Name: Permissionless IV
Start: 2025-06-24T04:00:00.000Z
End: 2025-06-26T21:00:00.000Z
Location: Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

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Speakers

Peter Todd

Brendan is the co-founder and CEO of Brave and the Basic Attention Token. He previously served as CTO, then CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. While at Mozilla, he helped launch the award-winning Firefox browser. He is also the creator of JavaScript, the Internet's most widely used programming language.

Brendan Eich

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



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

Kain Warwick

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



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



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

Hayden Adams

Joseph Lubin is a co-founder of Ethereum, the founder and CEO of Consensys, a leading web3 and blockchain software company, and Chairman of SharpLink, one of the world’s largest corporate holders of Ether (“ETH”). Lubin has established himself as a guiding force in the fast-growing blockchain industry and a powerful advocate of decentralized technologies. He held positions as Director of the New York office of Blacksmith Software Consulting, and VP of Technology in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs. Through these posts, Joe focused on the intersection of cryptography, engineering, and finance. In 2014 he met Vitalik Buterin, a Canadian programmer, writer and Founder of Ethereum and joined the Ethereum Project as a co-founder. After the Project was launched, Joe established Consensys. Since 2014 Joe and the Consensys team have been working on the foundational software for web3. Joe graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Joseph Lubin

Mayor Eric Adams has served the people of New York City as an NYPD officer, State Senator, Brooklyn Borough President, and now as the 110th Mayor of the City of New York. He gave voice to a diverse coalition of working families in all five boroughs and is leading the fight to bring back New York City’s economy, reduce inequality, improve public safety, and build a stronger, healthier city that delivers for all New Yorkers.

Eric Adams

Li leads Circle’s engineering team and drives Circle’s AI innovation. She has served as CTO and interim CPO at Lime, SVP of engineering at Pinterest, Senior Director of Engineering at Google Inc., and Vice President of Engineering at Baidu, China

Li Fan

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

Keone Hon

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

Guy Young

Dan Robinson is a General Partner at Paradigm, focused on crypto investments and research into open-source protocols. Previously, Dan was a protocol researcher at Interstellar. Before Interstellar, Dan practiced as a litigation attorney at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton &amp; Garrison LLP. He earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. from Harvard University.

Dan Robinson

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

Uma Roy

CTO @ AngelList, Previously Sr. Director of Engineering @Coinbase, Founder &amp; CTO @MySycamore

Goutham Buchi

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.

Illia Polosukhin

Sergey Nazarov is the co-founder of Chainlink, the standard for high-quality onchain data and secure cross-chain interoperability, powering leading tokenized assets and unifying global markets onchain.



The Chainlink standard has securely enabled over $17 trillion in transaction value, powering onchain finance across banking, tokenization, DeFi, global trade, and other major sectors. Sergey has worked in the blockchain industry since 2014, when he founded one of the earliest tokenization platforms, along with tools for composing and supporting live smart contracts. His work in capital markets dates back to 2016, when he demoed one of the first-ever "smart bonds," which used oracle infrastructure to connect existing Swift messaging standards to blockchain networks. Sergey continues to collaborate with major market infrastructure providers and institutional banks such as Swift, DTCC, Fidelity International, ANZ, and many others, giving him a unique perspective on what’s required to accelerate the global adoption of blockchain technology and tokenized assets.

Sergey Nazarov

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

Bryan Pellegrino

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

Henri Stern

Luca is the CEO of Pudgy Penguins, a next-generation IP company.

Luca Netz

Yu Hu

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

Konstantin Richter

Danny Ryan

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



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



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

Lei Yang

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

Casey Caruso

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



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



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

Ali Yahya

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

Sreeram Kannan

Lead Economist at Anza

Max Resnick

Christine Moy is a Partner at Apollo, where she serves as Head of Digital Assets, Data, and AI Strategy. She leads Apollo’s efforts in digital asset innovation, investing in and partnering with companies transforming financial services while integrating blockchain technology into Apollo’s businesses. She also oversees the firm’s Enterprise Data Strategy, driving high-impact data initiatives, commercializing data products, and working across the firm to identify and implement the most promising AI use cases that enhance decision-making and amplify team capabilities. Previously, Christine was a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, where she led the Blockchain program, focusing on digital assets, tokenized payments, and decentralized identity. Earlier in her career at J.P. Morgan, she worked in Syndicated Loans, Securitized Products, Credit Risk, and Commodities. Christine holds a BA from Brown University.

Christine Moy

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



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

Avery Ching

Ariel is the CEO &amp; Co-Founder of Hivemapper. A seasoned expert in the field, Ariel's journey began over a decade ago at Yahoo! Search and Maps, where he garnered invaluable experience in building maps at scale. Motivated by the inefficiencies of traditional methods, he embarked on a mission to revolutionize global mapping. Prior to Hivemapper, Ariel founded Gigwalk, a pioneering location-based data collection firm that transformed mobile devices into lucrative tools for data gathering, earning recognition from Fast Company as a Top 10 Mobile Innovation Company. With his extensive background and unwavering commitment to innovation, Ariel continues to shape the future of mapping technology.

Ariel Seidman

After 3.5 years at Ava Labs, Patrick left his position as VP of Engineering to start Commonware. Previously, Patrick worked on the Coinbase Crypto Engineering Team where he led the development of Rosetta, the open source specification that Coinbase uses to integrate new blockchains.

Patrick O'Grady

Zano Sherwani

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

Joshua Tobkin

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

Jordi Alexander

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



Follow him on Twitter @KyleSamani.

Kyle Samani

Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi.



Tarek was born in California and grew up in Lebanon. He made his way back to the States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).



Before starting Kalshi, Tarek worked as a quantitative trader at Goldman Sachs as a structured credit and equities analyst and at Citadel as a global macro trader. During his time at these firms, he realized a common thread: a lot of trading stemmed from an opinion on a future event.



For example, a lot of activity at Goldman was focused on providing institutions with exposure to, or a hedge against, Brexit. That would be done by selling them complicated financial bundles (swaps, options, etc.) at a high price… but these bundles were proxies: basically, a bunch of risk curves fitted together to approximate the binary/event exposure the customers were looking for. What you couldn’t do was just trade directly on the event itself, even though that would have been simpler and cheaper and was what people wanted. The option just didn’t exist.



It was from that observation that the idea was born: a marketplace for event contracts. In 2018, Tarek and Luana partnered up to start Kalshi.

Tarek Mansour

Tarun Chitra is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gauntlet, the leading model provider in crypto and premier DeFi vault curator. Gauntlet manages risk across custom vault strategies and builds models safeguarding tens of billions of dollars in digital assets across the crypto ecosystem, driving capital efficiency and mitigating risk.



Under Tarun’s leadership, Gauntlet equips investors, builders, and token issuers with data-driven strategies to confidently allocate funds onchain by leveraging the most trusted crypto-economic research and analysis. Tarun’s research collaborations include more than 25 peer-reviewed papers on crypto and DeFi, and he is among the most cited contributors in DeFi economics.



He invests in fintech and blockchain companies through his fund Robot Ventures and is a biweekly contributor to Laura Shin’s investor podcast, “The Chopping Block.” Tarun is an alumnus of D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES) and Vatic Labs, and holds a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in applied engineering physics from Cornell University.

Tarun Chitra

Suresh Shetty is the Chief Technology Officer for Kinexys by JPMorgan. He has been part of JPMorgan a leading global financial services firm for the last 24 years. Suresh has been recognized within the firm as a Distinguished Engineer in 2005.



He has held variety of senior architecture and development management roles within JPM. Suresh graduated with an Electrical Engineering Degree from City College of New York and has an MBA in Finance from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Suresh Shetty

Ivan Soto-Wright

Roshan Robert is a financial services executive with substantial experience in traditional capital markets as well as crypto. Having worked at Morgan Stanley, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Barclays, Hiddenroad and CLST, Roshan has focused on Risk Management, Regulatory Strategy and Product Strategy throughout his career. Over the last decade and a half, post the global financial crisis, Roshan played a key role in the implementation of Dodd Frank regulations across the derivatives business at Barclays. He took on a leadership role in implementing regulatory strategy for the Barclays FCM as well as took active part in important strategic initiatives like the reengineering of the derivatives business treasury processes and the creation of a derivatives utility. Roshan was also part of the founding team at Hiddenroad, leading the organization as the Group COO / CCO for over 4 years and helping to build a non-bank prime brokerage business straddling Tradfi and crypto. He was also a cofounder at CLST, a credit deployment hub for digital markets and spent time as an advisor to foreign banks entering US capital markets, prior to joining OKX as the US CEO.

Roshan Robert

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

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

Sidney Powell

CEO @ Delphi Digital | Founding Partner @ Delphi Ventures

Anil Lulla

Charlie Noyes is a General Partner at Paradigm. Previously, Charlie was a member of the investment team at Pantera Capital. He began working on crypto research in high school and attended MIT for one year (incomplete).

Charlie Noyes

Jeremy Rubin

Meltem Demirors is Founder and General Partner at Crucible, an early-stage fund investing in the foundations of our digital future. Before launching Crucible in 2024, she served as Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, Europe’s largest and longest standing digital asset investment firm which oversees $7B in AUM. Meltem started her crypto career on the founding team at Digital Currency Group, which grew from 40 to 200 portfolio companies and 2 to 4 subsidiaries during her tenure. Beyond her corporate positions, Meltem has lectured at MIT and Oxford and is an active angel investor in over 100 startups. She leverages her vast network – ranging from major institutions to builders at the fringe – to find and fund unique opportunities for Crucible. Before joining the crypto industry in 2015, Meltem began her career trading and working in the oil and gas industry. She studied math and econ at Rice University and has an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. When she isn’t talking about data centers, the energy grid, or forward curves she can be found reading, wandering in the woods, or scheming with her magical internet money friends.

Meltem Demirors

Saurabh Sharma

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



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



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



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

Andre Cronje

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

Haseeb Qureshi

Michael Anderson is the co-founder of<a href="https://framework.ventures/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> Framework Ventures,</a> one of the largest VC firms in the blockchain industry. Under the leadership of Michael and his co-founder Vance, Framework was arguably the first VC firm to <a href="https://decrypt.co/16943/why-framework-ventures-is-going-all-in-on-defi" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“go all in”</a> on the emerging Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) ecosystem, notching up major early investments in several multi-billion dollar apps and networks like Chainlink, Aave, Synthetix, The Graph, and more. Over the last year, the firm has raised $400M for its third fund, and has also expanded into additional maturing verticals like web3 gaming, real world assets, and social crypto. Before Framework, Michael and his co-founder Vance launched and sold Hashletes, a digital collectible startup with official licensing from the NFL. Before entering the crypto space, Michael served as a product manager at both Snapchat and Dropbox, where he helped build out their monetization platforms.

Michael Anderson

Thomas Lee is a Managing Partner and the Head of Research at Fundstrat Global Advisors. He is an accomplished Wall Street strategist with over 25 years of experience in equity research, and has been top-ranked by Institutional Investor every year since 1998. Prior to co-founding Fundstrat, he served as J.P. Morgan’s Chief Equity Strategist from 2007 to 2014, and previously as Managing Director at Salomon Smith Barney. His areas of expertise include Market Strategy, Small/Mid-Cap Strategy and Telecom Services. Mr. Lee received his BSE from the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania with concentrations in Finance and Accounting. He is a CFA charterholder and is an active member of NYSSA and the NY Economic Club.

Thomas Lee

Nathan Allman is the founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, a blockchain technology company building platforms, assets, and infrastructure to bring financial markets onchain. Prior to founding Ondo Finance, he previously worked at Goldman Sachs on the Digital Assets team, and has a background in private credit investing at Prospect Capital Management.

Nathan Allman

Robinson Burkey is the Co-Founder and CCO of the Wormhole Foundation. Prior to starting the Wormhole Foundation, Robinson led growth for a number of startups over the past decade, including DoorDash where he was for 4 years. He became involved professionally with blockchain interoperability in 2021 by building within the Polkadot ecosystem.

Robinson Burkey

Yan Liberman

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

Jill Gunter

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

Wei Dai

Alex W.

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

Eugene Chen

Furqan Rydhan

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



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



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

Abhay Kumar

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

Jon Kol

Sherri Haymond is co-president, Global Partnerships, at Mastercard, and a member of the company’s Management Committee. In her role, Sherri leads a unique team working with digital players large and small to create innovative, differentiated products and solutions that shape the future of commerce.



As our world becomes borderless and even more digitally connected, Sherri and her team keep a pulse on the market to ensure Mastercard delivers relevant, impactful and industry-leading capabilities. Through a consultative approach, they enable partners around the globe to build best-in-class solutions tapping Mastercard technology and deliver them at scale. Inspired by Mastercard’s longstanding focus on inclusive growth, Sherri is passionate about working hand in hand with mission-aligned companies to solve real-world problems for people and businesses around the world.



Since joining Mastercard in 2010, first as legal counsel and subsequently focusing on digital products in Mastercard’s Digital Payments &amp; Labs business, Sherri has been at the forefront of several initiatives driving transformation of the payments ecosystem. She has played a significant role in the development and commercialization of solutions such as mobile payments, tokenization, open banking, installments and more.



Earlier in her career, Sherri was with Banc of America Securities in its structured finance group and practiced capital markets law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher &amp; Flom LLP. Sherri holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature from Duke University. She serves on the board of MoCADA, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is the proud founder of What’s Your Twenty, Inc., a small business in New York City.

Sherri Haymond

Debbie Soon

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

David Hoffman

Mary is a founder in stealth and an early-stage advisor across applications and infrastructure. She was previously an investor at Galaxy Digital's fund of funds.

Mary

I sit down weekly with the most credible people in crypto

Kevin Follonier

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



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

Eli Ben-Sasson

Alex is a software architect with over 15 years of experience in engineering and startups. He is the co-inventor of ZKsync and currently serves as the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs. At Matter Labs, he leads a talented team focused on addressing blockchain scalability challenges using zero-knowledge proofs. Alex's passion lies in using technology to advance personal freedom, self-ownership, and decentralization

Alex Gluchowski

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



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



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

Greg Osuri

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

Andy C.

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

Ben Jones

Dan Elitzer is a co-founder of Nascent (nascent.xyz), a team of builders who have backed over 100 early-stage founders creating products and primitives for an open financial world.



Previously, Dan co-founded IDEO CoLab Ventures, a crypto-focused venture firm associated with the renowned design agency, IDEO. During that time, he also helped launch YAM Finance.



Dan began his career in social enterprise and microfinance, working with both domestic social impact organizations and international development agencies. Dan earned an MBA from MIT Sloan, where he co-founded the MIT Bitcoin Club and MIT FinTech Club, and a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Pomona College.

Dan Elitzer

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

Robbie K.

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

Robert Habermeier

Andrew Koller

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

Armani Ferrante

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



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



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

Yannik Schrade

Antonina Norair

Baek is a General Partner at Hashed, a leading web3 fund based in Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, and Silicon Valley. Hashed invests in early-stage blockchain projects globally to accelerate mass adoption of its technology. Baek actively participated in hackathons since young and was previously a software engineer at AWS. Baek was investor in many pioneering founders of startups such as ZKSync, Axie Infinity, Aptos, Sandbox, Mythical Games, Yuga Labs, and more. Hashed also operates subsidiaries including UNOPND (100+ engineers Web3 venture / gaming studio), KODA (The largest $6B+ digital assets custodian in Korea), Factomind (Digital asset management company), Hashed Emergent (Emerging market focused Web3 VC), and Hashed Open Research (digital assets policy think tank with ex. chairman of Korean Financial Services Commission)

Baek Kim

Edgar Pavlovsky

mteam.eth

Honour Masters is an investor at Crucible Capital, an early-stage fund partnering with founders at the intersection of compute, energy, and crypto. Previously, Honour spent three years at Energize Capital, where she invested in grid technology and energy transition software. Before that, she led business development at Treville Capital (fka CoVenture), focused on esoteric credit, crypto and venture. She began her career in M&amp;A at Morgan Stanley and later worked on the financial products team at Carta. Honour holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a degree in Economics from the University of Edinburgh.

Honour Masters

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

Sam Kazemian

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

Dr. Dan Boneh

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

Muneeb Ali

Mike Silagadze is the founder and CEO of&nbsp;<a href="http://ether.fi/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ether.fi</a>, the first ETH staking protocol that allows stakers to maintain full control of their keys throughout the entire staking process, making it the only truly decentralized liquid staking platform. Prior to founding&nbsp;<a href="http://ether.fi/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ether.fi</a>, Mike was CEO and co-founder of Top Hat, which he grew into the market leader in student engagement software, with 500 employees and $60 million in annual revenue.



He is also an active speaker and lecturer in the higher education, technology, and startup communities, having lectured at the Rotman Commerce Entrepreneurship Organization, the ASU GSV Summit, MaRS, Tech Fest Toronto, SAAS North and T­E­Dx­Laurier­University, among many others.

Mike Silagadze

Andrej Radonjic

Ian Barile

Swen Schäferjohann

Hadley is the Chief Commercial Officer at Marinade Labs, the web3 software development team behind Solana liquid and native staking protocol Marinade. He previously founded and led Fidelity’s digital assets division, after serving as SVP of Fidelity Labs where he led several divisions to research and pilot several emerging technologies, including wearable computing, VR/AR, mobile applications (including the company’s first-ever app and app brokerage), AI, and others. He also led global digital asset custody for the Bank of New York Mellon, where he launched the industry’s first bank-grade platform for digital asset custody on bitcoin and Ethereum. He also served as COO at blockchain infrastructure company Bloq, and previously led Amazon Web Services’ AWS Innovation Lab.

Hadley Stern

Kaledora

Merlin Egalite

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



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



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



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



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

Michael Lee

Jing Sun is the Co-founder of IoTeX Network and MachineFi Lab, focusing on ecosystem investment and acceleration in DePIN and AI sectors. Jing has a background as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and has led over 60 investments and innovations in frontier tech in blockchain, VR/AR, Cyber Security and AI since 2013. She worked as a General Partner of Sparkland Capital and DeltaG Venture with AUM $100M+. Jing received BA/MA and Scholarship in Economics and International Communications at NTU and NUS in Singapore.

Jing Sun

Dmitriy Berenzon

Felipe is the Chief Investment Officer at Theia, a liquid token fund focused on fundamentals. Theia invests in companies building out the Internet Financial System.



Prior to co-founding Theia, Felipe was a Vice President and early employee at BayPine, a private equity firm focused on creating value through digital transformation within traditional industries. Felipe was also a Vice President at Declaration Partners, the family office of David Rubenstein. Previously, he was a Senior Associate at JLL Partners, investing in buyout and growth equity transactions across healthcare, business services and industrials. Felipe holds a BA in Economics from Yale University.

Felipe Montealegre

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Mike Dudas

Founder / CIO 26CC - a frontier fund investing in crypto &amp; AI. Host of the AI rollup @bankless

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Seung Yoon “SY” Lee is the CEO and Co-founder of Story. Prior to founding the company, he served as Global Strategy Officer at Kakao Entertainment, a leading Korean entertainment company creating and delivering original content and IPs across formats. SY sold his first venture, Radish, the mobile serialized fiction app with millions of downloads across the globe, to Kakao Entertainment for $440M in 2021. The serial entrepreneur is also a venture partner at Hashed, an Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leader, and Trilateral Commission’s David Rockefeller Fellow. He was an inaugural member of Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2016 and was subsequently named as one of its All Star alumni. Lee was elected as the first Asian President of the Oxford Union, world’s famous debating society, during his study at Oxford.

Seung Yoon Lee

mel.eth

Rick Latona

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

DeFi Renaissance

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

Consumer Apps

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

Protocol R&D

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

Token Design

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

Crypto x AI

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