stake and consensus code for Polkadot and its underlying framework Substrate, including the code for parachain consensus. His technical leadership actively informed and shaped the Polkadot protocol design we know today. Prior to his work on Polkadot, Robert was a core developer on the Parity-Ethereum client, the first production-ready third-party Ethereum node.

Robert Habermeier

Patrick is the Founder of Commonware, a new company building an optimized stack for vertical blockchain applications. Before Commonware, Patrick served as the led engineering at Ava Labs and led the development of Rosetta (now Mesh) at Coinbase.

Patrick O'Grady

Armani Ferrante is the founder and CEO of Backpack. The Backpack ecosystem is composed of  <a href="https://www.backpack.app/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Backpack wallet</a>, the <a href="https://www.madlads.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mad Lads NFT collection</a>, and <a href="https://www.backpack.exchange/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Backpack Exchange</a>. Before founding Backpack in April 2022, he was the creator of <a href="https://www.anchor-lang.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anchor</a>, a groundbreaking developer tool that revolutionized programing on Solana. Anchor has become an integral part of numerous Solana projects and protocols, and bonding its commitments to simplifying the developer experience. Armani graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and before dedicating all his effort into crypto and web3, he used to work for Apple as a software engineer.

Armani Ferrante

Speakers

RWAs. American Dynamism. Reshoring DeFi Talent. US-based Capital Formation. DeFi apps.

DeFi Renaissance

Onchain Applications. Mobile Apps. Prediction Markets. NFTs. Onchain Gaming. Loyalty Engines. Creator Economy.

Consumer Apps

Blockchain design. EVM. SVM. Move. Modular vs Monolithic. Rollups. Scaling. Parallelization. Privacy & Security. ZK Proofs.

Protocol R&D

Tokenomics. Token Generation Events. Cash Flows and Fee Switches. Utility. Governance. Equity.

Token Design

Open Source Models. Onchain Verifiability. DePIN. Agents. Decentralized GPUs. Incentivized Training.

Crypto x AI

$BTC Dominance. Bitcoin Network Development. Scaling Bitcoin. Institutional & Nation State Adoption.

Permissionless IV