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

Danny K.

Kate Irwin

Debbie Soon

Luke Leasure

Nick Carpinito

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

Andrew Koller

Ali Yahya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he invests in crypto. Ali works with numerous portfolio companies, including Alchemy, Aleo, Aztec, EigenLayer, Espresso, Gensyn, LayerZero, Solana, Sound.xyz, XMTP, and zkSync.



Before Andreessen Horowitz, he was a software engineer and researcher at Google X, where he worked on the Everyday Robot project, which aims to build a robot that is smart and affordable enough to be viable as a consumer product for the home. He also worked at Google Brain, Google’s Artificial Intelligence lab, where he was a core developer on TensorFlow, Google’s primary library for machine learning.



Ali began his career as a student and researcher at Stanford University, where he focused on the intersection of Computer Security, Distributed Systems, and Computer Networking. He first discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2010 while doing research at Stanford Computer Security Lab, and has followed the space closely ever since.

Ali Yahya

Danny Ryan

David Vorick

Jean Herelle

Furqan Rydhan

Luca Prosperi is Co-Founder and CEO of M0. With a 20-year career dedicated to building, advising, researching, and investing in financial intermediaries, Luca Prosperi has been at the forefront of transformative change in the financial sector. Before founding M0, his journey has seen him contribute to the evolution of some of the most impactful DeFi protocols, including his previous role in Lending Oversight at MakerDAO, advising investors operating in the space, and publishing his research at Dirt Roads.

Luca Prosperi

Dr. Boneh is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University where he heads the applied cryptography group and co-directs the Center for Blockchain Research. Dr. Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to blockchains and to computer security. He is the author of over 200 publications in the field, and is a recipient of the 2014 ACM prize and the 2013 Godel prize.

Dr. Dan Boneh

Sal is the Co-Founder &amp; CEO of Bullpen. Prior to Bullpen, he was a researcher at Galaxy Digital where he wrote the first long-form report on Solana and its emergent ecosystem. Prior to Galaxy, he focused on data and analytics at ShapeShift. He studied Computer Science with a focus on Machine Learning &amp; AI at Cornell Tech (MEng) and Applied Economics &amp; Management at Cornell Univeristy (BS).

Sal Qadir

Leonard Dorlöchter is the co-founder of peaq, the layer-1 blockchain powering the Machine Economy. Throughout his years-long journey in Web3, Leonard has created multiple disruptive projects and supported innovators across various industries as an advisor and mentor. He thrives at the intersection of business and engineering and is passionate about blockchain's transformational potential.

Leo Dorlöchter

CEO @ Delphi Digital | Founding Partner @ Delphi Ventures

Anil Lulla

Jacob is a Co-founder at Lombard, where he is responsible for driving strategic vision and overseeing operational execution. Prior to founding Lombard, Jacob served as the COO at a DeFi derivatives protocol, Perennial, where he was the first hire and played a crucial role in shaping the company's direction and growth.



Before joining Perennial, Jacob spent nearly three years at Polychain Capital as a Partner on the Ventures team, leading venture investments, acting as the sole researcher on the liquid fund, and leading governance.

Jacob Phillips

Jeff Garzik is the co-founder of Hemi, a modular layer-2 network powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum. He has long been at the center of developing and commercializing open source software related to Bitcoin and blockchain technology. Previously, Jeff spent five years as an early Bitcoin core developer and ten years at Red Hat. His work with the Linux kernel is now found in every Android phone and data center running Linux today. During the early days of Bitcoin, he gave away 15,678 BTC in developer bounties, which is worth $1.4 billion today.



About Hemi



Powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, Hemi (<a href="https://hemi.xyz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://hemi.xyz/</a>) is a modular network for superior scaling, security, and interoperability. While other projects approach Bitcoin and Ethereum as ecosystem silos, Hemi views them as components of a single supernetwork. This unlocks new levels of programmability, portability, and potential. Hemi envisions a converged Internet ecosystem that is ready for the many challenges of Bitcoin DeFi, as well as a web3 and AI-driven future that is colliding with the Internet at-large. Follow Hemi at <a href="https://x.com/hemi_xyz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://x.com/hemi_xyz/</a>.

Jeff Garzik

Hunter Beast is the author of BIP-360 to upgrade Bitcoin’s security by introducing quantum-resistant address types, and is a senior protocol engineer for the Anduro sidechain platform.

Hunter Beast

Jeremy Rubin

Nitesh

Carlos Gonzales Campos

Nikhil Chaturdevi

Darren Mims

Jacob Sharples

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar

Ivan Soto-Wright

Ben Coverston

William Foxley

Illia Polosukhin

Nathan Allman

Neil Chatterjee

Antonina Norair

Jake is Chief Legal Officer at Variant, where he works with our portfolio to develop legal and regulatory strategies that help them effectively execute their visions. He is the former Chief Policy Officer at Blockchain Association, the largest advocacy group for the crypto industry in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was General Counsel at Compound Labs, where he helped pioneer “progressive decentralization,” a playbook that became hugely influential across the crypto industry.



He began his legal career with Baker McKenzie LLP, where he focused on anti-corruption and anti-money laundering compliance and investigations. He later represented individual and corporate clients in cryptocurrency-related securities litigation and government enforcement defense matters at Kobre &amp; Kim LLP. Jake also clerked for the Honorable Fernando M. Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Jake Chervinsky

Tarun is an alumni of D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES), Vatic Labs, an HFT firm, and Cornell. He fell into the blockchain world in 2011, when he was working on ASICs at DESRES and observed Bitcoin ASIC mining rigs substantially delay DESRES’s ASIC production. He has spent the last seven years working on simulation-based R&amp;D at the intersection of high-performance computing and AI and is applying this knowledge to the blockchain ecosystem.

Tarun Chitra

Robert Leshner is the CEO and Co-founder of Superstate, an asset management firm modernizing investing through tokenized financial products. Prior to founding Superstate, Leshner co-founded Compound Labs in 2017, which developed one of the first DeFi applications. Robert is a venture investor at Robot Ventures and co-hosts The Chopping Block, a crypto-native podcast. He is directly responsible for designing smart contracts such as Governor Bravo and the ERC-7246 token standard, Encumber. He has a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and is a Chartered Financial Analyst. Additionally, Robert is the former chair of the San Francisco Revenue Bond Oversight Committee and a CFA charter holder.

Robert Leshner

Ben is a co-founder of Optimism, a leading Ethereum L2 ecosystem. He served as Chief Scientist before becoming a director at the Optimism Foundation. In his free time, he makes Ethereum-based parody songs under his stage name, Weird ETH Yankovic.

Ben Jones

Sid Powell is the CEO &amp; Co-Founder of Maple Finance and with his Co-Founder Joe Flanagan founded Maple in 2019. Sid comes from a background in debt capital markets and institutional banking. During his career in traditional finance, he participated in $3BN+ of corporate bond issuance,and served as Treasurer for a commercial lending company in Australia. Maple has originated more than $5b in institutional lending since inception and currently holds over $550m in assets on the platform. We aim to be the global leader in tokenized private credit and first choice for institutional borrowers.

Sid Powell

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

Lekker Capital is a global macro hedge fund with a particular focus on the emerging digital asset industry. Prior to founding Lekker, Quinn served as the Head of Capital Markets for two institutional lending businesses in the digital asset ecosystem, most recently at Maple Finance. Quinn spent five years in fixed income and capital markets at Guggenheim Partners in New York before his full-time foray into crypto.

Quinn Thompson

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 founded the Stacks project, a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts. Stacks is the leading Bitcoin Layer-2, it enables fast, cheap transfers of BTC and makes BTC programmable in L2 smart contracts. He invests in and builds new Bitcoin apps through Trust Machines. Muneeb has been working on internet protocols and distributed systems for 15+ years and received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University, where he occasionally gives guest lectures.

Muneeb Ali

Eli&nbsp;is a co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, and Chairman of its Board of Directors.



He has been researching cryptographic and zero knowledge proofs of computational integrity ever since he received his Phd in Theoretical Computer Science from the Hebrew University in 2001.&nbsp;Eli&nbsp;is a co-inventor of the STARK, FRI and Zerocash protocols and a Founding Scientist of the Zcash Company. Over the years he held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Harvard and MIT, and, most recently, was a Professor of CS at Technion, which he left to co-found StarkWare.

Eli-Ben Sasson

<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

A seasoned open-source developer with over 25 years of experience, Greg is the founder of&nbsp;Akash, an open network that provides permissionless access to cloud resources. Greg is also the CEO of Overclock Labs, which is the creator and largest contributor to&nbsp;Akash.



Before&nbsp;Akash, Greg founded AngelHack, the world's largest hackathon organization, which boasts over 200,000 developers across 164 cities worldwide. Greg began his career at IBM and later designed Kaiser Permanente's first cloud architecture in 2008.



With expertise in massively distributed systems, Greg is recognized for his contributions to widely adopted cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, Terraform, and Nomad. His work has been featured in top-tier publications, including The New York Times, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Forbes, TechCrunch, and Yahoo! Finance. Greg was instrumental in the passing of California's first Blockchain law, providing the first expert witness testimony at the Senate.

Greg Osuri

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

Santiago Roel Santos (CryptoPunk #9159) is an investor focusing at the intersection of DeFi and the Web3 metaverse (NFTs/gaming). Most recently was a Partner at ParaFi Capital, one of the largest crypto funds specializing in DeFi. Prior to that, he was at Sageview Capital investing in Internet and software and, before that, at JP Morgan investment banking. Santiago began investing in crypto in 2012.

Santiago Roel Santos

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

Avery is the CTO and Co-founder of Aptos, the safe and scalable layer 1 blockchain. Avery spent over a decade leading teams at Meta, most recently as the Tech Lead of the crypto platform which covered projects across general blockchain development and ecosystems, wallet infrastructure, strategy and most notably the Diem blockchain. Prior to that, Avery was the overall tech lead of all of Meta’s batch processing teams including Spark, Graph processing (Apache Giraph), Facebook Hive/Hadoop (Corona), distributed scheduling, and the unified programming model for pipelines.&nbsp; These technologies power analytics for all of Meta’s products and scale to hundreds of thousands of machines.



Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Avery studied computer engineering at Northwestern University where he also received his PhD in Computer Engineering specializing in the area of supercomputing, parallel computing frameworks, and high-performance file systems.

Avery Ching

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

Byron Gilliam

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

Austin Campbell

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

Joe Cutler helps evaluate the regulatory exposure and compliance paths for emerging distributed ledger technology companies, cryptocurrency exchanges, and token-based projects. He provides guidance related to financial services, principally those involving money transmission, exchange, and emerging payment solutions. Joe also helps companies obtain state money transmission licenses, register with Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) as money services businesses, draft and implement anti-money laundering programs, and comply with state and federal financial privacy laws. His litigation work focuses on combating cybercrime and enforcing website terms of use. A leader in the blockchain space, Joe represented Washington state’s first licensed bitcoin company, CoinMe, and first cryptocurrency point-of-sale solution for the cannabis industry. He is working with cryptocurrency exchanges to obtain their money transmitter licenses and formalize the requisite internal governance to operate in the United States. Joe counseled 15 U.S. representatives and senators on ways to integrate blockchain technology into government functions to reduce bureaucracy and testified before Washington State House and Senate legislative committees considering legislation related to blockchain and cryptocurrency. Joe also represented clients under threat of enforcement by the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions.

Joe Cutler

Jon Charbonneau

David Pakman is a Managing Partner and Head of Venture Investments at CoinFund, focused on leading the firm’s venture investing activities. David developed an early interest in mining Bitcoin before he began building Ethereum mining rigs in 2017. David is widely recognized for his track record and thought leadership in crypto, consumer, and enterprise technology investing. During his 13 years at Venrock he led the Series A round and sits on the board of Dapper Labs, led the Series A and B rounds of Dollar Shave Club (sold to Unilever for $1B), and led early-stage investments in robotics, AI, consumer and carbon removal tech companies. He personally invested in Coinbase prior to their IPO and was named the 55th top venture capitalist in the world by CB Insights. Prior to CoinFund, David was a partner at venture capital firm Venrock, co-founder of Myplay, CEO of eMusic and the co-founder of Apple’s Music Group. David is a graduate and a former member of the Board of Overseers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science with a degree in Computer Science Engineering.

David Pakman

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

Rich Rines is an early Bitcoin adopter (2013 OG) who helped scale Coinbase's digital infrastructure, facilitating over $1 trillion in value. Now fully dedicated to advancing Bitcoin's next frontier through the Core ecosystem, he merges BTC's uncompromising security with DeFi's boundless innovation. As CEO of Element Wallet and founder of the B2B software company AutoReach, Rich balances "zero-to-one" creativity with "one-to-100" operational rigor—bridging the gap between big ideas and broad adoption. Driven by an entrepreneurial vision, he's transforming how institutions and individuals expand Bitcoin's utility, unleashing trillions in untapped value.

Rich Rines

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.

Permissionless IV

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Hackathon: Into the Mainstream

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