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.

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. 

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.

Jeff ‘Jihoz’ Zirlin is the Growth Lead and Co-Founder of Sky Mavis, the creators of the largest NFT gaming ecosystem, Axie Infinity. With over 2.2M daily active players, Axie Infinity has achieved over 2B USD in total transactions as players turn their time and effort into real value. As Growth Lead, Jeff spearheads strategic growth initiatives including partnerships, fundraising, user acquisition, community engagement, and is responsible for strengthening the Axie Infinity economy. He received a BA in History from Yale.

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.

Community Capitalist investing in the metaverse

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).

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.

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.

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.

Dan Tapiero is the CEO and Managing Partner of 10T. Dan brings 30 years of experience in macro and commodity investing and trading, research and economics, as well as entrepreneurship. Dan has an extensive set of relationships in the institutional investment management space and is a thought leader that regularly speaks and contributes on macroeconomic topics.

Before founding 10T, Dan was the managing partner of DTAP Capital Advisors, a global macro investment fund, that he founded in 2003. He is the co-founder of Gold Bullion International (GBI), a physical precious metals platform for the wealth management industry that also expanded into the cryptocurrency universe in 2014. He is a co-founder of the Agricultural Company of America (AGCoA), one of the largest farmland REITs in the U.S. at the time of its sale in 2013.

Previously, from 1992-2012, Dan was a macro-focused portfolio manager and analyst at Tiger Management, Duquesne Capital Management, Steinhardt Management Co., and SAC Capital Advisors. Dan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University, where he earned his B.A.'90 and M.A.'91 in European History. Dan has been on the Board of Trustees of the Lawrenceville School for the past 12 years and currently leads the Investment Committee for its endowment.

I never had ‘a job’, in part because I always wanted power over my choices. My entrepreneurial nature, for better or worse, is driven by wanting to feel a true sense of freedom and ownership. That is something blockchain gives you and so Gala Games is a natural place for me.

Before joining Gala just over a year ago, I spent a lot of time in FinTech amongst other major industries and realised a real discrepancy between the people who have and the people who have not, and realised that technology alone is not going to fix that. Blockchain in a gaming environment really enables the general public who want to play games to access a fairer and more equitable world and that excites me. If games can do that, so can music and I’m delighted to be part of building a new decentralized future with Gala Music now too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Preston Van Loon is a co-founder and core developer at Prysmatic Labs focused on building mission critical client software for Ethereum's switch to Proof-of-Stake and other scaling efforts.

Christine leads Liink by J.P. Morgan, a new ecosystem and network that facilitates collaboration, easy and direct access to value-added applications, and commercialization opportunities for financial institutions, corporates and fintechs to enable faster, cheaper, and safer payments. Christine also oversees J.P. Morgan’s firmwide Blockchain/Crypto strategy and has defined its program in the past half decade. Christine recently expanded her role to build out J.P. Morgan’s Metaverse practice, tasked with setting a comprehensive cross-metaverse & video game ecosystem strategy (across both Web2 and Web3) for the firm and its various lines of business, designing and driving the development of cutting edge technology products, collaborating video game publishers, payments facilitators, developer marketplaces, NFT artists, digital assets ecosystems, and guiding clients on the journey. Since joining J.P. Morgan more than 17 years ago, she has emerged as a highly trusted and respected leader – delivering results across the firm by cultivating strong relationships with clients, structuring new and innovative solutions, as well as designing and delivering enterprise-grade technology at scale through a variety of roles in Investment Banking, Markets, Asset Management and Technology. As one of the founding members of J.P. Morgan’s blockchain program, Christine created and drove its key initiatives in digital assets, tokenized payments, internet-of things and digital identity. She is a graduate of Brown University. Christine was recently named in Fortune’s The Ledger 40 Under 40 list of “the most impressive, young superstars transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.

Vance is the co-founders of Framework Ventures, a thesis-driven venture capital firm whose team of technologists, researchers, and investors partner with founders and teams to build token-based networks and develop the requisite cryptoeconomics, governance, and community to scale.

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. 

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.

Kieran is a proven serial entrepreneur. Working alongside his brother Kain Warwick in e-commerce, Kieran was exposed to Bitcoin and Ethereum early on. His enthusiasm for the crypto space led to joining Blueshyft. While there, Kieran successfully onboarded major Australian Exchanges and started the world’s first OTC cryptocurrency exchange.

Additionally, Kieran helped The Burger Collective amass 100,000 unique reviews, 20,000 monthly web app users, and established a partnership with the global business, DoorDash. At the same time, DeFi was quickly growing, and Kieran and Kain (Synthetix.io) wanted to explore the uncharted areas of opportunity. With his background and interest in trading penny stocks, Kieran wanted to pioneer a DeFi project that would be a game-changer (pun intended) for the industries it represented. With this in mind, he tapped his brother Aaron (Co-Founder/Game Designer) to develop what will be the first AAA gaming title on the Ethereum blockchain, and Illuvium was born.

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.

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.

Tegan Kline is co-founder of Edge and Node, (prev. Business Lead for The Graph), an indexing and query protocol organising the world’s open blockchain data and making open data a public good. Tegan helps leaders and innovators connect more deeply with stakeholders across the blockchain ecosystem. Tegan is the former International Business Development Manager and OXT Relations Lead for Orchid, an A16z and Sequoia backed blockchain company that created tools and protocols for users to obtain digital freedom and an open and accessible internet. Tegan successfully helped to launch Orchid at a 400m valuation on Coinbase. Tegan’s professional experience has been with Fortune 500’s and startups, prior to Orchid, Tegan was the Executive VP of a patent marketplace powered by blockchain, analysed by AI. She began her career in Investment Banking at BAML and, prior to discovering blockchain, worked in Sales and Trading at Barclays.

Tom is a Partner at Dragonfly Capital. He previously led product at 0x, worked as a product manager at Facebook and Instagram, and worked in software engineering at Apple and Microsoft.

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

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.

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.

Cooper is actively shaping the Creator Economy as an operator and an investor. He contributes to DAOs like Friends with Benefits and advises Audius and the Variant Fund. He is an avid NFT collector and was featured in Fortune’s 2021 NFTy 50.

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).

Matt Hougan is one of the world’s leading experts on crypto, ETFs, and financial technology. He is Chief Investment Officer for Bitwise Asset Management, a pioneer in cryptoasset index funds with more than $1.2 billion in assets under management. He was previously CEO of ETF.com, where he helped build the world’s first ETF data and analytics system, the leading ETF media site, and the world’s largest ETF conference, Inside ETFs. Hougan is co-author of both “A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange-Traded Funds” and “Cryptoassets: The Guide to Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies for Professional Investors” from the CFA Institute’s Research Foundation. He is a crypto columnist for Forbes, and a three-time member of the Barron’s ETF Roundtable.

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. 

Amy is head of the emerging market equity investment business with investors based in New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Riyadh. She joined Morgan Stanley in 2001 and has over 21 years of experience. She was previously chief operating officer of the emerging markets equity business, and held roles in FX trading, portfolio management support, and product development and strategy. Amy started her career in internet consulting before transitioning to finance. Amy received a B.A. in business administration, with a concentration in finance, from Fordham University and a Master of Science, in Applied Psychology, from the University of Southern California.

Jake Brukhman is the founder and CEO of leading web3 Venture Capital firm CoinFund. Coinfund was established in 2015 and was one of the earliest investors in the NFT and Web3 Infrastructure space.

Jake is also a writer, an artist, and a technologist who has a background in mathematics and computer science. He started his career working at hedge fund’s including Highbridge Capital Management and then moved to Amazon as a technical product manager and engineer. Following this, he was appointed to the role of CTO at Triton Research, a company which sources publicly available data about private companies and then performs financial analysis on them before they go public.

Richard is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures. Fabric backs the founders of the Open Economy. investing in builders, businesses and digital assets from inception to scaling since 2012. Fabric invested in the likes of Polkadot, Ocean Protocol, Orchid, Sorare, 1inch, The Graph, and NEAR. 

Richard combines a pedigree in open source, developer-oriented tools, and early stage venture investing with blockchain focus since 2012, and has invested in Pantera Venture Fund I, Bitstamp, Bitrise, Tray.io, TransferWise, and Citymapper. Richard has previously exited 3 software companies as an entrepreneur, building/ scaling Automic (CA), Tideway (BMC), and Orchestream (Oracle) – reaching a cumulative market cap of $2.2bn. 

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.

Vanessa Grellet is a Global Executive with over 20  years of expertise in the Financial Services and Tech industry. At CoinFund she is the Head of Portfolio growth where she oversees and supports the portfolio companies . Prior to joining CoinFund she was an Executive Director at ConsenSys where she focused on driving adoption for Ethereum,  Strategic initiatives, Alliances and Channels.  She was involved in setting up the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), sits on the Board of the Accounting Blockchain Coalition (ABC) and is the President of the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC). Prior to joining ConsenSys she was a Strategy Executive at NYSE and a key member of PwC’s global wealth management team. Vanessa is a Founding Board member of AABC focused on Blockchain and Art, she sits on the Advisory Council of ConsenSys and the Resolution Project. She is a Milken Institute Associate and contributed to the  World Economic Forum Digital Future Council. Mrs. Grellet graduated Cum Laude from Law School (Paris II Assas) and Business School (HEC).

Bill Barhydt - born in New York City, and currently residing near San Francisco - is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in Internet and media technologies for 30 years. 

Bill is the founder and CEO of Abra. Forbes describes Abra as "the Robinhood of Crypto!” Abra enables myriad crypto banking services for consumers and institutions including trading, high yield interest accounts, borrowing and lending.  Abra has customers in over 100 countries.

As a recognized expert in Internet and Mobile technologies Barhydt has presented at over 100 conferences including The World Economic Forum, The US State Department, The Mobile World Congress and TED where he gave the first ever TED Talk on Bitcoin in 2012.

Bill started his career working in R&D at the CIA and NASA. Bill also spent several years working at Goldman Sachs in Fixed Income Trading. As one of the early team members of Netscape, Bill was involved in building some of the core infrastructure that helped grow the consumer Internet we all use today.  Today Bill is globally recognized as a technology pioneer and as an avid investor in companies across the broader technology ecosystem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alex is one of the inventors of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) with a foundational patent dating back to 1994 and is now working on MOIP (Money Over Internet Protocol) technology. Over 35 patents have been issued to Alex, relating to exchanges, VOIP protocols, messaging and communication.

Alex is a serial entrepreneur and founder of seven New York City-based startups, raising more than $1 billion and exiting over $3 billion. Alex founded two of New York City’s top 10 venture-backed exits since 2000: Arbinet, with a 2004 IPO that had a market capitalization of over $750 million; and Transit Wireless, valued at $1.2 billion.

Alex has received numerous awards for innovation, including being nominated twice by E&Y as ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’, in 2002 & 2011; Crain’s 2010 Top Entrepreneur; the prestigious 2000 Albert Einstein Technology medal; and the Technology Foresight Award for Innovation (presented in Geneva at Telecom 99).

As one of the pioneers of web-based exchanges, Alex authored patents that cover aspects of the Smart Grid, ad exchanges, Twitter, Skype, App Store, Netflix streaming concept and many other popular web companies. Additionally, Arbinet’s fundraising story was featured as a case study in 2001 by Harvard Business School.

Melody is a Co-Founder of Spartan Group and leads the group’s advisory business. She works side by side with the crypto industry’s leading founders and projects on their fundraising and strategic development in Asia. Since founding Spartan, Melody has worked closely with WilderWorld, BitDAO, Qredo, Dapper Labs / Flow, Solana, Blockstack, Origin, Deribit and other leading crypto projects. Melody has been an active early stage tech investor over the past decade and an early investor in blockchain companies. Prior to founding Spartan group, Melody was an investment partner at MOX/SOSV, a global top accelerator VC. She started her career in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong where she worked on numerous financing and M&A transactions including the Baidu IPO.

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 bourgeoning 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 recently 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.

Lorien has a LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School and is a member in good standing with the Ontario Bar.

Ray Mogg is a Co-Founder at Tracer DAO.

Ray is building Tracer DAO, decentralised financial derivative infrastructure that will provide more transparent and effective ways for individuals and firms alike to manage risk. Tracer DAO is a free market vehicle for both digital and real world derivative markets to be unlocked through a low transaction cost framework.

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. 

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.

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.

Teddy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Notional Finance, a fixed-rate lending protocol on Ethereum. Prior to founding Notional, Teddy traded interest rate swaps at Barclays Investment Bank and traded crypto at London-based family office Ayanda Capital.

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.

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.

Chris is an industry veteran, passionate about financial innovation, and was previously at Bitstamp, where he held the role of Head of Business Development and was responsible for helping financial institutions enter the crypto market and focused on identifying opportunities for integrating crypto with traditional finance. Prior to that, he launched the open banking payments platform, Token, and built the pipeline for the business in Europe.

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.

Perianne Boring is the Founder & President 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 America’s Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes. In 2016, she was named 10 Most Influential People in Blockchain by CoinDesk. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rebecca Rettig is General Counsel at Aave.  She began her legal career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York, litigating complex commercial disputes; prior to joining Aave, Rebecca was a partner in Manatt, Phelps & Phillips LLP’s financial services group.  With unique and deep-rooted expertise representing companies at the forefront of the financial services industry’s digital transformation, Rebecca spent the past four plus years advising blockchain and cryptocurrency clients on legal and regulatory matters—with a particular focus advising DeFi projects over the past two years; she also represented clients in all aspects of litigation and regulatory enforcement proceedings as well as in licensing matters.  In 2019, Rebecca was recognized as one of the top 100 women lawyers in New York City by Crain’s New York Business.

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.

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.  

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.

Hugo Philion is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flare Network. Flare is a scalable, EVM based layer 1 blockchain, designed to enable trustless and secure interoperability between any blockchain. Hugo’s previous career was as a derivatives trader managing portfolios at several large funds. Subsequently Hugo studied Machine Learning at University College London where he met Flare's Co-Founders, Sean Rowan and Nairi Usher.

Scott Stuart is the Co-founder and CEO of Kava Labs, the primary development team behind the Kava Network and App.

The Kava Network is a builder-owned Layer-1 blockchain that combines the speed and interoperability of Cosmos with the developer power and support of Ethereum in a single network.Since the company’s founding in 2017, Scott served as the Head of Product, later assuming the role of CEO in 2021. Following his graduation from the University of Wisconsin Madison, Scott led a 7+ year career in professional poker, topping leaderboards world-wide. Prior to founding Kava Labs, he founded AppEase, a successful mobile advertising technology company.

James founded Elliptic and has a strategic focus on new product initiatives and key industry developments. James sits on the Elliptic board and loves finding innovative solutions for customers that apply Elliptic's best-in-class blockchain data capabilities. He has a Computer Science Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and a Computer Science MPhil and MA from the University of Cambridge

Moti joined DeviantArt in 2017, initially as COO, and recently assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer.
DeviantArt, the world's largest online art community, has flourished under Moti's leadership and now proudly hosts over 70 million users and 500 million pieces of art.

Prior to joining DeviantArt, Moti co-founded Mobilibuy, a venture that aimed to revolutionize the retail world by converting any media, digital screen, or print into a virtual storefront using image recognition technologies.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Allan Gulley is the Product Operations Lead at the Index Coop, the leading decentralized community powering on-chain index products. Allan is engaged in every stage of the product lifecycle, from R&D and product design to go-to-market and post-launch management. Before joining the Index Coop, he has worked in the crypto and blockchain space since 2016 as an academic researcher, solution architect, and management consultant. His work and writing have also been included in educational curricula developed by the Linux and Ethereum Foundations.

Alan Chiu is the founder and CEO of Boba Network, a Layer 2 optimistic rollup scaling solution built to make Ethereum faster, cheaper, and smarter. Alan has experience growing distributed systems startups, designing DAO-like incentive systems (years before DAOs), and investing in top startups through XSeed and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs. Through it all, Alan has retained a purposeful, mission-driven attitude when building startups, a mindset best represented by his penchant for teaching and the phrase “WAGMI” (we’re all gonna make it).

Weso is Beefy's Lead Developer and Strategic Partnership Coordinator, providing daily direction to the project’s globe-spanning team. Beefy’s success relies on his roles in managing multiple partners, stakeholders, and user groups in one of the world’s fastest-moving industries. Weso’s extensive background in business and program development is an essential factor in Beefy’s position as an industry leader. Using his extensive knowledge, Weso has developed a key strategic vision for a project that handles over $1 billion in TVL. 

Through Weso, Beefy’s customers rely directly on these skills to keep their deposits safe in an industry that values bank-grade security. Over 10 years of experience have provided him the background needed for heading one of the DeFi space's most-known and loved yield optimizers.

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.

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.

Tobias Jung is a Product Owner in the Staking unit at T-Systems MMS a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom where he builds infrastructure for public blockchain networks. Previously he worked in various tech software start-ups. Tobias graduated from Lund University with a MSC in Business administration. Since several years he has been passionately involved in the crypto space.

Genevieve Bos is a successful technology and media entrepreneur who launched and sold multiple privately held companies. Her newest venture, called Poplar, is a high-yield sweeper account designed exclusively for businesses. It's a SaaS platform called YaaS(Yield as a Service) and it delivers 3-20% APY automatically on idle cash and working capital. Poplar uses bank-grade security to tap hard-to-access, high-yield DeFi smart contracts so business customers enjoy higher yields, full liquidity with built-in business rules and full trackability  — all while having no exposure to the volatility of crypto.  As a tech executive, board member, and professional speaker, Genevieve is a global connector of people and ideas and a strategic business developer. She is also known for launching then selling the publishing lifestyle brand PINK with over 1 million readers - created exclusively for professional women – described as “Fortune Meets Oprah.” She is a sought after speaker for companies like Cisco, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, GE, The Home Depot, P&G and has been featured in Forbes, and on CNBC, NBC and CNN. Genevieve is an investor, board and advisory member for some ground-breaking tech companies like Software Automation (sewing machine robots), Optios.com (helping the world’s most elite performers unlock their brain’s exponential capacity using proprietary neuroscience technology in the financial trading and sports industries), Steady (customized on demand job opportunities for the gig economy) and Advanced Data Cooling Technologies (making the carbon capture of Bitcoin mining profitable). Her mission every day is to help people harness their own positive human energy to elevate themselves and humanity.

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.

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.

Derek is the CEO of PureStake, the company building Moonbeam. Prior to PureStake, Derek was the co-founder and CTO of Fuze, where he led the product and engineering teams in the creation of a global Unified Communications-as-a-Service cloud platform with points of presence all around the world. During his time at Fuze, the company grew to 700 employees and a $150M run rate. As a professional tech entrepreneur with over two decades of success building software and cloud companies, Derek can speak to the importance of blockchain infrastructure to eliminate operational complexity and allow developers to focus on building unique applications and projects.

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

Alvin Lee is Lead Evangelist at DeGate DAO. DeGate is an ZK-rollup based Decentralized Trading protocol built on Ethereum. .

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.

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.

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.

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.