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

Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin.co — Where builders & funders come together to build the open web.  Gitcoin has delivered $50mm worth of value to OSS devs in the last several years. He has a BS in Computer Science, 15 years of engineering leadership experience in Open Source Software and Web Startups. Kevin is a community organizer in the Boulder Colorado Tech Scene.

Mariano Conti was Head of Smart Contracts at the Maker Foundation and is currently an angel investor in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Evin McMullen is CEO and Co-founder of Disco, your identity for the Metaverse. Disco enables your personal data backpack, making data and reputation portable across web2 and the web3 blockchain ecosystem. 

Her previous work includes connected hardware and experience design disruptions for autonomous automotive, luxury, beauty, healthcare & connected home. Evin also led the world’s first initiatives with NFTs at a major music festival, verifiable NFT authorship, and livestream media NFT issuance. 

Evin has served as Head of the Story Department at a global film production studio, and a Director with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio. She is a founding member of DAO Jones and inkDAO, a member of CompTIA’s Blockchain Council and an advisor to Web3 projects including Herd Social, Engage Raise and DoomsdayX. She is a graduate of Yale University. 

Ryan Sean Adams is a crypto investor & co-founder of Bankless. He’s an open finance maximalist who propagates the message of financial sovereignty. His mission is to help onboard the first billion people to crypto through memes, media, and education.

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

Chris Dixon is a general partner and has been at Andreessen Horowitz since 2012. He founded and leads a16z Crypto, which invests in web3 technologies through three dedicated funds with more than $3 billion under management.

Previously, Chris was the cofounder and CEO of two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch. SiteAdvisor was an internet security company that warned web users of security threats. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. Hunch was a recommendation technology company that was acquired by eBay in 2011.

Chris has been a prolific seed investor, cofounding Founder Collective, a seed venture fund, and making a number of personal angel investments in various technology companies.

Chris started programming as a kid, and was a professional programmer after college at the high-speed options trading firm, Arbitrade. He has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard. He has written about his theories and experiences as an entrepreneur and investor on Medium, and before that at cdixon.org; his a16z Podcast appearances can be found here.

Surojit is Chief Product Officer at Coinbase where he is responsible for Product Management, Product Design, User Research, and Program Management. Before Coinbase, Surojit was Vice President and Head of Product for Google Shopping. Before that he worked as Senior Vice President and Head of Product & Design at Flipkart, India from 2015-2017. Previously, Surojit was a founding member of Google's mobile search ads product and helped make mobile search ads a growth engine for Google, growing it into a multi-billion dollar business. 

Surojit has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, a B. Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and an MS in Computer Science from SUNY at Buffalo. Surojit has 33 US patents to his name in distributed computing, payments, mobile advertising, and location based technologies. Surojit is an active angel investor in many technology companies in Silicon Valley and India.

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.

Josh began his career in traditional finance — working on the legal side of the commodities and derivatives markets. While at a commodities fintech company in 2017, he encountered blockchain for the first time and was blown away by its potential to fix the fragmentation and antiquated processes found in legacy finance.

His first role in crypto was at the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi where he joined as Global General Counsel, later moving on to lead their Institutional Business. His most recent role before joining Qredo was at Binance, where he led and scaled the EMEA organization, helping it to become one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges by trading volume.

Joe Hoffend is Foundry’s VP of Product Development. He started his career co-founding an eSports media company, and prior to joining Foundry, was at Fastly, helping improve the user experience of their Edge applications and partner offerings. Joe first became interested in blockchain in 2012 as he saw Bitcoin as the intersection of sound money and technology. Since then, he’s spent a good deal of time learning about blockchain technology and what problems it can help solve in the world and believes every asset will eventually be digitized. Joe has led Foundry’s Staking business as well as productizing other areas of the business.

Blockdaemon founder & CEO, Konstantin Richter has been active in the blockchain ecosystem since 2015. He created Blockdaemon in 2017. It has grown to become the world’s largest institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure provider for node management and staking.

Anne is the VP of Special Projects at OpenSea. She oversees platform development for community and creator-centric initiatives while managing the teams focused on the intersection of OpenSea and its creators. Prior to OpenSea, Anne was COO of Oasis Labs, the core contributors to the Oasis Network — a privacy-first Layer 1 blockchain network — and led their Mainnet development and token launch (ROSE). Before this Anne held roles as Product Manager / Product Marketing Manager for the iPhone at Apple, Director of Special Projects / Product Marketing at eero, and worked for former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright helping companies with regulatory issues abroad. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and went to Georgetown for undergrad.

Morgan is a General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage venture capital fund. 
 
Most recently, Morgan was at Facebook where she originally joined as part of the Corporate Development team in May 2017. Her main project was trying to answer the question "how should Facebook be thinking about blockchain?" This evolved into the creation of the dedicated blockchain team which later became Diem and Novi. Morgan was Head of Strategy for Facebook's Novi.   

Morgan graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's in Statistics and Information Science. 

Carly Reilly is the chief of staff at block::block, an early-stage blockchain startup. She is the host of Overpriced JPEGs, a Bankless HQ podcast about NFTs and the metaverse. She spent two years as national finance director for Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign; has worked at a hedge fund, a VC fund, and a production company, but has found her true passion in Web3.

She is a Washington Post contributor, former co-host of the Yang Speaks podcast, and has been featured by Bloomberg News.

Vlad Tenev is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Robinhood Markets. In 2013, Vlad co-founded Robinhood with Baiju Bhatt to democratize investing. Before Robinhood, Vlad started two finance companies in New York City and earned his B.S. in Mathematics at Stanford University and M.S. in Mathematics at UCLA. Vlad has been recognized on the Forbes 30 under 30, Inc 30 under 30, and Fortune 40 under 40 lists. He was born in Bulgaria and grew up in the Washington, D.C. area.

Baiju Bhatt is the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Robinhood Markets. In 2013, Baiju
co-founded Robinhood with Vlad Tenev to democratize investing. Before Robinhood, Baiju
started two finance companies in NewYork City and earned his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in
Mathematics at Stanford University. Baiju has been recognized on the Fortune 40 under 40
list. He is the son of Indian immigrants and grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia.

As the CEO of Nansen, Alex drives the growth and adoption of the blockchain data analytics firm to provide crypto traders, hedge funds, institutional investors and VCs with insights into the crypto markets. Alex has over 10 years of experience in data science, management consulting, and cryptocurrencies. His academic background is in artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

James Wang is Head of Tokens for Amun. He is focused on building the future of crypto investing. Previously he was an analyst for ARK Invest for six years. He began his career as a tech columnist before moving up to work as editor-in-chief at Nvidia. He resides in New York City and attended UNSW in Australia.

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

Evgeny has 15+ years of experience growing fintech businesses. He has consistently grown market share in Europe’s top fiat exchanges, developed and executed ambitious expansion projects and led agile cross-functional teams. Prior to founding Wintermute, Evgeny built and ran the Optiver’s European ETF business (HFT and OTC) – one of the largest in the EU. Evgeny holds MSc in Finance and EMBA from London Business School.

Michael Ippolito is a co-founder at Blockworks in charge of content and finance.  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&A strategy.

John Calabrese leads Product at Nansen, and has over 10 years of experience in product management. Previously, he worked at large companies in the finance technology space such as FIS, Fidelity and startups such as Cinch and Monit.

John has roots in traditional finance, earning his CFA and FRM designations, but is most passionate about the future of finance where products are more decentralized, transparent, and efficient through blockchain technology. When not working or trading crypto, John can be found at home spending time with his Shiba Inu, Nutmeg.

Soona Amhaz is founder and GP of Volt Capital, a venture firm that focuses on pre-seed and seed companies in the digital assets space. Soona is also an advisor to On Deck, Forbes 30 under 30 in VC, and an alum from the University of Michigan School of Engineering.

Charles is the VP of Product at Ledger, the world leader in digital assets security and self-custody applications, where he is defining the firm’s Web3 strategy and product offering. Prior to this, he was the Head of Crypto at Opera and pioneered the company’s entry into Web3.He holds a degree in Software Engineering from Laval University.

Josh Rosenthal, Ph.D., a former Late Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation historian turned crypto-first investor. A Fulbright Recipient to the Sorbonne’s interdisciplinary think tank (École Pratique des Hautes Études), Josh founded multiple successful startups before starting a crypto-first founders’ fund, the 6ixth Event, and crypto-first family office, Narwhal Ventures. A guest lecturer at Harvard, Hopkins, and MIT, Josh explores how communities are using decentralized technology to reshape our world in what has become known as a Crypto Renaissance.

Lorien is a wannabe polymath who was born in Malaysia while his dad was curing tropical diseases with the Peace Corps. Off to a cool start, he spent the next few years of his life in Hawaii, San Diego, India…before settling into the much more exciting, colorful and exceedingly polite land of Canada.

In 1994, at the age of 24, when Lorien’s younger brother Matt asked him to run his burgeoning internet company, Lorien did what any self-respecting lawyer of 6 months would do--he quit. He moved the company from their parent’s basement and over the next four years managed the growth of Interlog, one of Canada’s first commercial ISP’s, to over 150 employees, 65,000 customers and profitability. The company was then acquired by a large multinational telecommunications provider.

Determined not to be one hit wonders. Lorien and Matt teamed up again and co-founded Bird on a Wire Networks - a managed web hosting and data-center provider which was one of the first of its kind in Canada. Within two years, the company was acquired by AT&T Canada. Their third start-up, pingg.com, based in New York City, was acquired by 1800-Flowers.

Lorien has also been known to run divisions of Fortune 500 companies (Micron), spearhead the exponential U.S. growth of a UK based tech company (MessageLabs) as Global VP Business Development, serve on the advisory board of a number of start-ups and whip up a mean breakfast of Spanish eggs.

Matt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alluvial Finance. Alluvial is building the enterprise liquid staking standard. Recently he was the Head of Liquid Staking Products at Figment, a blockchain infrastructure company focused on building web3. Prior to joining Figment, Matt spent 12 years in the proprietary trading space leading teams in building high-frequency, algorithmic trading systems. He was a Partner and Managing Director at Transmarket Group. Matt graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering and University of Chicago with a Master’s in Computer Science.

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Mara is the Head of Sales at Coinbase Cloud (formerly Bison Trails), the leading developer platform for blockchain-based infrastructure services and APIs.

She has broad experience in bringing blockchain-based protocols, products and services to market. Prior to joining Coinbase, Mara managed Business Development at Bison Trails (acquired by Coinbase) and served as Strategy Manager at ConsenSys. She is passionate about open source technology and has led various initiatives including the development of the eth2 launchpad and distributed validator technology (DVT).

She is an active angel investor and serves as an advisor to various blockchain projects

Alison Mangiero is the Acting Executive Director of the Proof of Stake Alliance (POSA), an industry alliance advocating for innovation-friendly regulation of the growing proof-of-stake industry. Alison previously founded Tocqueville Group (TQ), which worked with various ecosystem partners around the world to incubate new ventures and build products, open source software, and other public goods for the Tezos ecosystem. Prior to founding TQ she spent a decade in public policy, and has broad experience fundraising and growing membership associations.

A recovering political scientist now focused on the ways blockchain technology will drive social, political, and economic innovation, Alison also currently teaches courses on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy at College of the Holy Cross and is on the Board of Advisors for the University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies. 

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.

Kain Warwick is an Australian cryptocurrency entrepreneur most-known as the founder of Synthetix protocol. Synthetix is a financial primitive that enables the creation of synthetic assets, offering unique derivatives and exposure to real-world assets on the blockchain. In 2020, Kain popularised the concept of yield farming that sparked the 2020 DeFi boom, earning the moniker: ‘the father of modern agriculture.

Mary-Catherine (MC) Lader is the Chief Operating Officer of Uniswap Labs, a developer of foundational web3-based products and applications. In this role, she oversees the company’s growth efforts, strategic initiatives, and operations. Previously, she held various leadership roles at BlackRock, including as the Global Head of the firm’s digital sustainability business, Chief Operating Officer of the firm’s Digital Wealth Business, and leader of the firm’s strategic fintech investments and blockchain activities. MC began her career in Goldman Sachs’ Special Situations Group and worked on the staff of the World Economic Forum’s Davos gatherings. She received her J.D. and M.B.A. degrees at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, respectively, and her B.A. at Brown University.

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

Taylor Monahan is the founder and CEO of MyCrypto, a security-first Ethereum interface that recently joined the MetaMask family. She has been focused on building awesome products that put the power in people's hands since 2015 and strives to provide a safe and secure experience for both new and veteran inhabitants in the space.

Mihailo Bjelic received his MSc in CS from the University of Belgrade. Prior to entering Web3/blockchain industry, he co-founded an AI/ML-powered platform for automotive industry and several other smaller startups and side projects. In 2017, he decided to join the Web3 movement full-time, primarily as a researcher interested in Ethereum scaling and multi-chain paradigms. In parallel with his work, he became one of the prominent Ethereum proponents and community members. In 2019, he started working on Polygon and conceptualized its architecture, vision and brand. In 2020, he joined hands with the Matic Network team and they have been working together on Polygon since then.

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.

Illia Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, a decentralized developer platform powered by a sharded smart contract blockchain. NEAR’s vision of a scalable, robust, and highly usable blockchain began in 2018 when they couldn't find a protocol that met the needs of builders. NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet in 2020 and is focused on scaling to global mainstream adoption. Illia has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor and managed the team building question-answering capabilities for the core Google search, as well as an author of several notable research papers. Illia has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg, TIME, Wired, New York Magazine, Forbes, and TechCrunch.

Harry Kalodner is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Offchain Labs where he leads the engineering team. Before the company he attended Princeton as a PhD candidate where his research explored economics, anonymity, and incentive compatibility of cryptocurrencies. When not up at 3:00am writing code, Harry occasionally sleeps.

My passion is to work at the intersection of innovation, finance and analytics. I look to work with people who are focused and passionate about challenging the status quo.
When I am not working, I am usually playing with my two children, making dinner for my family, reading, or working on carpentry.

Michael Ippolito is a co-founder at Blockworks in charge of content and finance.  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&A strategy.

Catherine Gu heads Visa’s Global CBDC program and asset protocols, building digital payment solutions with central banks, financial partners and global infrastructure technology companies. Prior to Visa, Catherine has worked at J.P. Morgan and Man Group in quantitative finance. She spent 2 years on stablecoin research while studying at Stanford University with Prof. Dan Boneh. She also worked at 2 crypto startups: Anchorage and Gauntlet. Catherine graduated with M.S. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University, and First Class B.A. and M.Phil in Economics from Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Kate Rooney is a technology reporter based out of CNBC’s San Francisco bureau, with a focus on financial technology, payments and venture capital. She also writes and reports for CNBC’s digital platforms.

 Rooney joined CNBC in 2015 as a news associate before working as a producer for CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) and was most recently a markets reporter for CNBC.com.

 She graduated from Boston College with a bachelor’s degree in communication and earned her master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where she received an Eric Lund Global Reporting and Research Grant to film and produce a documentary in the Philippines. She also worked as a multimedia reporter in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2015 with a focus on housing and politics.

Sam joined crypto during the 2017 bull run as a hobby. While looking for interesting projects he came across MakerDAO and was instantly hooked. After being part of the community for 2 years, he joined on as the first DAO smart contracts dev and later joined the Protocol Engineering team full time. Today Sam coordinates with the other DAO mandated actors across technical, business and strategy to grow the Maker ecosystem.

Jacquelyn Melinek is a senior crypto reporter at TechCrunch based in New York City. She was previously a crypto reporter for Blockworks covering DeFi, DAOs and crypto venture capital funding and prior to that covered energy markets for S&P Global Platts and Bloomberg News.

Vanessa Grellet is a Managing Partner at Aglaé Ventures. Vanessa is a Global Executive with over 20 years of expertise in the Financial Services and Tech industry. At Aglaé Ventures she manages the Web 3 focused fund. Prior to joining Aglae she has Head of Portfolio growth at CoinFund and Executive director at ConsenSys where she focused on driving adoption for Ethereum based products,  Strategic initiatives, Alliances and Channels.  She was involved in setting up the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the Accounting Blockchain Coalition (ABC) and the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC). Prior to ConsenSys she was a Strategy Executive at NYSE focused on investments and M&A and a key member of PwC’s global wealth management team. Vanessa is a Founding Board member of AABC focused on Blockchain and Art, a member of the Advisory Council of ConsenSys, a Milken Institute Associate, a contributor to the  World Economic Forum Digital Future Council and part of Cointelegraph’s list of 100 most influential people for 2022. Mrs. Grellet graduated Cum Laude from Law School (Paris II Assas) and Business School (HEC).

Jim Bianco is President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research, L.L.C. Since 1990 Jim’s commentaries have offered a unique perspective on the global economy and financial markets. Unencumbered by the biases of traditional Wall Street research, Jim has built a decades long reputation for objective, incisive commentary that challenges consensus thinking. In nearly 20 years at Bianco Research, Jim’s wide ranging commentaries have addressed monetary policy, the intersection of markets and politics, the role of government in the economy, fund flows and positioning in financial markets.

Jim appears regularly on CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business, and is often featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Grants Interest Rate Observer, and MarketWatch. Prior to joining Arbor and Bianco Research, Jim was a Market Strategist in equity and fixed income research at UBS Securities and Equity Technical Analyst at First Boston and Shearson Lehman Brothers. He is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a member of the Market Technicians Association (MTA). Jim has a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance from Marquette University (1984) and an MBA from Fordham University (1989).

Co-founder of the Enzyme Protocol (formerly Melon protocol under Melonport AG), and CEO/founder of Avantgarde Finance. President of MAMA (Multichain Asset Managers Association). Nominated Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum and Digital Shaper in Bilanz magazine in 2018. 

Mona is a former star-trader at Goldman Sachs, promoted to Vice President by the age of 26 and made the “Top 30 under 30” list in Trader Magazine in 2008 and Forbes Magazine in 2011 after profitably trading the 2008 and 2011 crashes. She moved to Geneva-based macro fund Jabre Capital in 2011, before deciding in 2014 that the future of finance lay in blockchain technology. She studied Economics & Statistics at the University College London.

Michael Ippolito is a co-founder at Blockworks in charge of content and finance.  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&A strategy.

Jake is the Head of DeFi at crypto market maker GSR. As the Head of DeFi, Jake leads product development for GSR's DeFi liquidity, trading platform, and blockchain infrastructure. He also leads GSR's venture capital efforts and expansion into new markets. GSR is an active, multi-stage investor in more than 100 leading companies and protocols in the crypto/Web3 industry. Prior to GSR, he spent over four years as a Senior Vice President and GM of Venn at Two Sigma.

Glenn Barber is the Head of Sales & Business Development, Americas at Copper.co. – a pioneering digital assets custody and settlement provider. Prior to joining Copper, Glenn led sales as a consultant at FalconX, an institutional digital asset brokerage, and he was also the Chief Institutional Officer at Voyager Digital, a publicly-traded holding company whose subsidiaries operate a crypto-asset platform to trade crypto assets. Glenn also has over 25 years experience in global capital markets, and was a Managing Director in Equities at Deutsche Bank and Barclays.

Glenn holds a Masters in international Management and Finance from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BSc in Business Administration and Management.

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. 

Johann is the Product Lead for MetaMask Institutional. Since launching the product in February 2021, Johann has managed the product strategy and roadmap, design and operations, and also crypto custodian integrations. Prior to joining ConsenSys, Johann spent time as a Fintech founder, Director of Product for a Pan-European Robo-advisor, and Global Macro Portfolio Manager, where he helped to start and build the business.

Rachel Mayer is VP of Product at Circle, responsible for overseeing product design and user research for the Circle Account, go-to-market and growth strategies teams. Since joining Circle in 2017, her leadership in launching a core suite of APIs and the Circle Account has been integral in furthering the company’s mission to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of financial value.

Mayer joined Circle through its acquisition of Trigger Finance, a company she had co-founded. Prior to Trigger Finance, Mayer had extensive experience in digital currency and financial services, including as a trader at JP Morgan where she ran the FX e-commerce platform for emerging market currencies and rates. She is a recent honoree on the “40 Under 40” list from Fortune.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in computer science from Cornell University. Outside of work, Miami-based Mayer enjoys spending time with her two young children and adopted dog.

Luca leads MakerDAO’s Lending Oversight, focusing on making of MakerDAO the true lender of last resort of the DeFi ecosystem. This means building the bridge between real-world and DeFi, as well as developing any protocol-to-protocol use case. Luca publishes his own research on dirtroads.substack.com and is an advisor for Cherry Venture’s crypto investments. Prior to joining the DeFi revolution, he has been for 15 years a banker and investor in financial services companies. Luca holds an MBA (with hons) from London Business School, and a MSc and BA in mathematics and economics from Bocconi University.

Joseph Edwards is the Head of Financial Strategy for Solrise Group, a development company building on the Solana blockchain, with products including the Solrise Finance asset management protocol, the Solflare wallet, and the Solrise Pulse ecosystem of permissioned products. Previously, he was Head of Research for London-based brokerage Enigma Securities. Joseph is also an acclaimed professional esports coach and analyst, working with a number of notable organisations including TSM and Team Liquid. 

Nuri is Director of Product at BitGo, responsible for onboarding new blockchains, building new capabilities for DeFi and NFTs, and continuing to grow WBTC. Most recently, he led BitGo's MetaMask Institutional Integration. Prior to joining BitGo, Nuri spent time as a product manager in Silicon Valley startups, such as Affirm.

Recently listed as one of the top-25 crypto executives to watch in 2022, Asaf Meir is Founder and CEO of Solidus Labs. Before founding Solidus in 2018, Meir spent a decade leading complex technological and financial products for various firms, including Microsoft and Goldman Sachs’ equities trading desk.

Nisa Amoils is Managing Partner at A100x Ventures and Advisor to Dragonfly Capital where she,invests in early stage Blockchain/Crypto/Web 3 companies.  She has been in VC for 11 years and investing in blockchain since 2016, with multiple unicorns and exits. She  previously worked for Scout Ventures and used to practice securities and corporate law at Anderson Kill. She serves on Boards such as Wharton Entrepreneurship, Global Digital Assets and Crypto Association, Nightfood (NGTF). She has been named Business Insider’s Women VC’s to watch, 2021 systematic leader in asset management, top 100 Women in Fintech, and top 50 global Blockchain thinkers. She is an occasional host and commentator at Defiance Media and Forbes.  She holds a business degree from the University of Michigan and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Katherine Wu is a Venture Partner at Archetype, a venture capital firm focused on leading early investments in high potential crypto startups. Most recently, Katherine was the Senior Lead on the Coinbase Ventures team, where she led investments on behalf of Coinbase and scaled the investment team. During her tenure at Coinbase, Katherine oversaw a record-breaking year in deal-making, putting Coinbase Ventures among the most active corporate venture funds in operation. Katherine joined the Coinbase Ventures team from Notation Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on software investments. Prior to Notation, Katherine was the first business hire at Messari, a leading provider of crypto market intelligence products. 

Over the years, Katherine has also advised and worked with a number of top tier crypto protocols and companies on issues spanning from investment strategies to go-to-market and other operational processes. 

Georgi Ivanov, CFA, is the VP of Strategy, Risk and Operations of the leading digital assets
institution Nexo. In this role, Georgi leads growth initiatives focused on blockchain solutions and
capabilities that capitalize on the synergistic touch points with traditional Consumer Finance and
Capital Markets products and services.
Georgi boasts 20+ years of experience in Corporate Finance, Investment Management and
Capital Markets, and has held leadership roles at various financial institutions and hedge funds,
including Wells Fargo and Bank of America. He received his MBA from Duke University and
holds two B.S.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering from the University of
Pennsylvania.

Scott Byron is the Head of Venture at AscendEX focused primarily on early-stage token projects. AscendEX Ventures invests in different layer-1 and layer-2 ecosystems, as well as across different narratives emerging in the space.

David Abner is the Global Head of Business Development at Gemini. In this role, David oversees the expansion of Gemini’s institutional business and leads the relationships with major institutional partners and high-net-worth individuals on a global scale. Prior to joining Gemini, David spent the last 20 years focusing on driving the growth of the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) industry. He was instrumental in bringing ETFs from a fringe arbitrage trading tool to an investment product utilized by institutional asset managers, reaching more than 7 trillion in AuM. His most recent book, The ETF Handbook (Wiley Finance) describes the inner workings of ETFs and how to achieve efficient portfolio implementation and execution.

Kevin leads initiatives and investments at the intersection of real-world asset lending and DeFi. Prior to joining BlockTower, Kevin was at Harvard Business School (before dropping out to pursue crypto full time), directing operations at Capchase, and leading a structured credit trading desk at Citigroup. Most importantly, he avidly believes that distributed ledger technology can make finance fairer and more just for all.  

Eric Peters is the Founder, CEO, and CIO of One River Asset Management and its subsidiary, One River Digital Asset Management. One River is an innovative investment manager dedicated to delivering high-conviction discretionary and quantitative strategies that help its clients build superior portfolios. One River sees the world in a period of major economic and political transition, with the investment landscape shifting in ways that will make the coming ten years look profoundly different from the past decade. Its strategies are built to profit from this dynamic environment while providing strong diversification benefits to traditional investment portfolios.

Prior to founding One River in 2013, Eric served as Chairman of Grant Capital Partners, a $1.25 billion discretionary global macro hedge fund. In that role, Eric focused on thematic investment opportunities and was responsible for all non-investment activities including the direct oversight of the Chief Risk Officer. Over the course of his career, Eric has held various positions that include portfolio manager for Peloton Partners, proprietary trader for both Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse, and Founder and Chief Executive Officer of a TH Lee Putnam funded technology firm.

Eric travels extensively, exchanging ideas, debating policy, and identifying investment opportunities with many of the world’s top investment managers, economists, strategists, political consultants, academics, scientists, and business leaders. The content of those discussions often finds its way into his weekly investment letter - Weekend Notes - which is read by investment professionals who directly deploy over $1trln in alternative assets.

As an experienced business builder and innovator in Financial Services, Brett has accelerated revenue growth with institutional clients and mobilized FinTech companies. At Coinbase, Brett is making connections between finance 1.0 and the crypto economy. Coinbase is focused on the continued institutionalization of crypto. This includes continuing to expand the institutional client base, building out the Sales team, introducing new features and services that institutional investors expect, and continuing to educate the institutional community about crypto as an asset class and its role within a diversified portfolio. Previously, as the Global Head of Sales at Barclays, Brett hired and developed large teams while incubating and launching multiple lines of business. Brett pioneered the Digital role across sales & trading adopting new technologies and transforming existing platforms, including the creation of a digital bank prototype.Brett is currently on the Advisory Board of Eightfold.ai. helping them scale their AI based hiring and retention platform for Financial Services.In earlier experience, Brett held leadership roles in sales, trading, and structuring at JP Morgan, innovating credit derivatives and structuring platforms.

Miles’ extensive knowledge of digital asset taxation and tax procedure helps TaxBit continuously refine its products to maintain its role as a leading software company in the area of digital asset taxation, accounting, and information reporting.

Miles previously spent over 15 years working as an attorney for the IRS. As an attorney for the IRS, Miles provided the IRS with advice on examination and collection matters, and represented the IRS in court.  Miles conducted trials involving a variety of tax issues ranging from financial products and retirement accounts to complex abusive tax schemes. He has extensive experience with tax litigation and tax procedure.  

Miles spent his last three years as counsel to the IRS as a leading expert on digital asset tax issues, including the tax treatment of digital assets, examination techniques, information gathering, data interpretation, and tax calculations.

Perianne Boring is the founder and CEO of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the world's largest trade association representing the blockchain industry. The Chamber’s mission is to promote the acceptance and use of digital assets and blockchain-based technologies. Working with policymakers, regulatory agencies and industry, the Chamber advocates for a pro-growth policy environment that fosters job creation, innovation, and investment.

Perianne was named one of "America’s Top 50 Women in Tech" by Forbes and one of the "10 Most Influential People in Blockchain" by CoinDesk. She appears regularly in the financial media to share insights on digital asset and blockchain innovations and public policy discussions. Prior to forming the Chamber, Perianne served as a television anchor for an international finance program that ran in more than 100 countries and reached over 650 million viewers. She began her career as a legislative analyst in the U.S. House of Representatives, advising on finance, economics, tax, and healthcare policy.

Darius is co-founder and CIO at QCP Capital, a full-suite crypto saset trading firm headquartered in Singapore. Formerly a Macro Trader at Dymon Asia Capital, he spent years trading cross-asset derivatives with a focus on Asian FX/NDFs and model-based strategies before moving on to manage the Asia FX & Bonds book at BNP Paribas in New York. 

In addition to institutional trading, Darius has a keen interest in financial modeling. He has created and implemented asset allocation models for sovereign wealth funds and also developed predictive models for Asian currencies, many of which operate under managed float regimes. He brings this and his capital markets experience to crypto-asset trading. He has a particular passion for crypto-economics and has given advice to a number of crypto projects, including Algorand and Terra, on trading structures and strategies.

Cynthia leads business development and sales across international markets at Matrixport. She was previously Investment Director at Bitmain Technologies, focused on investments in blockchain for the financial services sector.
Prior to venturing into crypto, Cynthia was Vice President at Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX), responsible for derivatives product development and institutional sales. She started her career as a commodities trader.  

Eric currently spends his time and energy on all things Web3 as a builder and investor.  His current area of focus is digital assets and NFTs ability to unlock new economic structures in the real world as well as digital metaverses.  He spent the past year diving deep into NFTs and was an early investor in TopShot, ZED, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Punks Comic. While the returns have been astronomical, it has also led to a bottoms up approach to make angel investments in Web3 companies based on a deep domain perspective.  Prior to pursuing Web3, Eric was the Managing Director and Portfolio Manager of Personal Bond Management (PBM) at Fidelity Investments. In this role, Eric created a new business to manage individual bond portfolios at scale. He founded the business in 2015 and launched to the public in 2017.  By March 2021, PBM grew to $18B in assets, across 23,000 clients and executing 1,500 trades per day with a team of only five people. Prior to assuming this position in January 2015, Mr. Golden held various other roles within the fixed income division, including research analyst, associate research analyst, and research associate. In these positions, he was responsible for covering not-for-profit hospitals, senior living, utilities, transportation, and tobacco credits for bond and money market funds. He has been in the financial industry since joining Fidelity full time in 2004. Mr. Golden earned his Bachelor of Science degree in corporate finance and accounting, with a minor in information technology, from Bentley University. He is also a CFA® charterholder.

Eric is a trader at CMS, a principal investment firm that operates in the cryptocurrency space. CMS deals in both liquid and illiquid investment strategies.

Perianne Boring is the founder and CEO of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the world's largest trade association representing the blockchain industry. The Chamber’s mission is to promote the acceptance and use of digital assets and blockchain-based technologies. Working with policymakers, regulatory agencies and industry, the Chamber advocates for a pro-growth policy environment that fosters job creation, innovation, and investment.

Perianne was named one of "America’s Top 50 Women in Tech" by Forbes and one of the "10 Most Influential People in Blockchain" by CoinDesk. She appears regularly in the financial media to share insights on digital asset and blockchain innovations and public policy discussions. Prior to forming the Chamber, Perianne served as a television anchor for an international finance program that ran in more than 100 countries and reached over 650 million viewers. She began her career as a legislative analyst in the U.S. House of Representatives, advising on finance, economics, tax, and healthcare policy.

Brian D. Quintenz was nominated by both Presidents Obama and Trump to serve as a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in August of 2017, and served four years in his role at the agency until stepping down in August of 2021.

Prior to his appointment to the CFTC, Mr. Quintenz worked in the financial markets, first at an investment firm focused on the banking sector during the financial crisis and later founding his own firm registered as Commodity Pool Operator.

Mr. Quintenz began his career on Capitol Hill, serving as a senior policy advisor for Congresswoman Deborah Pryce (OH-15), at that time the highest ranking woman in the history of the House of Representative.

Mr. Quintenz graduated Magna Cum Laude from Duke University with a major in Public
Policy Studies and received an MBA from Georgetown University McDonough School of
Business, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Gamma honors society.

Jordan Nof is a Co-founder and Managing Partner at Tusk Venture Partners L.P. and is a member of the firm’s Investment Committee. He has led many of the firm’s investments including Lemonade, Bird, Coinbase, Alma, Sunday, and Wheel. He currently serves on the board of directors of Alma, Sunday, and Wheel.

Prior to Tusk Venture Partners, Jordan spent six years as a Director at Blackstone, where he focused on the development of the firm’s corporate venture capital portfolio. During that time, Jordan focused on investing in early-stage technology companies that could accelerate operations across Blackstone and the firm’s underlying portfolio companies. 

Before joining Blackstone, Jordan spent four years in the institutional investment management division at AllianceBernstein. During that time, he worked with many of the firm’s largest global institutional sub-advisory relationships.

Jordan received an M.B.A. from Rollins Graduate School of Business and is a graduate of Florida State University where he received a B.S. in Finance. He is based out of the firm’s New York office.

Ron represents the association on Capitol Hill as the Director of Government Relations. Ron’s background in crafting a bipartisan crypto regulatory framework via legislation dates back to 2016 when he served as the Financial Services Policy Lead for Rep. Warren Davidson (OH-8). During Ron’s five years on Capitol Hill, he authored several pieces of legislation including the Token Taxonomy Act, Federal Reserve Regulatory Oversight Act, and the Derivatives Fairness Act. Before coming to Capitol Hill, he was the campaign manager for three successful Texas State Senate races. Ron received his B.A. from Georgetown University.

Colleen Sullivan is Co-Founder and CEO of CMT Digital Holdings LLC and has been a partner with the broader CMT Group since 2013. Ms. Sullivan oversees CMT Digital’s trading, investments, and regulatory initiatives in the crypto assets / blockchain technology space. Ms. Sullivan is also a Co-Founder and Managing Member of Sullivan Wolf Kailus LLC, a boutique law firm based in Chicago that specializes in hedge fund, private equity, venture capital, digital assets, and other alternative investment products. Ms. Sullivan previously practiced law in the Investment Funds and Derivatives group at Sidley Austin LLP and, at age 25, co-founded a company called iOptions Group LLC, which developed hedging and monetization strategies for holders of employee stock options.  Ms. Sullivan currently serves on the Board of Directors of Silvergate Bank and on the Advisory Board of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. 

Angela Dalton founded Signum Growth Capital, an M&A Advisory and capital raising firm, which also invests, with a focus on the intersection of video gaming, art, esports, music, blockchain, crypto and the emergence of digital economies in “the Metaverse.” She served as a Managing Director for three investment banking firms - UBS, Evercore and Guggenheim Partners - and has 20 years of experience in Technology, Media and Telecom capital markets. At Evercore, she was an initial investor and Co-Founder of the Equities business in 2010, building out its Research, Sales and Trading teams prior to Evercore’s acquisition of ISI. Signum Growth Capital serves as Lead Advisor to ARK Invest in the US and to the Web3 Foundation in Zug, Switzerland. Angie serves on the Advisory Boards of Mythical Games, a next generation video gaming company in LA, Wall Street Blockchain Alliance in NYC, and Perpetual Altruism in London, UK. She serves as a Venture Partner for Griffin Gaming Partners and a Nexus Partner for Gaingels. Education: BS and a BA from The University of Kansas, MBA from The University of Chicago.

Ken Timsit is a web3 industry veteran, he is the managing director of Cronos chain and its Particle B ecosystem accelerator.

Cronos is a public Layer 1 blockchain protocol that interoperates with both Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems. It is backed by Crypto.org, Crypto.com and more than 200 Dapp developers, validators and infrastructure partners. Cronos is powered by the Cronos ($CRO) cryptocurrency. Within 4 months of mainnet launch, Cronos attracted more than 400,000 end-users and skyrocketed to being a top 10 blockchain by total value locked.

Previously, Ken was chief revenue officer at ConsenSys, a co-founder at two start-ups in Southeast Asia, and a partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). He has co-authored several publications on Fintech and blockchain, and served as management committee member of the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum.

CEO of UniX Gaming | Metaverse Designer & a passionate Veteran Pro Gamer. Former Fleet Operations Manager in the Cruise Industry who has led large teams of 400+ people through multiple $480M openings. Pivoting to build a team that can change communities across the globe & lead the era of play-to-earn.

Entering the crypto space in 2017, Liko founded J8 Venture that incubates and advises blockchain and traditional start-ups. He is now the CEO and Co-founder of Project SEED - a GameFi Metaverse Ecosystem built by an AAA Game Studio with the goal of revolutionizing the whole next-gen gaming industry.

Dan Keeler is Editor-in-Chief at Blockworks. Prior to joining Blockworks, he was Frontier Markets Editor at the Wall Street Journal where he managed the Journal’s coverage of smaller emerging markets as well as created a number of high-profile events and a highly regarded newsletter. Before joining the WSJ, he was the Editor of Global Finance magazine. He is also the founder of New York’s FM Network, a group that hosts gatherings of finance professionals focused on smaller emerging markets.

Kate is Chief Marketing Officer at Coinbase, where she oversees Coinbase’s global brand, product, and performance marketing. Prior to joining Coinbase, Kate spent more than a decade at Facebook in various roles, including Global Head of Brand and Product Marketing for Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook app, Public Affairs, and the Facebook company. She’s worked in global product marketing across both consumer and platform roles, building a variety of teams along the way.

Avery Akkineni serves as the President of VaynerNFT. She leads the company's mission to build long-term strategic NFT projects for the world's leading intellectual property owners serving brands, celebrities, athletes, and associations looking to incentivize and reward brand advocacy and customer loyalty. Avery previously led VaynerMedia's expansion into APAC, growing a team from 0-150+, opening offices in Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Sydney, and was awarded SEA Independent Agency of the Year within years. Before joining Vayner, she worked at Google in both Silicon Valley and New York City. Avery will drive meaningful cultural relevance for others to unlock the potential of one of the technology shifts of our time.

Jeff Carvalho is one of today’s leading experts in youth culture having spent two decades closely covering the market, and is now helping to bring culture on chain with web3.

In 2007, he joined Highsnobiety and, under his direction, established it as the authority on street culture. As the cofounder of the highly-praised brand, Carvalho grew its North American operations from a publication to expand into a full range of services. Today, Highsnobiety includes an in-house agency, an experiential marketing team, and a commerce division working with brands  from Amazon to adidas, Gucci to Mattel.

In 2020, he cofounded Culture Club talk show on Clubhouse and has more than 4million followers on the platform interviewing the likes of Naomi Osaka, Grimes, Jaden Smith, Virgil Abloh, Snoop Dogg and many others. wwww.cultureclub.show

A crypto native since 2016, Carvalho joined the advisory board of Portion.io, one of the first NFT marketplaces on Ethereum in 2018.

Today, Jeff is focused on Burrata, his consultancy/strategy practice helping to bring culture on chain. Pushing IRL with the emerging work of web3 technologies including NFTs, blockchain, metaverse and tokens, their most recent work include launching the first tattoo on-chain wearable on Decentralland. He also advises various companies in the blockchain space.

Evin McMullen is CEO and Co-founder of Disco, your identity for the Metaverse. Disco enables your personal data backpack, making data and reputation portable across web2 and the web3 blockchain ecosystem. 

Her previous work includes connected hardware and experience design disruptions for autonomous automotive, luxury, beauty, healthcare & connected home. Evin also led the world’s first initiatives with NFTs at a major music festival, verifiable NFT authorship, and livestream media NFT issuance. 

Evin has served as Head of the Story Department at a global film production studio, and a Director with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio. She is a founding member of DAO Jones and inkDAO, a member of CompTIA’s Blockchain Council and an advisor to Web3 projects including Herd Social, Engage Raise and DoomsdayX. She is a graduate of Yale University. 

Christina is Head of Growth at Aave Companies, focusing on partnerships across its suite of Web3 products. Christina began her career as an Investment Banker at J.P. Morgan, then worked for various hyper growth consumer tech companies in business development, operations and finance orientated roles. Prior to Aave, she was one of ByteDance/TikTok’s early US based employees working on music innovation partnerships and spearheaded the company’s first foray into NFTs. In 2021, she was recognized by Variety in their New York Women’s Impact Report.

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

Community Capitalist investing in the metaverse

Michael Ippolito is a co-founder at Blockworks in charge of content and finance.  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&A strategy.

Shayne is the Co-Founder and CEO of the HBAR Foundation. Prior to the HBAR Foundation, Shayne spent the better part of a 25-year career focused on building, scaling, and operating enterprise software businesses ranging from $5M to $400M+ in revenue.

Prior to the HBAR Foundation, Shayne was General Manager at HighRadius, a FinTech Unicorn. He served several years with BMC Software in multiple executive roles over his tenure as SVP of Strategy and Operations and President of the Performance and Analytics business. He’s also had several board roles with JAMF Software (Nasdaq: JAMF), CodeNotary, and Symplified.

Shayne holds a bachelor’s degree in management information systems from Mary Hardin-Baylor University.

Fun Facts about Shayne:

- Minored in music with voice as his primary instrument
- Played college baseball on scholarship
- Loves freshwater bass fishing

Dan Keeler is Editor-in-Chief at Blockworks. Prior to joining Blockworks, he was Frontier Markets Editor at the Wall Street Journal where he managed the Journal’s coverage of smaller emerging markets as well as created a number of high-profile events and a highly regarded newsletter. Before joining the WSJ, he was the Editor of Global Finance magazine. He is also the founder of New York’s FM Network, a group that hosts gatherings of finance professionals focused on smaller emerging markets.

Isaac is the Interim Chief Information Officer at ZKSpace. Isaac has been instrumental in the technical development of ZKSpace, a layer 2 ecosystem comprised of three major components: ZKSwap, an innovative Layer 2 AMM DEX powered by ZK-Rollups technology; ZKSquare, a payment service; and ZKSea, an NFT minting center and marketplace. ZKSpace aims to implement EVM-compatible ZK-Rollups and provide the community with more layer 2-based products in the near future through an optimized user interface, NFT support, unlimited token listing, smoother withdrawal, increased efficiency, and multi-chain support.

Yubo Ruan is the Founder of Parallel Finance, a leading multi-chain decentralized finance platform. 

A driven entrepreneur, developer, and investor, Yubo founded Parallel Finance in 2021. Prior to that, Yubo was also the founder of 8 Decimal Capital, one of the pioneer blockchain funds with over $60 million AUM. With a track record of 40 startups across 5 countries, the fund was recognized as a top fund in the crypto space. In addition, Yubo co-founded Skylight Investment, an early-stage tech investment firm, backed by education giant New Oriental (NYSE: EDU). Yubo has accepted 13 scientific and technological invention awards and 5 patents in high school and launched and sold Ali Simba Technology Co., Ltd. Yubo received the “30 under 30” award by the LA Post and the Hurun US Innovation Outstanding Award.

Yubo's organizations have been backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Polychain Capital, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and LightSpeed Venture. Parallel Finance is supported by a growing team of talented developers and professionals from organizations including Stanford, MIT, Facebook, Google, JP Morgan, and Polygon.

Yubo is a two-time Stanford University dropout, where he studied Computer Science and Economics. He went on to Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as a member of the Executive Education Advanced Finance Program. He dropped out of Stanford in 2014 to pursue 8 Decimal Capital, he dropped out again in 2021 to pursue Parallel Finance.  Bilingual in English and Mandarin, Yubo has extensive experience in both the American and Chinese markets. 

Lauren Halstead leads business development for the entertainment sector at Chainlink Labs as well as Chainlink Labs' program for early-stage blockchain projects, Startup with Chainlink.  She focuses her time pushing the boundaries of what is possible with NFTs by leading the dynamic NFT movement by inspiring others to build new creative projects using off-chain data sources and Chainlink’s VRF.  She was first exposed to Crypto in 2012 and is an active participant in Meta Gamma Delta, a DAO focused on giving away grants to women-found projects.

Casper is a co-founder of Spartan Group and heads up Spartan’s M&A and investment banking advisory business. Spartan advises leading crypto-focused companies on M&A and token raises, with past clients including Solana, Dapper Labs, Blockfolio, BitDAO, Qredo, Blockstack, Origin Protocol, Wilder World and others. Spartan’s crypto asset management business manages >$500 million via its hedge fund, venture fund and managed accounts.

Based in Asia since 2004, Casper has worked as an investment banker, tech entrepreneur, corporate executive and private equity investor. Prior to co-founding Spartan in 2017, Casper spent 10 years in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs in their London, Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore offices, where he led and worked on more than $20 billion of M&A and capital markets transactions.

Ben Strack is a Denver-based reporter covering macro and crypto-native funds, financial advisors, structured products, and the integration of digital assets and decentralized finance (DeFi) into traditional finance. Prior to joining Blockworks, he covered the asset management industry for Fund Intelligence and was a reporter and editor for various local newspapers on Long Island. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in journalism.

Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin.co — Where builders & funders come together to build the open web.  Gitcoin has delivered $50mm worth of value to OSS devs in the last several years. He has a BS in Computer Science, 15 years of engineering leadership experience in Open Source Software and Web Startups. Kevin is a community organizer in the Boulder Colorado Tech Scene.

Hart is the Co-Founder of Risk Labs, the foundation supporting the UMA and Across protocols. UMA is an optimistic oracle (OO) that can provide and verify arbitrary data on-chain. Across is a completely decentralized, low-cost and near-instant cross-chain bridge that is secured by UMA's optimistic oracle.

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 financial contract and oracle design researchers at Risk Labs.

frogmonkee (frog) cut his teeth on DAOs after working as a core contributor at BanklessDAO. He now works at Orca Protocol focusing on DAO governance and organizational design.

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.

Rebecca Rettig is the General Counsel of the Aave Companies, a group of software development companies that build blockchain-based software for the web3 world.  In addition to handling legal matters, Rebecca works with policymakers across the globe on regulatory matters relating to decentralized finance (“DeFi”) and cryptoassets.  Rebecca began her legal career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York, litigating complex commercial disputes and defending regulatory enforcement matters; for more than a decade, she’s been representing clients on the cutting edge of technology, and, over the last 5+ years, in the crypto and DeFi sector.  Immediately prior to joining the Aave Companies in March 2021, Rebecca was a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips LLP in the financial services group, serving these types of client.  In 2019, Rebecca was recognized as one of the top 100 women lawyers in New York by Crain’s New York Business.  Rebecca currently serves on the Board of Directors of Silvergate Bank, a public company, and the Board of the DeFi Education Fund, a 501(c)(4) promoting education about DeFi for regulators and policymakers.

DeFi super-user, educator, and Partner at 4RC

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.

Rotem is a member of Algorand’s founding team and a Director of Product Management, overseeing the product development of the Algorand platform, including the Algorand Consensus protocol, smart contracts platform, and developer tools.

Prior to Algorand, Rotem served for 5 years in Israel’s elite cyber-intelligence unit 8200, leading projects of national strategic caliber. His experience, however, stretches even further back. He started his career as a software engineer for SAP AG at the age of 14 and has since developed software and conducted research for several prominent companies, including IBM Research, Akamai Technologies and Broadway Technology. He also provided strategic counsel at Sygnia, a leading cyber-security consulting firm.

Rotem Holds a Master of Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MIT.

Michel Dahdah is the Co-Founder of C3 Protocol, a decentralized spot and derivatives markets protocol with cross-chain settlements, and Co-Founder of Rand Labs, a company building leading infrastructure on top of Algorand.

Casey Wagner is a New York-based business journalist covering digital assets and macro economics. Prior to joining Blockworks, she reported on markets at Bloomberg News. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Media Studies.

Based in Chicago, Saeed Badreg currently serves on Jump Crypto’s Strategic Partnerships team. At Jump Crypto, Saeed is heavily focused on supporting the continued development of Jump's special projects including the Wormhole protocol, a communication bridge between Solana and other top decentralized finance (DeFi) networks, and the Pyth network, a specialized oracle solution for latency-sensitive financial data, among other strategic initiatives.

Prior to Jump, Saeed served as the Chief Executive Officer of Tolemaeus, mobile and web application developer and software integration platform, and co-founded Makanak, a product aggregating one of the largest business datasets for the MENA regions.

Saeed earned a bachelor’s degree in Law and Society from American University and an MBA Primer from DePaul University.

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.

Mark Bentley Richardson is the Product Architect of Bancor. Mark was previously a research scientist; he received his BSc (Hons) from Macquarie University, and his PhD from the University of Melbourne. He switched from a career in the physical and life sciences to DeFi in January of 2021. Mark leads the research and development efforts at Bancor, creating new concepts to better service the liquidity needs of cryptocurrency markets. He values decentralization, user safety, and operational simplicity, and imbues his product designs with these ideals.

Chjango is a longstanding cryptocurrency evangelist, community builder, and technologist with specialization in Layer 1 consensus protocols and cryptoeconomics. She works on seed stage projects, growing those ecosystems from 0 to $1B market cap, having been one of the founding team members of Cosmos Network. She now advises cornerstone Cosmos ecosystem projects like Osmosis. She was formerly Ecosystem Development VP at Tendermint Inc, the team behind Cosmos.

She is an early trend spotter, identifying blue chip fungible digital currencies by their technical merits as early as 2014. She started the dWeb (decentralized web) Foundation in 2020, a not-for-profit aimed at driving Handshake adoption.

Chjango is host of Interchain.FM, a technical podcast that covers bleeding-edge cryptocurrency projects solving major problems in the blockchain sector. She runs a PoS validator called Interchain.FM  for Osmosis, Umee, and Comdex. Her podcast is hosted on YouTube, which has featured guests like Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, and Wallstreetbets founder Jaime Rogozinski.

Chjango holds a Bachelor of Science in Econometrics at the University of California, San Diego.

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.

Amir Haleem is the CEO of Nova Labs (formerly named Helium Inc.) and founder of the Helium Network. Today, the Helium Network is the fastest-growing decentralized wireless network across 56K cities and 170 countries globally. Prior to Nova Labs, Amir served a long career in the video game industry as CTO at gaming startup Diversion, and member of the original team behind Battlefield 1942 at DICE in Stockholm, Sweden. Outside of work, Amir is a former world champion esports gamer, co-founder of the popular esports community esreality.com, and builds and races 90's Japanese sports cars.

Casey Wagner is a New York-based business journalist covering digital assets and macro economics. Prior to joining Blockworks, she reported on markets at Bloomberg News. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Media Studies.

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.

Ariel Seidman is a two-time entrepreneur. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hivemapper, a decentralized mapping network with a crypto-integrated dashcam. Prior to Hivemapper, Ariel led teams of innovators as the Co-Founder and CEO of Gigwalk. Awarded Fast Company Top 10 Most Innovative Companies (Mobile) in 2013, Gigwalk is a mobile mechanical turk platform used by all the leading mapping companies. Before Gigwalk, Ariel served as the Director of Product Management at Yahoo Maps and Search where he fell in love with geospatial tech.

Saurabh Sharma is a Partner and Head of Investments at Jump Crypto and invest across Blockchain Infrastructure, Open Finance and Web3 primitives. Prior to this, Saurabh was a General Partner at Jump Capital where he led Infrastructure and Application Software investments. Saurabh started his career as a High-Performance Computing Researcher at French National Research Institute, worked as a quant trader with Lehman Brothers and led product, operations, and marketing teams at Groupon.

Katka Opocenska is a co-founder and CEO of Factor.fyi, an open and free finance data analytics platform. She became an active user of web3 protocols during DeFi summer, fascinated by the permissionless nature of the whole ecosystem, and by its potential to improve on the existing financial infrastructure. As a member of We3 from day 1, Katka led an education session on investment basics, and is passionate to help womxn get exposure to the new emerging asset class of crypto in a mindful and data-driven way. 

Katka has an MBA from Stanford University and Master’s degree in Computer Science from Charles University in Prague. Prior to founding her own company, she worked as a Product Manager at Google and as a Business Analyst at McKinsey. She was born in the Czech Republic and now lives and builds in San Francisco.

Ryan is co-founder and CEO of Messari, a leading crypto asset data and research company. Prior to founding Messari, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and was on the founding teams of Digital Currency Group, where he managed the firm’s seed investing activity, and CoinDesk, where he led the company’s restructuring and annual Consensus conferences. He has been an investor and prolific writer in the crypto industry since 2013.

Nicki Sanders is the head of blockchain engineering at TaxBit where she leads blockchain research and development specifically for DeFi and NFT smart contracts.

Sanders has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Utah and has an extensive background in software engineering. Prior to joining TaxBit, Sanders worked at Medici Ventures and tZERO Group, Inc., where she designed, architected, and implemented tZERO’s Global Security Standard for digital securities. During this time, Sanders also led the mobile applications development team for tZERO’s Crypto App.

Jack is a veteran entrepreneur with a deep background in machine learning, AI, security, and blockchain. Prior to co founding SKALE, Jack was a founder at multiple Silicon Valley based enterprise technology companies including IncentAlign, a digital currency platform, and Aktana, the leading machine learning analytics platform for the life science industry. He also held an executive role at Good Technology which was acquired by Motorola for ~$500M and subsequently held executive positions in Motorola. Jack has been actively involved in cryptocurrencies and decentralization as an investor since early 2013 and began working full-time in the space in early 2017. Jack holds a BS from the University of Nebraska and calls the Bay Area his home.

Eric is the CEO and co-founder of Giddy. Eric’s career as a software developer led him to get involved in crypto early, mining Bitcoin and Ethereum and eventually developing his own projects. He got heavily involved in DeFi in 2020 which led him to cross paths with people who sought help getting involved in DeFi and others who needed help retrieving lost tokens. This work led Eric to begin developing the Giddy app with the mission of democratizing access to wealth by making DeFi easier and safer to access than ever before.

Joel Edgerton is Head of Sales Americas at Ledger Enterprise where he is responsible for overseeing clients' strategic growth in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

Joel previously served as COO and Board of Directors of bitFlyer, where he helped increase their presence in the United States. He has over 17 years of experience in traditional finance and insurance through State Street, Citigroup, and BNP Paribas. 

Mohamed Elkasstawi is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Tribal Credit, crypto-powered payments and financing platform for startups and growing enterprises in emerging markets. Kasstawi leads Tribal’s efforts to create an innovative product offering at the nexus of TradFi and DeFi, leveraging the “DeFi mullet” ethos to accelerate growth for its startup clients. In recent months, Kasstawi spearheaded the launch of Tribal’s crypto-powered B2B cross-border payment service, as well as the company’s $40 million hybrid fiat-USDC debt round and its $41M token sale. 

Kasstawi is a seasoned expert in leveraging blockchain to serve real-world use cases. In addition to his work at Tribal, Kasstawi is also the founding partner of zk Capital, a research-focused blockchain firm, and was featured by Scene Arabia magazine as a leading Middle Eastern blockchain entrepreneur. Kasstawi is a firm believer in the power of crypto to transform people’s financial lives, especially in emerging markets. 

Ryan Sean Adams is a crypto investor & co-founder of Bankless. He’s an open finance maximalist who propagates the message of financial sovereignty. His mission is to help onboard the first billion people to crypto through memes, media, and education.

Johann Kerbrat is Chief Technology Officer of Robinhood Crypto. He oversees the crypto engineering team and leads technical strategy for the crypto business. Johann joined Robinhood to support the company in its mission to democratize finance for all and open up access to crypto to everyday investors. Prior to joining Robinhood, Johann held engineering roles at Airbnb, privacy-focused cryptocurrency startup Iron Fish, and founded an e-commerce platform company. Johann grew up in Nice, France and has an MSc in Software Engineering from Oxford Brookes University. He has been involved in crypto for more than a decade, mining his first bitcoin back in 2010 and buying a domain name for “far too many bitcoin” when bitcoin was just a few dollars.  

Lincoln Bartlett, CFA, leads the Agency Trading Desk at Anchorage Digital. He joined Anchorage after thirteen years on Wall Street on both the sell-side and the buy-side, where he personally executed three trillion dollars worth of equities, fixed income, and FX trades. Lincoln was previously the Portfolio Risk Manager for $193 billion of Vanguard’s Active Fixed Income funds. He is an expert at executing extremely large and high risk trades with minimal market impact. Lincoln has also led numerous technology initiatives to optimize portfolio management and trading strategies.

Stephen is the Institutional Manager at the Aave Companies, tasked with distributing knowledge of DeFi and Web3 to financial institutions and corporates. Stephen educates institutions on DeFi and helps them explore how they can participate in the web3 ecosystem, with discussions including various permissioned markets. Stephen worked in legacy finance for over 10 years, joining the Aave Companies from exchange traded fund provider First Trust, where he similarly worked in helping to increase adoption of a new technology amongst institutions in Europe.

Madi is the COO of Crypto Chicks and Women Labs. Crypto Chicks grew its roots as a women-centric NFT project and has since been acquired by Women Labs, which operates a portfolio of programs to support women across their web3 journeys. Madi has previously worked at both Meta and Google overseeing special programs for VPs and business leaders. She graduated from Cornell University, where she still regularly engages in their business and entrepreneurship endeavors as a member of the Board of Directors for Student Agencies, Inc.

Zach Hungate is Head of Everyrealm Ventures. Hungate also serves as Portfolio Manager for the Everyrealm Metaverse Alpha Fund, a venture capital fund focused on metaverse platforms, NFT/metaverse infrastructure, and gaming, and leads Everyrealm Gaming, M&A, and Strategic Partnerships. Hungate has over a decade of investment, investment banking, and technology experience, having worked at companies including Comvest Partners and Raymond James.