Mark Yusko is the Founder, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management. He is also the Managing Partner of Morgan Creek Digital. Morgan Creek Capital Management was founded in 2004 and currently manages close to $2 billion in discretionary and non-discretionary assets. Prior to founding Morgan Creek, Mr. Yusko was CIO and Founder of UNC Management Company (UNCMC), the Endowment investment office for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before that, he was Senior Investment Director for the University of Notre Dame Investment Office.

Mr. Yusko has been at the forefront of institutional investing throughout his career. An early investor in alternative asset classes at Notre Dame, he brought the Endowment Model of investing to UNC, which contributed to significant performance gains for the Endowment. The Endowment Model is the cornerstone philosophy of Morgan Creek, as is the mandate to Invest in Innovation. Mr. Yusko is again at the forefront of institutional investing through Morgan Creek Digital Assets, which was formed in 2018. Morgan Creek Digital is an early stage investor in blockchain technology, digital currency and digital assets.

Mr. Yusko received a BA with Honors from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA in Accounting and Finance from the University of Chicago.

Leah Wald is an economist with an expertise in asset management focusing on value investing. She co-founded Valkyrie with CIO Steven McClurg, after a career spanning NGOs, the World Bank, and asset management. 

Prior roles include a stint at Vital Financial, where Ms. Wald spearheaded investment strategies for multi-billion dollar asset managers on global macro strategy; Ms. Wald was also partner at Lucid Investment Strategies, an asset management firm specializing in cryptocurrency investments. Additionally, she worked at the World Bank Group and co-founded Veterati, a mentorship platform assisting unemployed and transitioning US veterans to secure meaningful employment.

Ms. Wald is a contributing writer for Forbes and co-authored the book Hyperwave Theory: The Rogue Waves of Financial Markets.

Jurrien Timmer is the Director of Global Macro at Fidelity Investments. Fidelity Investments is a leading
provider of investment management, retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage, benefits
outsourcing, and other financial products and services to institutions, financial intermediaries, and
individuals.

Jurrien is part of Fidelity’s Global Asset Allocation group, where he specializes in asset allocation and
global macro strategy. Jurrien has been at Fidelity for 27 years and has close to four decades of
experience in the industry. He appears frequently in the media and can be seen on CNBC, Bloomberg,
and Fox Business. He is also on social media via Twitter & LinkedIn.

Prior to assuming his current position in 2005, Mr. Timmer held various other roles within Fidelity,
including director of market research and technical research analyst. He also co-managed Fidelity Global
Strategies Fund from 2007 to 2014. Before joining Fidelity in 1995, Mr. Timmer was a vice president in
the Fixed Income group at ABN AMRO Bank in New York. He has been in the investments industry since
1985.

Jurrien earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Finance from Babson College. He was born and raised a Dutch citizen in Aruba, but has been living in the United States all of his adult life. He became a US
citizen in 2002. Jurrien is a strong proponent of healthy work-life integration and is an avid cook and
cyclist.

Robert is the CEO and founder of Compound Labs. Compound Labs created the Compound Protocol, a leading algorithmic, autonomous interest rate protocol; and Compound Treasury, a crypto-powered cash management solution designed for corporate treasuries and institutions.

Robert began his career in finance with Discover Financial Services and HPM Partners. He subsequently founded two software companies and worked as a product lead at Postmates.  Robert graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Economics, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.  He is also an investor at Robot Ventures, which focuses on seed investments in fintech and crypto companies.

Brent Johnson brings over twenty years of experience in the financial markets to his position as CEO of Santiago Capital where he manages $175mm for High Net Worth families via separately managed accounts and private funds.  

Brent enjoyed more than nine years as a Managing Director at BakerAvenue Asset Management, a $2 Billion Asset Manager and Wealth Management firm, with offices in San Francisco, Dallas and New York.  He was the lead advisor for several of the firms largest clients.  

Before joining BakerAvenue, Brent spent nine years at Credit Suisse in their private client group. He got his start as part of the training program at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) in New York prior to moving to San Francisco. He joined Credit Suisse in the fall of 2000 when the bank purchased DLJ.

Earlier in his career, Brent was a financial auditor for Philip Morris Management Company in New York City where he performed audits at the company’s headquarters as well as subsidiaries in Germany, Hong Kong, and Richmond, Virginia.

Brent regularly gives interviews and speaks at conferences regarding precious metals, currency markets & macroeconomic trends.  His views have been quoted in numerous print, online and television outlets. He lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico with his wife Mary and son Moses.  

Tyrone leads J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain & Crypto team and is responsible for creating innovative Web3-focused products & solutions for J.P. Morgan’s businesses and clients, and for engaging with the industry at large in order to provide a holistic blockchain strategy for the firm. Tyrone is also the Head of Onyx Digital Assets, a multi-asset tokenization platform that enables the exchange of value for various types of digital assets. Tyrone was previously a Senior Blockchain Product Manager in J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence and was also the Head of Product for Quorum, an open-sourced Ethereum-based blockchain platform built for Enterprise use.  Tyrone sits on the Board of Directors of The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and The Hyperledger Foundation, and prior to joining the blockchain team in 2015, Tyrone was a software engineer within the Credit Markets business and spent several years managing and delivering large strategic programs across various businesses within J.P. Morgan, covering Front, Middle and Back Office risk and trading systems.

Michael has been a student of markets and market structure, for nearly 30 years. His proprietary research into the shift from actively managed portfolios and investment funds to systematic passive investment strategies has been presented to the Federal Reserve, the BIS, the IMF and numerous other industry groups and associations.

Michael joined Simplify in April 2021 after serving as Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Logica Capital Advisers, LLC.  Prior to Logica, Michael managed macro strategies at Thiel Macro, LLC, an investment firm that manages the personal capital of Peter Thiel. Prior to Thiel, Michael founded Ice Farm Capital, a discretionary global macro hedge fund seeded by Soros Fund Management. From 2006-2014, Michael founded and managed the New York office of Canyon Capital Advisors, a $23B multi-strategy hedge fund based in Los Angeles, CA, where he established their global macro strategies, managing in excess of $5B of exposure across equity, credit, FX, commodity and derivative markets.

In addition to his work as a market theorist and portfolio manager, Michael has been noted for his work as a public speaker and financial media participant. He is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a CFA holder.

Founder & CEO of dYdX. Previously software engineer at Coinbase, Uber. Princeton CS ’15

Travis Kling is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Ikigai Asset Management, a L/S multi-strategy crypto asset hedge fund. Prior to founding Ikigai in 2018, Travis spent 10 years in traditional finance at leading institutional funds. He started his career as an Investment Banker at Simmons & Company in Houston, focused on Energy M&A, and completed more than $3bn in deals and capital raises. While there, he represented Noble Drilling’s $2.2bn acquisition of Frontier Drilling. Travis went on to join Magnetar Capital in Chicago in January 2011 as an Energy Analyst, investing across the capital structure in L/S equities and structured, non-control private equity and debt in the Energy sector. These structured investments included first lien debt, mezzanine debt, warrants, convertible equity, preferred equity, convertible debt, PIPEs and ORRIs.

Many of these investments were in highly illiquid or completely illiquid securities. Travis led investment efforts for all Energy IPOs, investing in over 40 IPOs during his time at Magnetar. During the nearly five years Travis was an Investor at Magnetar, his division grew from $250mm to $4.6bn in AUM. In 2012, Magnetar Energy won “Specialist Hedge Fund of The Year” from Hedge Fund Magazine.

Travis left Magnetar Capital in 2015 to join Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management in New York as a Portfolio Manager. At Point72, Travis had sole discretion over a $200mm L/S Energy and Materials equities portfolio and managed a team of two Analysts and a Trader. Travis designed, built and executed the investment framework, processes and tools to effectively cover 140 companies. Travis regularly interacted with all senior management of the $90bn AUM Point72 firm to help them architect and implement various firm-wide data science and “quantamental” initiatives. In the summer of 2017, after researching Crypto on-and-off for years, Travis began spending considerable time studying crypto assets and DLT (Decentralized Ledger Technology). He embarked on a 500+ hour self-study of the technology and its potential to affect transformative change. Travis left Point72 in early December to pursue Crypto investing full-time.

Travis was an athletic scholarship recipient and football team Captain at Blinn College his first two years in college. Travis has a Bachelor’s in Accounting and a Master’s in Finance from Texas A&M University where he graduated in 2008 with honors. During his graduate work, Travis took a keen interest in behavioral economics and game theory.

Michael is the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, a secure digital asset infrastructure company. Prior to Fireblocks, he co-founded Lacoon Mobile Security, which was acquired by Check Point, and was then appointed the Head of Products, Mobile and Cloud Security for Check Point. Michael is a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and investor. He is also a recognized industry speaker, delivering talks at RSA Conference, BlackHat and Infosec. Before his commercial endeavors, Michael pioneered the mobile security field in an elite military technological unit (8200), where he received the Israeli Presidential Excellency Honor for his contributions. He holds a BSc in Computer Sciences and Physics from Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

Sid Powell is the CEO & Co-Founder of Maple, and with his Co-Founder Joe Flanagan launched Maple in 2021. Maple is transforming capital markets through technology and counts traditional finance and crypto-native firms as customers. 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, established and ran a $200M+ bond funding program, and managed Treasury at a commercial lending FinTech company. 

John Wu is President of Ava Labs, an Andresseen Horowitz backed technology company building the next generation blockchain platform: Avalanche. John’s objective is to open up financial services and products to all. In this role, he leverages his expertise from over 20 years as a fintech executive and technology investor to create a blockchain-enabled solution for originating, issuing, and trading financial assets.

John was previously CEO of the SharesPost Digital Assets Group, enabling compliant token trading of private shares and funds. Prior to that, he was a technology investor and the founder of Sureview Capital, a global hedge fund backed by the Blackstone Group.

John began his investment career at Tiger Management, before managing a global technology portfolio at Kingdon Capital.

Laszlo is co-founder and CEO at Kiln. He previously co-founded a tech recruitment company before he started to build Kiln in 2018."

James helped launch TradeStation Crypto’s offering which utilizes a true online brokerage model that self-directed investors and traders have come to expect for equities, futures, and foreign currency markets. He is a reputed crypto asset specialist and blockchain thought leader focused on helping people find innovative ways to participate in this space. He is active in the blockchain community with speaking engagements, TV appearances and mentoring. James has over 15 years of experience in the Fintech industry.

John Patrick Mullin is a FinTech entrepreneur, investor, and educator living in Hong Kong. He’s a Co-founder of MANTRA DAO, a popular Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform and SOMA.finance a US-regulated Decentralized Exchange (DEX). Prior to this he served as the Managing Director of Tritaurian Capital, a FINRA-regulated boutique investment bank focusing on providing financial services and capital raising solutions for startups and SMEs. He also has a traditional investment banking background having worked at Guotai Junan Securities in Shanghai, China. As an educator, he has spoken at leading universities across the world, including Harvard, London Business School, and Peking University. Additionally, John is an active investor as General Partner (GP) of UNKNOWN VC, an early stage venture capital firm investing in DeFi and Web 3.0.