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Abdelhamid Bakhta is Head of Freedom Tech at StarkWare, a role he transitioned into after serving as Head of Ecosystem at the same company for three years. In his current capacity, his stated focus is on the question of how to verify what autonomous systems actually do, working on cryptographic proofs, governance tooling, and agent harness engineering for auditable autonomous systems. His work sits at the intersection of zero-knowledge proof technology and AI safety.

Prior to his current role, Bakhta led StarkWare's developer relations and growth efforts for the Starknet network. He was centrally involved in the STRK token airdrop in early 2024, serving as a primary public spokesperson in the aftermath of its contested rollout, acknowledging that criteria such as minimum wallet thresholds and the exclusion of certain users were miscalculated. During his tenure as Head of Ecosystem, he initiated the Kakarot and Madara open source projects, both of which subsequently became independently operated. He also led StarkWare's public positioning on extending ZK rollup technology to Bitcoin, including public commentary on the potential reactivation of the OP_CAT opcode and its implications for Bitcoin scalability. Before joining StarkWare, Bakhta worked as an Ethereum core developer and is co-author and technical champion of EIP-1559. He has 15 years of production software experience across payments, banking, and blockchain. He has appeared on the Bankless podcast to discuss Starknet's culture and development trajectory.

Abhinav Guptha is Product and Strategy Leader – Digital Asset Solutions at Broadridge, a position he has held since June 2025. Prior to this, he served as Associate Vice President – Innovation at Broadridge from August 2022 to June 2025, based in Hyderabad, India. His work sits at the intersection of fintech, digital assets, and Web3, with a stated focus on open innovation and blockchain technology.

Before joining Broadridge, Guptha was a Consultant at MSC (MicroSave Consulting) from September 2021 to August 2022, where he curated a financial inclusion lab to support fintech startups scaling their impact and designed open innovation programs for social good. Earlier career experience includes roles at T-Hub Hyderabad, JICA, Bharat Inclusion Initiative, NPCI, and Hilti Group. He holds a Master's in Business Administration from Amity University, a Management Development Programme qualification from the Indian Institute of Management, and a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering. He is also the creator of CoinBeings, a webcomic focused on the fintech sector. His total professional experience spans approximately 13 years.

Adam Back is CEO and co-founder of Blockstream, a Bitcoin and blockchain infrastructure company he has led since being appointed to the role in October 2016. He invented Hashcash in 1997, a proof-of-work system originally designed to deter spam and denial-of-service attacks, which was later cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper and adopted as the basis for Bitcoin's mining mechanism. At Blockstream, Back leads development of Bitcoin infrastructure including the Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain enabling faster settlement, privacy-enhanced transactions, and issuance of digital assets such as stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets. The company also develops Bitcoin wallets, mining infrastructure, satellite-based data broadcasting, and enterprise blockchain solutions.

Before co-founding Blockstream, Back co-founded Pi Corporation, a cloud infrastructure provider subsequently acquired by EMC, where he became Chief Security Officer of the consumer division. He has held senior roles at Microsoft, VMware, and Zero-Knowledge Systems, with a focus on cryptography and security architecture. He is a cypherpunk and has been active in digital privacy and electronic cash research since the 1990s. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Distributed Systems from the University of Exeter.

Adam Bilmes is Executive Director, Head of Digital Asset and Tokenization Sales at S&P Global, a position he has held since December 2025 and is based in New York. He holds the CFP® and CIMA® certifications and has approximately 21 years of experience in financial services sales and relationship management.

Prior to joining S&P Global, Bilmes spent three years at Franklin Templeton across two roles. From June 2024 to September 2025, he served as VP, Business Development Lead for the Americas within Franklin's Innovation Research, Strategies and Technology group, where he led business development and partnerships across NeoBanks, brokers, fintechs, wealthtech platforms, and payment platforms in the Americas, with a focus on digital assets and blockchain. He led the go-to-market strategy for Franklin's first tokenized money market fund, BENJI, targeting institutions, crypto firms, and direct-to-consumer platforms, and managed multi-billion dollar opportunities through non-traditional distribution channels. From April 2022 to May 2024, he held the role of VP, Digital Strategy and Wealth Management, focusing on distribution of Franklin's Goals Optimization Engine—an AI and dynamic programming-based managed account solution offered via APIs to 401k record keepers, broker-dealers, and RIAs—alongside sales of mutual funds, ETFs, model portfolios, and alternatives in fintech and neobank channels.

Adam K Carson is Chase – Corporate Development – Digital Assets Crypto Strategy and Partnerships at JPMorgan Chase, a role he began in January 2026. In this capacity he focuses on corporate development, digital asset strategy, and partnerships within Chase's digital assets mandate.

Carson previously served as Managing Director and Head of Digital Partnerships at Chase from April 2012 to March 2019, concurrently holding the title of Managing Director – Global Technology at JPMorgan Chase & Co. from April 2016 to March 2019, and Executive Director – Global Technology from April 2012 to April 2016. From April 2019 to January 2025 he was a Partner at Point72 Ventures focused on fintech and crypto investing, followed by an Advisor role there from January 2025 to February 2026. Earlier in his career he held positions at Morgan Stanley, Bain & Company, and eBay. He holds an MBA from Dartmouth College's Amos Tuck School of Business and an undergraduate degree from Duke University.

Adam Krochak is VP of Product: Agentic Commerce & Experiences and Web3/Blockchain, Amex Labs at American Express, a position he assumed in February 2025. In this role, his stated mandate covers agentic commerce, Web3, and blockchain product development within Amex Labs, the company's innovation unit. His immediately preceding role, held from November 2021 to February 2025, was VP of Product for Digital Payments and Web3 at Amex Labs, giving him over three years of direct product leadership in the Web3 and digital payments space at the same institution prior to his current appointment.

Krochak has been at American Express since 2015, progressing through a series of product roles. He served as Director of Product for Digital Payments at Amex Labs from October 2019 to November 2021, and as Senior Product Manager at Amex Labs from February 2018 to October 2019. Earlier, he held Senior Product Manager and Product Manager roles within American Express's Digital Business Financing group between November 2015 and February 2018, a commercial innovation unit that American Express later expanded through the acquisition of Kabbage in 2020. Prior to his full-time roles, he completed a digital commerce product development internship at American Express in summer 2013. He holds a degree from the University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business, where he studied between 2010 and 2014 and served as a Teaching Assistant for a Business Information Technology course covering topics including AI, machine learning, and big data.

Adam Schouela is Head of Tokenization Strategy at Fidelity Digital Asset Management, a role he has held since May 2023. In this position, he explores and defines strategies for how tokenization and smart contracts can change the infrastructure, processes, and business models underlying the operation of traditional capital markets and investing.

Prior to this role, Schouela spent over six years at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), first as Director of Product Management for Emerging Technology from July 2016, then as Vice President of Product Management for Emerging Technology from June 2017, and subsequently as Head of Emerging Technology from January 2020 to June 2023. In these roles, he led technology teams building applications using emerging technologies including AR/VR, blockchain, and quantum computing, and oversaw rapid development of proofs of concept to assess their applicability to financial services. His published work during this period includes research on quantum computing optimization and the introduction of Sherlock, a tool to analyze digital assets. Before his emerging technology work, he served as Director of Product Management for New Business Incubation at Fidelity from April 2013 to July 2016, leading teams using Design Thinking and Lean Startup methodologies. He holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Western University.

Adeniyi Abiodun is Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain, a position he has held since November 2021. In this role, he leads product strategy, developer tooling, architecture, performance, and usability for the Sui platform. His stated mandate includes overseeing institutional infrastructure and developer experience to advance Web3 adoption. Specific initiatives attributed to him include work on the Move programming language, low-latency consensus, offline transactions, and hardware integrations.

Prior to Mysten Labs, Abiodun served as Product Lead for crypto infrastructure at Meta (Facebook), where he led the Novi Crypto Platform team and contributed to the Diem (formerly Libra) Network and the Move programming language. Before Meta, he was Head of Product for Blockchain at VMware and Architect for Blockchain Cloud Platform at Oracle. He co-founded PeerNova and CloudHashing, the latter focused on Bitcoin cloud mining infrastructure. Earlier in his career, he held senior engineering and software roles at HSBC, J.P. Morgan, and Syncova Solutions in London. Abiodun holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Queen Mary, University of London, where he studied from 2001 to 2005. He was originally from Nigeria, relocated to the UK at age 7, and later moved to San Francisco.

Adithya Attawar is Head of U.S. Digital Assets Products for Legal at BlackRock, a position he assumed in November 2025, having served as Director in the Digital Assets and ETFs legal function since January 2022. He sits on the leadership team for Digital Assets, with direct involvement in BlackRock's flagship digital asset products including IBIT, ETHA, and BUIDL. In his broader Director role, he has led product counsel responsibilities across BlackRock's iShares ETF suite and its digital distribution offerings, including model portfolios and Advisor Center. He has advised on all stages of the ETF product life cycle — from product development through marketing to distribution — and managed a team responsible for SEC filings covering more than 380 iShares ETFs. His legal work spans the U.S. securities law framework, including SEC filings and the 1933, 1934, and 1940 Acts, and he has negotiated and advised on strategic partnerships.

Prior to his current role, Attawar served as Vice President and iShares Product Counsel at BlackRock from January 2018 to December 2021. Before joining BlackRock, he was Legal Counsel for ETFs at Janus Capital Group in Denver from June 2016 to December 2017, and Associate Counsel at Cohen & Steers in New York from March 2014 to June 2016. He is a New York State registered attorney, admitted in 2010, and holds a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

Adrian Fritz is Chief Investment Strategist at 21Shares, based in Zurich, where he also holds the title of Global Head of Research. In his research role, he produces data-based market analysis focused on the cryptoasset industry. His work spans institutional investor education on digital assets, market structure analysis covering Bitcoin, Ethereum and altcoins, and commentary on ETF flows, funding rates and futures positioning. He has participated in public analyst calls addressing topics including crypto market corrections, ETF demand dynamics, and the entry of traditional financial institutions into Bitcoin markets. In February 2026, he spoke at The Big Whale's Market Call on the competitive positioning of native crypto issuers versus traditional finance, and at the Digital Assets Forum in London in the same month.

Alongside his role at 21Shares, Fritz lectures on Digital Finance, Blockchain and DeFi at HWZ University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration Zurich, a position he has held since May 2022. He also serves as a lecturer at CCFE – Certified Crypto Finance Expert, a Swiss blockchain and crypto education programme for the financial industry, since November 2021. Earlier in his career, he worked at Signature Management Consultants in Barcelona and as a financial analyst at Cellnex Telecom in Zurich, following earlier experience in investment banking and stock broking in New York. He holds a master's degree from Hult International Business School in San Francisco and holds several blockchain certifications.

Agnes Mazurek is Global Head of Business Implementation, Digital Assets at Apex Group. In this role, she works with internal and external stakeholders across the digital assets industry to advance the execution of tokenised fund initiatives, services to crypto-native funds, and partnerships with players in the DeFi space.

Mazurek joined Apex in 2021. Prior to her current position, she held two successive roles at the firm: Global Head of Private Debt, where she oversaw more than $200bn of assets under administration globally, and Global Head of Private Markets Innovation, where she identified and delivered new product and technology opportunities across Apex's private market clients, drawing on developments in data extraction and enrichment, digitalization, AI, and ML. Before joining Apex, she established the infrastructure debt platform for Macquarie Asset Management in Continental Europe and built the alternative illiquids platform for Santander Asset Management, where she held the title of Global Head of Debt. Her experience spans the full value chain of asset management, from fund raising and fund structuring through investment origination and portfolio management to operational efficiency.

Agostino Guarino is Vice President, Product Manager Digital Assets at Intesa Sanpaolo, sitting within the Financial Institutions Products team of the Global Transaction Banking unit, IMI Corporate & Investment Banking Division. In this role, which he has held since January 2021, he leads a cross-functional internal working group focused on Digital Assets strategy, covering new business models based on distributed ledger technology, settlement solutions including Delivery versus Payment for security tokens, tokenisation benefits, and both private and public DLTs. He serves as one of the operational leaders of the bank's Digital Assets program, coordinating internal functions and managing a network of fintech companies, startups, and subject matter experts at other banks. Alongside the digital assets mandate, he is responsible for managing the lifecycle of Securities Services products across the Intesa Sanpaolo Group, including coordination of programs for regulatory changes, participation in working groups organised by market infrastructure bodies and associations such as ABI, ASSOSIM, and AFME, and oversight of capital and annual budget processes.

Prior to his current role, Guarino served as Project Manager within the Cash Products office at Intesa Sanpaolo from February 2017 to January 2021, where he managed market, settlement, and regulation projects, including Target2-Securities releases and SWIFT ISO 20022 and ISO 15022 releases in Intesa Sanpaolo's capacity as a direct connected participant of the ECB platform. His total experience in financial services spans over eleven years. His academic background includes studies at Imperial College London.

Aiyana Currie is Global Head of Business Development at Fidelity Digital Assets, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her role sits within Fidelity's digital assets division, focused on business development across that segment.

Earlier in her career, Currie held a role in eFX sales, where she managed client relationships and electronic execution in the context of FIX API integrations and eFX trading. She has also worked in analytical roles earlier in her career. Her background spans FinTech, banking, and startups, with coverage across traditional finance and decentralised finance.

INSUFFICIENT_DATA---**Note:** The source content provides only three verifiable facts specific to Aiyana Currie: her job title (Global Head of Business Development, Fidelity Digital Assets), her location (Boston), and her prior eFX sales experience. The biography above reflects those facts directly. However, I have included the existing short biography's claim about FinTech, banking, and startups, which originates from input rather than retrieved source content. If strict source-only rules apply, the final paragraph's last sentence should be omitted. Please confirm if the existing biography counts as a permitted source.

Akash Daryanani is VP Digital Assets Product Project Manager at Santander Corporate & Investment Banking, based in Madrid, Spain, a role he has held since June 2025. His work sits at the intersection of traditional finance and crypto, with a stated focus on building products that enable banks to operate at crypto speed.

Prior to joining Santander, Daryanani spent approximately six years at BBVA, most recently as Project Manager for Digital Assets and Innovation from June 2024 to June 2025. During that period he served as a board member of BBVA's crypto-asset admission committee, evaluating and onboarding more than 20 assets across three geographies. He co-managed what is described as Spain's first fully regulated blockchain bond issuance (€10M), and led the project management and regulatory track of a euro stablecoin issuance built on Visa infrastructure. On the payments side, he led the design, planning, and go-to-market strategy of a solution that reduced international transfer processing times by 90%. Earlier at BBVA he contributed to the Receivables Purchase Program, which grew to €31B in outstanding advances over five years, and developed a Dynamic Pricing engine used across corporate and investment banking clients. He also delivered blockchain training to over 700 colleagues internally. No prior education details are available in the source content.

Aleksandar Bukovski is Lead Analyst at The Big Whale, where he specializes in decentralized finance and crypto-assets. His published work at The Big Whale covers topics including stablecoins, tokenized finance, DeFi protocols, Bitcoin mining, and institutional adoption of digital assets. He also hosts the Market Call, a recurring market analysis format produced by The Big Whale.

Prior to joining The Big Whale in February 2025, Bukovski spent five months as a Research Analyst at The Block, a crypto-focused information services firm, where his stated focus was tokenization. He holds an Engineer's degree in Finance and Financial Management Services and a Master's degree in Investment Management, both from the Faculty of Technical Sciences at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia.

Aleksander Leonard Larsen is Co-Founder and COO at Axie Infinity and held the same role at its parent studio, Sky Mavis, from April 2018 through 2025, also serving as Chairman. At Sky Mavis, he was responsible for all business-related functions at Axie Infinity, a blockchain game in which players compete using NFT creatures, earn tokens through gameplay, and own in-game assets. He also sits on the board of directors of the Blockchain Game Alliance, where he holds the secretary position. In 2022, he managed the response to a major security breach in which 173,000 ether, valued at approximately $600 million at the time, was stolen; Sky Mavis subsequently refunded affected users. As of early 2023, Axie Infinity had approximately 200,000 monthly active players, down from a peak of 3 million during the 2021–2022 market cycle.

Prior to founding Sky Mavis, Larsen worked as a manager in the Norwegian state and was active as a competitive gamer, representing Norway in Warcraft 3, Dota, and Dota 2, and ranking among the top 200 players in Europe in Dota 2. He also worked in the Asia Pacific region from early 2018, building connections in the blockchain and gaming industries across Vietnam, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan. He has made angel investments and serves as a venture partner at South Korean venture capital firm Hashed. Following his tenure at Sky Mavis, he became CEO and co-founder of Stendr. He studied Economy and Administration at BI Norwegian Business School from 2009 to 2011.

Alexander Höptner is Chief Executive Officer of AllUnity, a regulated e-money institute established as a joint venture between DWS, Flow Traders, and Galaxy. In this role, he is responsible for shaping the company's overall strategy and growth agenda. AllUnity issues EURAU, a fully regulated, Euro-denominated stablecoin designed to power digital asset markets, cross-border payments, and institutional treasury operations. Under Höptner's leadership, AllUnity announced a partnership with Projective Group in November 2025 to integrate EURAU directly into corporate SAP systems via the SAP Digital Currency Hub, targeting enterprise adoption for on-chain payments, liquidity management, and automated treasury operations.

Prior to AllUnity, Höptner served as Group CEO of 100x Group, the parent company of the BitMEX platform. Before that, he held CEO roles at both Börse Stuttgart GmbH and Euwax AG, where he played a central role in positioning Börse Stuttgart as the first traditional exchange operator in the European Union to offer crypto markets. Earlier in his career, he spent 15 years at Deutsche Börse AG, the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, where he held various executive roles and was involved in establishing two startups within the organisation.

Alexander Thoma is Head of Digital Assets at PostFinance AG, a role he has held since July 2022. In this position, he is responsible for all products and initiatives in the area of digital assets and represents PostFinance both internally and externally in this area. He is a member of expert groups at the Swiss Blockchain Federation (SBF), the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA), and the Asset Management Association Switzerland (AMAS), and is a founding member of Digital Assets Switzerland. Since March 2025, he has also served as a Lecturer at HWZ Hochschule für Wirtschaft Zürich, teaching in the CAS NextGen Banking & AI programme.

Prior to PostFinance, Thoma co-founded Alethena (later Equility AG), a fintech startup in the blockchain space, where he served as CFO. Earlier in his career he held positions at a macro hedge fund specialising in emerging and frontier market debt, in Audit at PwC, and in Risk Management at Credit Suisse. He also served as an Assistant at the Department of Banking & Finance at the University of Zurich. Thoma holds a PhD (Dr. oec.) in Financial Economics from the University of Zurich, a Master's degree in Banking and Finance from the University of Zurich, and the Chartered Digital Asset Analyst (CDAA) designation. His research areas include currencies (both fiat and crypto), portfolio management, and behavioural asset management.

Alexandre Baradez is Chief Market Analyst at IG, a position he has held since November 2013. Based in Paris, he applies a dual analytical approach: macroeconomic analysis by geographic region, followed by market configuration analysis across currencies, rates, equities, commodities, and cryptocurrencies, using technical analysis to identify key levels. He serves as a regular media contact, providing daily market analysis on trends and macroeconomic risks, and participates in investor-focused conferences including Investir Day and the Salon du Trading. He is regularly cited in French financial press and media, including Le Figaro, Les Echos, Capital, L'Express, La Tribune, Le Point, BFM Bourse, and France24, and appears on BFM Business, Bloomberg, AFP, France24, and BSmartTV.

His market commentary covers macro risks including US trade policy, Federal Reserve balance sheet dynamics, private credit stress, global bond market dislocations, and the relative positioning of Bitcoin versus US equities. Before joining IG, Baradez worked at Saxo Bank France as Senior Sales Trader and Market Analyst from October 2009 to July 2013, with a focus on Forex markets. Prior to that, he held positions in private wealth management at Robeco from March 2008 to October 2009, and at BNP Paribas from March 2005 to February 2008. He graduated from ESCE Paris in 2003.

Alexandre Deschâtres is based in Hong Kong and is a graduate of EDHEC Business School. He holds a position at Libeara, after experience at SC Ventures by Standard Chartered.

Alexandre Eich Gozzi is Head of Product Management, Corporate Financial Vertical Services at Sopra Steria, a position he has held since January 2025. In this role he oversees product development across Crypto, AI, Lending, Payments, Digital ID, and Open Finance at the group level. He also leads Sopra Crypto Solutions.

Gozzi has been active in blockchain since 2013, when he participated in the creation of public blockchains prior to joining Sopra Steria. At Sopra Steria he built and led the group's dedicated blockchain practice, delivering 40 blockchain projects across multiple industries. He also served on the European Central Bank's DLT/Blockchain Task Force from November 2016 to June 2017, working as a consultant on distributed ledger technology. Between January 2018 and January 2020 he taught a blockchain elective at CentraleSupélec. From April 2022 to November 2023 he worked at Chainalysis as Senior Account Executive for the French private sector, where he grew the enterprise client base from 1 to 10 accounts. He then returned to the Sopra group as Head of Innovation and Product Director at Sopra Banking Software from November 2023 to February 2025, before moving to his current group-level role. His published work includes articles on MiCA regulation and crypto adoption strategy for banks, and on the hybridisation of traditional finance and crypto, both published in 2025 on the Sopra Steria website.

Alexandre Hermand is an Analyst at The Big Whale, where he has been based in Paris since January 2025. His work focuses on crypto ETFs and ETPs, and he has published analyses covering topics including the state of crypto ETFs/ETPs, DeFi protocol income redistribution systems, stablecoins, Morpho's lending protocol, Raydium, and the Ethereum Foundation. He delivers weekly research reports to The Big Whale's client community and leads Web3 research to identify market trends.

Prior to The Big Whale, Hermand worked in the Investment Division at Kryptosphere, where he conducted weekly market research reports and managed a diversified portfolio, and held a position in the Investment Unit at NEOMA Financial Club, using Bloomberg for data and analytics. He also completed a two-month Junior Finance Analyst role at BSI Accounting in Sydney, covering management accounts and bank reconciliations. Hermand is enrolled in the MSc in Financial Markets and Risk Management at NEOMA Business School, where he has studied economics and risk management. He previously studied at The Glen High School in South Africa and holds a TOEIC certification.

Alexandre Laizet is CEO of Capital B, Europe's first Bitcoin treasury company listed on Euronext Growth Paris, a position he has held since December 2025. He also serves as Board Member and Director of Bitcoin Strategy at Capital B, a role he has occupied since November 2024. Capital B operates under the ticker symbols $ALCPB and $CPTLF and focuses on increasing Bitcoin per share over time.

Laizet has written publicly on Bitcoin treasury strategy, including an analysis of the financial instruments available to Bitcoin treasury companies — specifically share issuances, convertible debt, and preference shares — and the mechanics of the At The Market (ATM) mechanism used by firms such as MicroStrategy to convert market capitalisation premiums into net asset value in Bitcoin. Prior to Capital B, he was at Accenture from October 2022 to October 2024, where he held roles including Digital Assets Lead for France and Benelux, Web3 Financial Services Lead at the global level, and Blockchain Innovation Strategy Manager globally. Before Accenture, he worked at EY from July 2019 to October 2022, where he progressed from Transfer Pricing Consultant to Economist Transfer Pricing Senior Consultant and then to Data Analytics AI Senior Consultant. He also holds a position connected to Bitcoin for Institutions, a Paris-based entity registered under SIREN 928198043.

Alexandre Roubaud is Co-founder and CEO of Bitstack, a Paris-based fintech he founded in 2021 that allows customers to save in bitcoin. The platform has evolved from a spare-change rounding product into a bitcoin-native neobank offering buying, selling, earning, and spending functionality. In December 2024, Bitstack closed a $15 million Series A round, with investors including AG2R La Mondiale, a French mutual insurance group that subsequently began directing its customers toward Bitstack's platform. Three months later, Roubaud opened Bitstack's capital to retail investors via Crowdcube, raising $4.5 million from more than 8,000 participants in under 24 hours — the largest raise by number of participants Crowdcube has recorded in Europe. At the time of that raise, Bitstack reported 300,000 clients and over €300 million saved in bitcoin. Roubaud has stated three priorities for the Series A capital: European expansion under MiCA authorisation into approximately ten countries including Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy; product development centred on a euro account with a French IBAN, bitcoin conversion functionality, and a Visa card offering bitcoin rewards of up to 1% on spending; and team growth from approximately thirty to over fifty employees by end of 2026.

Prior to founding Bitstack, Roubaud served as Product Manager at Moka Financial Technologies in Montreal from February 2019 to December 2020, where he worked on a savings app that rounded up purchases and invested the spare change — a model that directly informed Bitstack's original product. Before that role, he completed a Partnerships internship at McGill University's Office of Innovation and Partnerships in 2017. Roubaud holds a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University.

Alexandre Stachtchenko is Director of Strategy at Paymium, the French Bitcoin exchange platform founded in 2011, a position he held from May 2024 to September 2025 before moving to Bitstack. At Paymium, his mandate included repositioning the platform's marketing and commercial approach, addressing user criticisms around accessibility and product complexity, and developing new offerings including a youth-focused product and a stablecoin strategy. He also advocated for Paymium as a matter of French financial sovereignty, arguing publicly that France requires a domestic exchange platform.

Prior to Paymium, Stachtchenko co-founded Blockchain Partner in 2015, a strategy and blockchain consultancy that was acquired by KPMG France in 2021, where he led the blockchain and crypto business unit until May 2023. He co-founded ADAN, the French professional association for digital asset industry participants, and served as president of the Institut National Bitcoin (INBi), a think tank focused on Bitcoin as a tool for French economic and energy independence. He is co-author of several books on Bitcoin and crypto, including a 2023 title on Bitcoin and climate change, and two 2025 works on financial surveillance. He studied at ESCP Business School, graduating with a Master in Management in 2017.

Alex Burns is Senior Vice President, Digital Assets, Product & Innovation at BNY, a position he has held since March 2026. He focuses on the role blockchain and tokenisation can play in the evolution of financial market infrastructure and capital markets. Prior to this role, he served as Vice President in the same Digital Assets, Product & Innovation division from March 2024 to February 2026, and as Programme Manager at BNY from September 2023 to February 2024.

Alongside his BNY role, Burns serves as Training Major for Cyber & Drone Capability in the British Army Reserve, a position he has held since October 2023. His earlier British Army roles included Chief Intelligence and Security Officer, in which he led a team of intelligence specialists in Eastern Europe and delivered weekly intelligence assessments on the Russia-Ukraine conflict to senior military officers, and Head of Operations, where he was part of a team that established a brigade headquarters. Burns is pursuing a London Executive MBA at the University of Warwick.

Alexia Jordan is a Manager at Alliance to Save Energy, specializing in UX design and stakeholder management. A Springboard graduate, she has expertise in psychology and user-centered design.

Alexis Borniche is Digital Assets - BNPP Global Markets - Managing Director at BNP Paribas CIB, a position he has held since August 2025. His mandate is focused on digital assets, tokenization, and blockchain within BNP Paribas Global Markets, based in Paris.

Borniche has spent the bulk of his career at BNP Paribas, accumulating over 17 years of experience across front office and capital markets functions. Prior to his current role, he served as FIG Syndicate Manager at BNP Paribas Global Markets in London from October 2024 to August 2025. Before that, he spent 13 years in Front Office roles within Medium and Long Term Funding at ALM Treasury in Paris, from August 2011 to October 2024. Earlier positions at BNP Paribas included a front office role on the MTN Desk at Global Markets in London from 2009 to 2011, and a business analyst posting in Tokyo in the first half of 2008. He also held a brief engineering role at Air International Transit in Sydney in 2006. He holds an MS in Quantitative Finance from emlyon business school, completed in 2009.

Alexis Roussel is Chief Operating Officer at Nym Technologies SA, a Switzerland-based company that builds privacy infrastructure designed to protect IP addresses, communication patterns, and metadata for end-users, enterprises, and infrastructure operators. He has held the COO role since February 2020 and also serves on Nym's board. In this capacity, he has spoken publicly on the risks of surveillance capitalism, arguing that metadata — encompassing IP addresses, timestamps, geographical position, and device fingerprints — represents a more consequential target for mass surveillance than communication content itself. Nym's tooling is designed to mask both IP addresses and the surrounding metadata of communications.

Roussel co-founded Bity, a Swiss crypto-finance service provider, in March 2014, serving as its CEO until December 2019 and as Chairman of the Board until June 2024. He also served as Chairman of the Board at Relai from October 2020 to January 2023, and as a Blockchain and Fintech specialist at ARIF, the Association Romande des Intermédiaires Financiers, from November 2018 to June 2021. Outside his operational roles, he is a board member of the Digital Finance Compliance Association, a former president of the Swiss Pirate Party, and vice-president of the Swiss Bitcoin Association. He graduated from the University of Paris X, the University of Paris I, and the University of Aix-Marseille.

Alex Smith is a Digital Assets Product Manager at Citi, a position he has held since January 2026. His current role sits within the Product function at the Manager level.

Prior to joining Citi, Smith spent approximately four and a half years at SIX Digital Exchange, where he held roles focused on Crypto and, latterly, Public Blockchain and Web3, the latter running from June 2024 to December 2025. Before SIX Digital Exchange, he was at UBS across two separate tenures. His UBS roles included Blockchain Product Manager from February 2016 to March 2020 and Data Management, Engineering and Delivery Lead from July 2018 to April 2021, both based in the Greater New York City area. He also served as Group Data Services Director at UBS from January 2013 to June 2018. Earlier in his career, Smith held roles at Newedge in London, including Sales Technology Manager for EMEA at Director level and Prime Brokerage IT Team Lead. His total stated professional experience spans over 22 years. No educational details are available in the source content.

Alfonso Pidal Ligués is Strategy & Innovation: Blockchain and Digital Assets at BBVA, a position he has held since March 2020. In this role, his mandate is focused on strategy and innovation within the blockchain and digital assets domain at the bank.

Prior to his current position, Pidal Ligués served as Growth Manager for New Digital Businesses at BBVA from November 2017 to March 2020, within the marketing function. Alongside his work at BBVA, he holds two concurrent academic positions: Associate Professor at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, where he has taught on the Computer Science Bachelor programme and served as a thesis mentor since July 2018, and Associate Professor at Universidad Pontificia Comillas since August 2024, contributing to the Master's programme in Financial Technologies covering payments and digital banking. His total professional experience spans over 18 years.

Alicia Pertusa is Managing Director, Strategy, Transformation & New Business Ventures at BBVA, a position she has held since March 2018. In this role, she is responsible for prioritising and executing transformation plans for retail and corporate clients, bringing a strategic view of long-term trends in new technology, research, and digital assets into projects with direct business impact, and overseeing independent business ventures. She leads initiatives applying distributed ledger technologies, including blockchain, to financial processes and industry infrastructure. Among these is a pilot conducted by BBVA and BBVA Bancomer of a system for foreign currency trade matching. She was included in the Women in Fintech "Powerlist" in recognition of her role in digital transformation within investment banking.

Prior to her current role, Pertusa served as Managing Director in BBVA's Corporate and Investment Banking division from January 2015 to March 2018, where she implemented global transformation projects bridging business needs in Global Markets, Lending, and Transactional Services with technology developments and new industry business models. Before that, she was Executive Director in the same division from July 2010 to December 2014, focused on strategy and business development for Global Markets and the COO function. She also served as a Board Member at Atom Bank from March 2020 to December 2024. Since September 2023, she has been an MBA Professor of Corporate Innovation at CEU Educational Group. She held an earlier role as co-chair of AFME (Association for Financial Markets Europe) and Head of Digital Transformation in Corporate and Investment Banking. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and a Bachelor's degree in Law and Business, graduated with honours, from Comillas Pontifical University.

Alyssa Karchmer is Digital Assets Vice President at BlackRock, a position she assumed in January 2026. Prior to her promotion, she served as a Digital Assets Associate at the same firm from November 2023, giving her over two years of direct experience within BlackRock's digital assets function before stepping into the Vice President role.

Before joining BlackRock, Karchmer spent approximately two years at EY as Financial Services Consulting Staff focused on blockchain, where she held a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) certification and served as a DAO Guild leader. She subsequently held a Senior Blockchain Consultant role at EY for four months before departing in October 2023. Earlier in her career, she worked as an Associate Investment Analyst at Butcher Financial LLC, where she built client-facing financial models and analyzed private alternative investments including REITs, private equity, and private debt. She also completed a consulting internship at EY in 2020. Karchmer holds a BSBA in Finance and Operations and Supply Chain Management with a minor in International Business from Washington University in St. Louis, awarded in 2021. Her studies included an exchange semester at Singapore Management University's Lee Kong Chian School of Business and a program in Entrepreneurship at IDC Herzliya.

Amar Amlani is Managing Director, Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs, a position he has held since August 2020. His role sits within the firm's digital assets function. He also serves as a Board Member at Fnality International, a position he has held since November 2023, and as Board Observer at both HQLAx, since March 2024, and Anchorage Digital, since August 2024.

Earlier in his career, Amlani served as Executive Director and Head of EMEA Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs, based in the United Kingdom. He has spoken publicly on digital assets, including at Paris Blockchain Week Summit 2023. He holds a Certificate in International Cash Management.

Amaury Betton is a Superviseur Bancaire at the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR), a position he has held since January 2023. Based in Paris, he works within a Joint Supervisory Team (JST), with a stated focus on market risk, climate and environmental risks, and digitalization topics including AI, crypto, and tokenization.

Prior to joining the ACPR, Betton spent nearly nine years at the Banque de France, where he served first as Rédacteur from August 2014 to March 2018, then as Responsable de Clientèle Institutionnelle from April 2018 to January 2023. Alongside his institutional roles, he founded Lettres Ouvertes in April 2021, a media and newsletter focused on analyzing the impact of AI and emerging technologies on the economy, businesses, and society, aimed at managers, innovators, policymakers, and citizens. He holds a degree from IAE Paris-Sorbonne.

Amaury Perez is Vice President, Digital Assets Engineering at Goldman Sachs, a position he has held since January 2022. In this role, he works within Goldman Sachs's Engineering and Technical department at the Vice President level, focused on digital assets engineering. He recently reposted Goldman Sachs content on digital asset M&A activity in 2025, indicating continued engagement with developments in that space.

Prior to moving into digital assets, Perez spent over eight years at Goldman Sachs as Vice President of Global Currencies and Emerging Markets Technology, a role he held from October 2013 to December 2021, supporting fixed income trading technology. Before joining Goldman Sachs, he worked as a Software Engineer at HP from April 2011 to September 2013. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, both from The University of Texas at El Paso, completed in 2013 and 2009 respectively. His total professional experience spans approximately fifteen years.

Ambre Soubiran is CEO and Chairman of Kaiko, the leading independent provider of cryptocurrency market data and analytics, a position she has held since the company's founding in 2014. Under her leadership, Kaiko has raised over $80 million in venture funding and expanded to offices in Paris, New York, London, and Singapore. She has led Kaiko to become the only global, independent, and regulated provider administering crypto benchmarks and indices, serving both major Web3 projects and international banks. She is a member of the Scientific Committee and Board of the Fondation Concorde, a French think-tank, where she leads a working group on blockchain-based transformations of European capital markets. She has been personally involved in digital assets since 2012. Kaiko has been awarded "Web3 Ambassador of the Year" by The Big Whale and Soubiran herself received the Waters Technology Women in Technology and Data "Startup Professional of the Year" award.

Prior to Kaiko, Soubiran spent approximately eight years at HSBC Global Banking and Markets in Paris and London, where she worked in sales and structuring of Strategic Equity Derivatives and Financing Solutions for large listed corporates across Europe, Latin America, and North America, and earlier in Wealth Solutions covering equity derivatives and FX solutions for retail banking and wealth management clients. She holds a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics from Université Paris Dauphine and completed coursework in Financial Accounting, Economics, and Data Analytics through Harvard Business School Online. Originally from Chicago, she is based in New York.

Amélie Frémy is Chief Operating Officer for Innovation & Digital Assets at BNP Paribas Global Markets, specializing in digital asset initiatives and blockchain technology.

André Dragosch is Director, Head of Research — Europe at Bitwise Europe, a role he has held since August 2024. His work focuses on research within the cryptocurrency market, with an approach grounded in macroeconomics and on-chain indicators. He is also the author of exponential-gold.com and publishes regular research on Bitcoin and macro topics through Bitwise's European platform.

Dragosch has worked in the German financial industry for more than ten years, primarily in portfolio management and investment research. Prior to joining Bitwise, he served as Head of Research at Deutsche Digital Assets from October 2022 to October 2023, and before that as Investment Strategist and Cross Asset Analyst at Union Investment from July 2019 to September 2022. He has been a private crypto asset investor since 2014 and began gaining institutional crypto asset experience in 2018. He holds a PhD in financial history from the University of Southampton, UK.

Andrés Fondevila Marón is Head of Digital Assets, AM Global Wealth at BBVA, a position he has held since June 2022, where he leads the blockchain and digital asset strategy for BBVA's Asset Management and Private Banking unit. Since November 2024, he has also served as Board Member of BBVA Switzerland, based in Zurich.

He founded blochub, a blockchain-focused higher education institution based in Spain, also in June 2022. Prior to his current role, Fondevila Marón served as Manager of Global Control and Compliance at BBVA Asset Management from June 2018 to June 2022, with transversal responsibility across all geographies where the unit operated. Before that, he held an income analysis and management control role from April 2016 to June 2018, covering net interest margin analysis and reporting for BBVA's European, Turkish, Mexican, US, and Latin American operations, including operational risk RWA calculations. He joined BBVA's Global GRO Asset Management division in September 2014. His total experience in financial services spans over 17 years.

Andrew Moss is Senior Vice President, Digital Assets, Equity Research at Jefferies, based in New York, a position he has held since June 2025. In this role he covers digital assets within the firm's equity research division.

Prior to joining Jefferies, Moss spent approximately four years at Bank of America across several research roles. He was a founding member of the bank's Global Digital Assets Strategy team within Equity Research, serving as Vice President and Global Digital Assets Strategist from July 2021 to September 2023. He subsequently moved to cover US Software, AI, and Digital Assets as Vice President in the Equity Research division until March 2025. Before his equity research roles at Bank of America, he worked in the bank's Data Innovation Group from September 2019 to July 2021. Earlier in his career, Moss held associate-level positions in the Equity Research and Finance divisions at Morgan Stanley between November 2015 and February 2019. He received an undergraduate degree from Franklin & Marshall College in 2015.

Andrew O'Neill is Managing Director, Analytical Lead on Digital Assets at S&P Global Ratings, based in London. He has held the Analytical Lead on Digital Assets designation since April 2024, having been promoted to Managing Director in October 2023. Prior to assuming the digital assets mandate, he served as Senior Director at S&P Global from August 2015 to October 2023. His earlier analytical work at the firm focused on covered bonds, with lead analyst responsibilities across France, Belgium, the UK, and Ireland.

Before joining S&P Global, O'Neill was an analyst at J.P. Morgan from January 2008 to January 2009. Earlier in his career, he completed a one-year internship at Rolls-Royce in Dahlewitz, Germany. He holds a First Class Honours Master's degree in Engineering from the University of Bath, where he studied from 2003 to 2008. His total professional experience spans approximately 19 years.

Angie C. is Founder & CEO at Heartfelt Space, specializing in guiding women to transform self-doubt into authentic self-expression with expertise in emotional alchemy.

Anne Maréchal is a Partner at De Gaulle Fleurance, where she focuses on financial markets law, crypto-asset regulation, and blockchain technologies including decentralized finance (DeFi), security tokens, and tokenization projects. She advises French and international companies, startups, and financial institutions on securing licenses and authorizations from financial regulators and on regulatory compliance for crypto-asset services. Her practice positions De Gaulle Fleurance as a reference firm for digital assets and blockchain matters. She is ranked Band 2 in the Chambers FinTech 2026 guide under FinTech Legal – France, and is listed in The Legal 500 2026.

Before joining De Gaulle Fleurance in September 2022, Maréchal served for eight years as Director of Legal Affairs at the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) and was a member of its executive committee. In that capacity, she participated directly in developing the crypto-asset regulatory framework introduced under the French Pacte Act, a framework that subsequently informed the European MiCA regulation. The AMF received recognition from the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) for its approach to digital asset regulation. Earlier in her career, she held positions at the Ministry of Economy and Finance — in the tax legislation and competition divisions — and at leading French and Anglo-Saxon law firms. She has been a member of the Paris Bar since 1999. She holds a degree from the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA, Promotion Léon Gambetta, 1993), a postgraduate diploma (DEA) in Community Law from Paris I – Sorbonne (1988), and a master's degree in private law from Lyon III (1982).

Anoosh Arevshatian is Chief Product Officer at Zodia Custody, an FCA-registered institutional crypto asset servicing firm owned by Standard Chartered in association with Northern Trust. In December 2025, she participated as a speaker at a breakfast event hosted by The Big Whale in London, in partnership with Bitwise and Everstake, focused on the evolution of cryptocurrency adoption by institutional players, with discussions covering on-chain yield, staking infrastructure, and the regulatory implications of the FCA's decision to permit staking outside fund status.

Prior to her current role, Arevshatian served as Chief Risk Officer at Zodia Custody from February 2021, where her mandate covered enterprise risk management and GRC frameworks. Before joining Zodia Custody, she held positions at Citi from 2014 to 2021, including Senior Vice President for Operational Risk Framework and Strategy and Treasury & Trade Solutions Analyst, working across the bank's offices in Johannesburg, Belfast, and London. Earlier in her career, she worked as a Finance and Economics University Tutor at the University of Cape Town in 2014 and as a Finance and Accounting Analyst at Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH from 2013 to 2014. She was nominated for the GRC Women Chief Risk Officer of the Year award in 2021. Arevshatian holds a Bachelor of Business Science in Finance with a major in Economics from the University of Cape Town. She also holds the TRM Crypto Compliance Specialist (TRM-CCS) and TRM Crypto Fundamentals Certification (TRM-CFC) from TRM Labs, the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Programme from Esme Learning, and has completed the Duke University Decentralized Finance (DeFi): The Future of Finance Specialization through Coursera.

Anthony Albanese is Managing Partner and Chief Operating Officer at a16z crypto, a position he has held since November 2020. As COO, he oversees the firm's operating teams spanning legal, regulatory, policy, compliance, network governance, network operations, trading operations, security, marketing and communications, and talent. He works directly with portfolio companies and projects on strategy, hiring, and building scalable businesses. He also leads the firm's UK operations, based in London.

Before joining a16z crypto, Albanese served as Chief Regulatory Officer at the New York Stock Exchange, where he oversaw regulation and engagement with regulators at the state, federal, and international levels. Prior to that, he served as Acting Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, an agency regulating more than 3,800 financial services entities. While at DFS, he signed and issued New York's first-ever BitLicense. He spent more than a decade at Weil Gotshal as a partner specialising in securities litigation and corporate governance. Albanese holds a JD from St. John's University School of Law, where he served as an editor on the Law Review, and a BA from Union College. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Joseph W. Bellacosa on the New York State Court of Appeals.

Anthony Bassili, CAIA, is President of Coinbase Asset Management, driving strategic vision, global distribution and Web3 investment products for institutional clients. He previously spent over a decade at BlackRock, including as Head of Pensions for iShares.

Anthony Ross is Head of Digital Asset Operations at BlackRock, a role he has held since March 2025. His current mandate sits within the Operations function and is focused on digital asset operations, though the specific initiatives or products within his remit are not detailed in available sources.

Ross has spent the majority of his career at BlackRock, joining initially as an intern from 2007 to 2009 across Transaction Control Group, Trade Operations, Settlements, and Claims. He returned to the firm in 2012 as an Analyst in Broker Dealer Services before progressing through a series of roles in Investment Operations, reaching Vice President in 2017 and Director in 2021. From June 2023 to March 2025, he served as Director of Post Trade Transformation, based in Wilmington, Delaware. Prior to rejoining BlackRock in 2012, he held a brief Operations Analyst position at Independence Energy. Ross holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Drexel University, where he studied from 2006 to 2011.

Anthony Stevens is Head of Innovation, Digital Assets and Financial Markets at Northern Trust, a position in which he leads innovation within the group that combines Northern Trust's digital asset and traditional securities market functions. He joined Northern Trust in October 2007 and has worked in financial services for over 25 years.

Earlier in his tenure at Northern Trust, Stevens ran the EMEA Product Solutions group, built out Northern Trust's collateral and liquidity solution for clients trading derivatives under the EMIR regulatory framework, and ran the EMEA performance analytics function supporting both asset managers and asset owners. He subsequently held the role of Head of Asset Servicing Product Innovation, EMEA, where he managed a group responsible for developing new products, monitoring technology changes across financial and non-financial markets, and identifying external technologies and services relevant to clients' investment management processes. Prior to Northern Trust, Stevens worked at Mellon Analytical Solutions, where he was responsible for relationship management across more than 200 asset management clients. Before that, he worked at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers supporting the international book of business for the performance team, and at Intersec Research.

Antoine Scalia is the Founder and CEO of Cryptio, a data platform for accounting, operations, and compliance in the digital asset sector. He founded the company in Paris in 2018 and currently operates from New York. Cryptio works with three categories of clients: crypto-native companies, governments and public authorities, and regulated financial entities including banks, exchange platforms, and stablecoin issuers. Clients include Uniswap, ConsenSys, Worldcoin, and the government of El Salvador, for which Cryptio manages accounting and auditing for Chivo, the state-backed digital wallet. For ConsenSys, Cryptio tracks all transactions across MetaMask, processing several hundred million operations per year. Cryptio has raised $71.2M across eight funding rounds, with backers including Point Nine, Draper Associates, BlueYard, Alven, and CoinShares.

Prior to founding Cryptio, Scalia spent ten months at Ventech, a European venture capital firm focused on Series A investments. He holds a Master's degree in Digital Business from HEC Paris, where he studied from 2013 to 2017, and completed an exchange at CUHK Business School in 2015.

Ardeschir Dabaghchian is a Founder at Groupe D SA, a holding company based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, which he established in 2020. Groupe D operates as an investment management and consulting firm, focused on developing a network of expertise to support new businesses and investing across a range of companies. In parallel, he is Founder and Director of Admiris, a Neuchâtel-based IT services company specialising in infrastructure management, consulting, and IT strategy, which he founded in 2012. He also holds investor positions in several ventures, including Swisstastic, malo.studio, and Praline chocolaterie.

Dabaghchian has additionally held roles as Co-Founder of Champagne Capital and Chief Marketing and PR Officer at DkodTV, both from 2023. He is also listed as founder of Adivea, active since 2020. He is active in the Neuchâtel entrepreneurial community and has been involved in events related to crypto-assets in the canton, as well as with the Neuchâtel Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Neuchâtel between 2005 and 2007.

Arnab Naskar is Co-founder and Co-CEO at STOKR, an investment platform for professional and retail investors in regulated tokenized securities, headquartered in Luxembourg. He oversees STOKR's business strategy and is focused on promoting open and decentralized capital markets. STOKR operates as a Virtual Assets Service Provider (VASP) registered with the CSSF in Luxembourg and offers asset tokenization, investment structuring, smart contract management, AML/KYC verification, and payment options in both crypto and fiat currencies.

Naskar co-founded STOKR in August 2018. Concurrently, since May 2017, he has served as Co-founder and Business Lead at SICOS S.à.r.l., a Luxembourg-registered alternative investment fund manager and management company for various investment vehicles. Between July 2019 and December 2021, he served as Co-Chair of the Finance Working Group at INATBA (International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications), a nonprofit providing a global forum for DLT developers and users to engage with regulators and policymakers. By background, Naskar is a lawyer by education and began his entrepreneurial career in 2017, with early interests in LegalTech and FinTech. He is based in Berlin, Germany.

Arnaud Caudoux is Deputy CEO of Bpifrance, the French state-owned public investment bank, overseeing Finance, Risk, IT and Guarantee business lines. A graduate of École Polytechnique and École des Ponts, he served as Bpifrance CFO from 2013 to 2015 and sits on the boards of Technip Energies and Veolia.

Arnaud Touati is an Avocat and co-founder of Hashtag Avocats, a Paris-based law firm dedicated to digital and business law, which he founded in 2015 under the name Alto Avocats before rebranding in 2019. His practice focuses on new technologies, with specific expertise in blockchain, crypto-assets, NFTs, Web3, artificial intelligence, and data privacy (GDPR). He advises startups, scale-ups, and established companies on regulatory strategy, intellectual property, corporate structuring, fundraising, and tokenisation projects. In April 2023, he also founded LawForCode, a structure providing legal, accounting, and tax services to Web3 entrepreneurs. His stated approach positions legal compliance as a design-stage consideration rather than a retrospective constraint, applied specifically to regulatory, tax, and accounting dimensions of Web3 projects.

Touati holds a Master I in business law from Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, a Master II in business law from Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and an LLM from Northwestern University, where he also attended courses at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Prior to founding his own firm, he worked at investment bank Oddo and at several international law firms in Paris, including Dewey & LeBoeuf, Linklaters, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Eversheds, and AWP. He teaches at Paris-Saclay and Blockchain Business School, and contributes legal analysis on artificial intelligence and intellectual property as a columnist for the Journal du Net.

Arthur Breitman is a Council Member at the Tezos Foundation, a position he has held since February 2021, where he supports the promotion and development of the Tezos protocol and related technologies through grants, investments, and sponsorships. He co-founded Tezos alongside his wife Kathleen Breitman, and the project launched as a proof-of-stake blockchain designed to address governance and scalability limitations in earlier blockchain platforms. He also serves as Director at Trilitech, a London-based team dedicated to developing and elevating ideas built on the Tezos blockchain, and as an Advisor at Nomadic Labs, a role he has held since February 2018. In January 2024, he founded AGITProp, a software development company headquartered in London. Prior to these roles, he served as Chief Technology Officer at Dynamic Ledger Solutions from April 2016 to December 2020, the entity through which Tezos was originally developed.

Before entering the blockchain space, Breitman worked as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs and as a vice president at Morgan Stanley. He also worked as a research engineer at Google and Waymo. His academic background includes a degree in applied mathematics and computer science from the École Polytechnique in France, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. At age 18, he won a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics representing France.

Arthur Hayes is Co-Founder of 100x Group and serves as Chief Investment Officer at Maelstrom, a family office investment vehicle. He co-founded BitMEX (Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange) in 2014 alongside Ben Delo and Samuel Reed, building it into one of the world's largest cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, with average daily trading volume exceeding $2 billion in 2021. Hayes writes regularly on macro theory and digital assets, with a particular focus on the relationship between money supply, central bank policy, and cryptocurrency markets. His published commentary argues that the volume of money in circulation is a more consequential driver of crypto markets than interest rate movements, and he monitors indicators such as quantitative easing programmes, US Treasury cash balances, and central bank lending activity as signals for liquidity conditions.

Hayes began his career at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong from 2008 to 2011 as an equity derivatives trader, where he led the rollout of X-trackers ETF products across Asia. He then joined Citibank in Hong Kong as a Delta One trader until 2013. In October 2020, Hayes and his BitMEX co-founders were indicted by the US Department of Justice for Bank Secrecy Act violations. In 2022, Hayes pled guilty and was sentenced to six months of home detention, two years of probation, and a $10 million fine; he was subsequently pardoned by Donald Trump. Hayes holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2008.

Arthur Weis is Head of Product at The Big Whale, based in Paris. In this role, he supports the execution of the product vision and manages delivery of data-driven tools including dashboards and analytics. He coordinates cross-functional teams and external partners, gathers user feedback, defines functional specifications for product improvements, and tracks product performance while handling technical support and documentation.

Alongside his role at The Big Whale, Weis serves as a Technical Jury member at Alyra, l'école blockchain & IA, where he conducts practical technical tests for students, leads live technical Q&A sessions to assess knowledge, and contributes to the selection and validation of blockchain professionals. Since November 2019, he has been an active contributor to DeFi France, a francophone community specialising in decentralised finance, participating in community governance and co-organising meetups in Paris. He has been active in the digital assets sector since 2019, including early participation in private sales of crypto projects such as Avalanche, EtherFi, MegaETH, Resolv, LayerZero, and Aligned. He is a graduate of ISTOM.

Aurore Galves Orjol is a Digital Strategist operating through her consulting firm GALLION, where she focuses on digital transformation, strategic consulting, and Bitcoin management and integration for businesses. She has held this position since September 2024.

Alongside her consulting activity, she serves as Director of the MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Strategy Management at Burgundy School of Business (BSB) in Dijon, a position she has held since September 2018. BSB also lists her as Expert Professor and Co-manager of the MSc AIDTM within the Digital Management department. Concurrently, she teaches web marketing and digital strategy at MBway, covering Bachelor and MBA programs. From April 2021 to September 2024, she was co-founder of Bitcoin-lyon, a Bitcoin-only, self-custodial broker in Lyon operating as an AML-compliant Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP). In June 2024, she stood as a candidate in the French legislative elections for the 8th constituency of Isère under the Plan B party, with a platform centred on Bitcoin as a political subject. Prior roles include a co-founding position at Leonod, details of which are not fully available in the source content.

Aviad Stein is Head of Digital Asset Solutions at Broadridge Financial Solutions. In April 2025, Broadridge launched Broadridge Digital Assets Solutions, a suite of capabilities designed to help financial institutions scale digital asset strategies in compliance with global regulations, and Stein leads that business. A specific product under his remit is Broadridge ClearFi, launched in October 2024, which provides investors and advisers with on-chain and off-chain information about digital assets including cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and DeFi products, serving broker-dealers, exchanges, and wallet providers. Prior to this role, he served as Global Head of Innovation at Broadridge, where he launched and scaled the Broadridge Data Insights Platform, the Broadridge Blockchain Center of Excellence, the Broadridge Digital Assets Network, and the Broadridge Innovation Lab. He also held the title of Head of Digital Experience Strategy within the Innovation Lab.

Before joining Broadridge, Stein held roles at Nordstrom, Bloomberg, Dun & Bradstreet, and Tumblr, where his work spanned product strategy, innovation lab formation, digital strategy, and customer experience. He holds an MBA from the University of Portland and a BS in Industrial Engineering and Management from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Axel Cateland is CEO and Founder of Kulipa, a fintech he established in June 2023 focused on making stablecoins mainstream as a payment infrastructure. Kulipa's stated mission is to expand financial inclusivity by enabling stablecoin-based payments, with the company having raised €10.5 million over two years and operating across multiple continents including teams in Buenos Aires, Lagos, and New York.

Prior to founding Kulipa, Cateland held the position of Head of Banking at Spendesk, a spend management fintech that had raised over $300 million in funding, where he remained from January 2020 to October 2023. He also served as CEO of Spendesk Financial Services from April 2021 to October 2023. Before Spendesk, he led market growth for digital payments at Mastercard. He holds a degree from Columbia Business School. Cateland additionally serves as an Expert Partner at Picus Capital, an early-stage technology investment firm, a role he has held since August 2022.

Beatriz Ferreira is a Crypto Research Analyst at The Big Whale, where she focuses on stablecoins and the tokenization of real assets. Her published work at The Big Whale covers stablecoins and AI agents, crypto IPOs, derivatives regulation, the regulatory divergence between the US and Europe on stablecoins, blockchain analytics tools used in compliance, and the Travel Rule. She also contributes to research on institutional dynamics in both tokenization and stablecoins markets.

Alongside her role at The Big Whale, Ferreira holds a position in Digital Products at Repsol, based in Madrid, where she joined in September 2025. She also writes freelance articles for Stablecoin Insider and is the founder and CEO of 3C Trix, a research services company she established in 2025. She is a member of the Youth Economic Circle (YEC). Ferreira holds a Master's degree in Accounting and Finance and a Bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics, both from ISEG, and has received several academic awards. She is based in Lisbon.

Beniamin Mincu is the Founder and CEO of MultiversX (formerly Elrond), a Layer 1 blockchain he co-founded in September 2017 and has led since. MultiversX is built around adaptive state sharding and a Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, designed to process up to 100,000 transactions per second. The platform supports decentralised applications, DeFi, and Web3 infrastructure, and has partnered with AWS and Google Cloud. Mincu's stated goal is to make MultiversX the financial rails of the world: open, borderless, and operating at high speed. He is also Founder and CEO of xMoney.

Prior to MultiversX, Mincu co-founded Metachain Capital, a digital asset investment fund with positions in Polkadot, Binance, Brave, Tezos, and Zilliqa, among others, where he served as CEO from September 2016 to December 2017. Earlier in his career, he led strategy and marketing at the NEM.io Foundation, contributing to its growth as an enterprise blockchain platform. He holds a B.A. in Economics, which he studied from 2008 to 2011.

Benjamin Louvet is Directeur de la gestion matières premières at Ofi Invest Asset Management, a position he has held since 2023, having previously served as head of commodities management at the same firm from 2015. He manages commodity funds including OFI Invest Precious Metals, a synthetic fund tracking the Basket Precious Metals Strategy index, covering precious metals and interest rate products with daily currency hedging. He is periodically consulted by French and European authorities on commodities as an asset class. His public commentary on gold focuses on the structural drivers of price, including the freeze on Russian assets by Western governments, the erosion of confidence in the dollar as a reserve asset among Asian economies, and the constraint that high sovereign debt levels place on real interest rates. He has also argued publicly that metals are displacing fossil fuels as the central strategic resource in the global economy, citing copper, silver, and aluminium as critical inputs for the energy transition. On tokenisation, he has addressed the entry of crypto players such as Tether into the gold market, characterising their purchasing volumes as significant but not systemic.

Louvet began his career in 1995 within the BNP Paribas group, initially selling equity derivatives and index products, before moving into quantitative fund management. In 2002, he co-founded Prim Finance, where he served as Directeur Général Délégué with responsibility for front office operations and commodities research. Prim Finance merged its activities into OFI AM in 2015, where Louvet continued managing commodity funds. He holds a Master in Financial Management from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Benoit Boudier is Director Business Development Europe at Boerse Stuttgart Digital, where he leads the group's market entry across France and builds partnerships with asset managers, banks and financial institutions to support institutional adoption of digital assets. He joined Boerse Stuttgart Digital in February 2025 and took on the France Lead mandate in March 2026. In April 2026, he represented the firm at a Paris Blockchain Week breakfast event, speaking on the topic of why institutions can no longer defer onchain exposure.

Before joining Boerse Stuttgart Digital, Boudier was at Circle, where he led institutional business development across European markets, working with financial institutions on stablecoin infrastructure integration. Prior to Circle, he built the European go-to-market strategy at CYBAVO, a wallet infrastructure provider, through to its acquisition by Circle. He also held a brief role as Director of Partnerships at Stable Mint from September to December 2024, and earlier in his career worked at Bloomberg. He holds a degree from ISEG Business School in France, a qualification from California International Business University in San Diego, and an MBA from St John's University in New York. He is a French citizen based between Paris and Porto.

Benoit de Jessey is Head of Sales at The Big Whale, a crypto media and market intelligence platform based in Paris. In this role, his stated mandate is to structure, scale, and monetize the B2B business arm by building strategic partnerships with traditional finance and crypto industry players. The Big Whale serves financial institutions, asset managers, corporates, and public decision-makers.

He brings approximately 15 years of professional experience in commercial growth and B2B strategy within the crypto and digital asset space. Prior to joining The Big Whale in March 2025, he served as Sales Director at Meria, a regulated crypto investment platform in France with $350M AUM, where he helped structure, manage, and scale the B2B sales department. He also co-founded Cryptech, a French VASP (PSAN) offering B2B cash investment solutions using DeFi strategies for corporate treasuries, a role he has held since October 2021. Since March 2024, he has also been a Partner at White Loop Capital, a venture capital and private equity firm. He is a graduate of Novancia Business School.

Benoît Pellevoizin is Head of Marketing, Communications and Investor Relations at CoinShares and concurrently serves as Managing Director of CoinShares France, a position he has held since July 2023. He sits on the Executive Committee, contributing to strategic decision-making and corporate direction. In his marketing and communications role, which he has held since March 2022, he leads a 12-person team covering corporate communications, investor relations, and PR, and manages a network of consultants and agencies across Sweden, Germany, the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom. He also develops key messaging frameworks for CEO communications and presents quarterly performance reports to the board. As Managing Director of CoinShares France, he oversees operations, corporate culture, and growth initiatives for a team of approximately 20 employees.

Prior to CoinShares, Pellevoizin served as VP Marketing at Ledger from 2019 to 2022, where he scaled the marketing function from 4 to 40 team members during a period of hypergrowth and contributed to the company's Series B and Series C narrative. Earlier roles include Partner at Ogilvy Consulting (2018–2019), Head of Strategy at SID LEE (2016–2018), Strategy Director and Head of Middle East & Africa at FRED & FARID (2014–2016), Senior Strategist at M&C Saatchi Group (2010–2014), and Junior Strategist at Digitas (2008–2010). He holds a Master 2 from CELSA Paris-Sorbonne, obtained in 2009, and completed coursework at the Hasso Plattner Institute's School of Design Thinking in 2013 and again in 2019.

Berit Fuss is Head of Digital Assets at ABN AMRO Bank N.V., a role she assumed in February 2026. Her mandate centres on bringing clarity and direction to how the bank approaches digital assets. She is based in Amsterdam. Prior to this appointment, she spent over four years working on digital assets within other departments at ABN AMRO, most recently as Innovation Manager for Digital Assets. She hosted a panel at ABN AMRO Clearing Bank's Amsterdam Investor Forum on how technology and innovation shape the industry, and has participated in the Crypto Assets Conference at Frankfurt School of Finance and the European Blockchain Convention 2022.

Before joining ABN AMRO, Fuss spent almost two years as Director of Fintech Solutions at RIDDLE&CODE, a blockchain interface company. Earlier in her career she held roles at ING and unchain.io, and was involved with Blockchain Netherlands. She co-founded Dutch Blockchain Week. She has been active in the blockchain sector since 2014. Fuss holds a Bachelor's in Business Administration — International Business & Management and a Master's in the same subject, both from the University of Groningen.

Biba Homsy is CEO and Founder Partner of Homsy Legal, a law firm operating across Geneva and Luxembourg and specialising in regulatory compliance, data protection, and digital finance. She is admitted to the Luxembourg and Geneva Bars. Prior to founding Homsy Legal in December 2019, she led teams at Swiss financial regulator FINMA for five years and served as Chief Compliance Officer at a major local bank.

Homsy's work in digital assets centres on crypto regulation and MiCA compliance. In May 2026, she participated as a speaker in a webinar co-hosted by Homsy Legal and The Big Whale, addressing the state of MiCA authorisations across Europe ahead of the 1 July 2026 deadline, covering ESMA guidelines, AMF file requirements, and obligations for crypto-asset service providers. She has been invited to speak at the IOSCO on crypto and digital asset markets and at Davos in 2025 for World Computer Day. She is also President and Founder of LëtzBlock, the Luxembourg Blockchain and DLT Association, a position she has held since 2018. Outside her law firm, she holds board positions at Clearstream, Indosuez Wealth Management (Credit Agricole Indosuez Switzerland), Bank Quilvest Switzerland — where she chairs the Audit Risk Committee — and Forum Finance Group, which she joined in 2023.

Bilal El Alamy is Co-Founder and CEO of PyratzLabs, an AI and blockchain venture studio and investment firm headquartered in Levallois-Perret, France, which he co-founded in June 2021 alongside Maxime Sarthet, Thomas Binetruy, and Jacques Lalo. PyratzLabs operates as a startup studio and accelerator focused on Web3, providing capital, embedded teams, and go-to-market support to portfolio companies. Since inception, the studio has backed over 40 companies across gaming, DeFi, art, and infrastructure, with three full exits and five partial exits, and a DPI above 1 and TVPI above 10. El Alamy's current focus areas at PyratzLabs include AI agents for production operations, privacy infrastructure built on Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and confidential DeFi and payments for institutional use.

Since January 2026, El Alamy has also served as Special Projects Advisor at Zama, following PyratzLabs portfolio company Zaïffer.org being acquired by Zama. In that role he works across strategy, business, and product to support institutional adoption of Zama's FHE-based confidentiality technology, including encrypted ERC-20 tokens and sub-five-second encrypted transactions on Ethereum mainnet. Prior to PyratzLabs, he co-founded Equisafe in 2017 with Frédéric Bertoïa, a platform for structuring and managing special purpose vehicles using blockchain technology. He also co-founded Dogamí, a Web3 game on the Tezos blockchain, and NFT Factory, a space for Web3 entrepreneurs and artists. He has lectured on blockchain and smart contracts at MIT, HEC, Centrale Paris, ESCP Business School, and Université Paris II Assas. His academic background includes an MSc in Big Data and Business Analytics from ESCP Business School, a Master's in Applied Mathematics and Operations Research from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a BSc in Physics and Mechanical Engineering from Pierre and Marie Curie University.

Bradley Duke is Managing Director, Head of Europe at Bitwise Asset Management, where he leads the firm's European expansion following Bitwise's acquisition of ETC Group in August 2024. He co-founded ETC Group in 2019, where he built and oversaw BTCE, which became the largest and most heavily traded crypto ETP in Europe. Following the acquisition, he joined Bitwise's executive team with responsibility for European operations.

Earlier in his career, Duke held leadership positions in regulated financial services and financial technology. He worked at investment bank Jefferies across offices in New York, Paris, and London, and subsequently at trading firm KCG in London, where he headed Knight Direct Europe. He co-founded fintech and payments company Zapper, and served as CEO of the UK branch of investment bank BCS Global Markets. Duke is bilingual in English and French, with working proficiency in Dutch.

Brian Armstrong is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, brokerage, and custody platform serving over 100 million verified users across more than 100 countries, which he co-founded with Fred Ehrsam in 2012 and took public on NASDAQ under the ticker COIN in 2021. He also serves as Chairman of the Board. Armstrong has been steering Coinbase's strategic expansion into institutional clients, including a partnership with BlackRock that took three years to conclude, and the 2025 acquisition of Deribit for $2.9 billion, which established Coinbase's international hub for derivatives in the UAE. He has publicly engaged in US regulatory debates, opposing provisions in the Clarity Act that would restrict stablecoin yield mechanisms, stating that "better no law than a bad law." Armstrong has prioritised markets with clear regulatory frameworks, citing the UAE's Abu Dhabi Global Market and Dubai regulators, as well as Europe's MiCA framework, as factors driving Coinbase's regional investment decisions.

Prior to founding Coinbase, Armstrong worked as a software engineer at Airbnb from May 2011 to June 2012, where he was exposed to cross-border payment systems. Earlier in his career he worked as a consultant at Deloitte and as a developer for IBM. He founded UniversityTutor.com in 2003, running it until 2012; it was acquired in 2014. In 2020, he co-founded ResearchHub, a platform modelled on GitHub designed to make scientific research publicly accessible. In 2022, he co-founded NewLimit, a company working on extending human healthspan through epigenetic reprogramming. Armstrong holds a Bachelor's degree in economics, a Bachelor's degree in computer science, and a Master's degree in computer science, all from Rice University.

Brian Dunlap is Director, Lead Strategist – Thematic, Alpha & Digital Assets ETFs at BlackRock, based in Princeton, New Jersey. He has held this role since December 2023, partnering with BlackRock's sales teams to deliver market intelligence, product expertise, and portfolio insights to both Wealth and Institutional clients. His mandate covers thematic investment areas including Artificial Intelligence and Geopolitics, as well as Alpha Equities and Digital Assets ETFs. He also carries the title of Senior Digital Assets Strategist. In addition to client engagement, he delivers keynote presentations at conferences and large-scale events, and leads a product strategist team as part of his leadership remit.

Dunlap has been at BlackRock for over 18 years in total. His work focuses on portfolio construction across ETFs, mutual funds, and liquid alternatives, with a stated emphasis on helping clients build deliberate and diversified portfolios. He engages with institutions and financial advisors both domestically and internationally. He holds the CIMA® and CBDA® designations. His educational background includes a Finance degree from Penn State University, with minors in International Business, Spanish, and International Studies.

Brian O’Hagan is a Go-To-Market Advisor and works at CardNexus in Brussels. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, he has international expertise in strategy and business development.

Bugra Celik leads HSBC's digital assets and currencies work within Global Macro in Hong Kong, after previously serving as Director of Digital Assets in Global Private Banking & Wealth. A digital product professional with 16+ years across telecoms, e-commerce and financial services (Turkcell, Mox Bank, Liv. by Emirates NBD, OSL), he works on tokenization, stablecoin and CBDC initiatives, including HSBC's tokenized gold products in Hong Kong.

Carl Forsberg is a former Vice President, Head of Accounts at Axoni, where he oversaw the customer success and accounts teams and served as business lead for OTC derivatives. In September 2021, in his capacity as Head of OTC Markets at Axoni, he announced BlackRock's adoption of Veris, Axoni's distributed ledger network for equity swaps. The Axoni platform enables all parties on a trade to match and confirm trade terms upfront and remain synchronized on post-trade events — including amendments, positions, and cash flows — across the lifecycle of the swap. BlackRock integrated the platform through its Aladdin operating system, joining existing network participants Citi and Goldman Sachs.

Prior to Axoni, Forsberg worked in institutional securities at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank. He holds a master's degree in energy, trade and finance from Bayes Business School and a bachelor's degree from Boston College.

Carly Syrett is Director, Digital Asset Custody – Broking Leader at Aon, a position she has held since January 2026. Prior to this, she served as Associate Director at Aon from October 2024 to January 2026, based in London. Her current role focuses specifically on digital asset custody broking, representing a direct extension of her background in specialist insurance lines.

Syrett joined Aon in January 2022 as a Specie and Fine Art Broker, a position she held until October 2024. Before Aon, she spent approximately four and a half years at Willis Towers Watson as an Account Handler covering Fine Art, Jewellery, and Specie, from September 2017 to February 2022. Her career spans roughly eight years in specialist broking across specie, fine art, jewellery, and, most recently, digital asset custody. No information on her educational background is available in the source content.

Carra Wu is a Partner, Crypto Investments at Andreessen Horowitz, where she has been based in New York since March 2021. Her investment mandate covers gaming, metaverse, media, consumer, infrastructure, and DAO investments across crypto.

Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Wu worked in product management at Apple, focused on search systems and developer-facing products for the App Store, with particular engagement with game developers. Before that, she consulted for Kessel Run at the United States Air Force. She began her career in software engineering at Microsoft, where she built AR/VR applications and games for the HoloLens. She first engaged with crypto in 2017 while working at a data analytics startup. Wu studied Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Economics at Harvard University, where she was also a board member and dancer with the Harvard Ballet Company. Outside of work, she writes and builds cars.

Cassie Craddock is VP, Managing Director – UK and Europe at Ripple, a role she has held since March 2025, having joined the company in 2017. She is also Board Director of Ripple Markets UK, a position she has held since November 2023, and Advisory Board Member of The Payments Association since December 2024. Based in London, she leads Ripple's European operations across payments, custody, and digital asset infrastructure. She was the named spokesperson for Ripple's January 2026 receipt of an Electronic Money Institution licence and Cryptoasset Registration from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, and for Ripple's full EMI licence granted by Luxembourg's CSSF in February 2026. In April 2026 she stated publicly that digital asset adoption in Europe has moved from pilot to production, citing custody infrastructure as the enabling layer, and pointed to integrations with institutions including Intesa Sanpaolo, BBVA, and DZ Bank as evidence of operational maturity on the XRP Ledger.

Prior to her current title, Craddock held the role of Director of Sales, EMEA at Ripple from October 2019 to October 2021, leading Payment Service Provider sales for RippleNet across the region. She previously worked at fintech startups including Mangopay, where she launched UK operations before the business was acquired by Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, and at payments companies Ixaris and Veridu. She began her career as a professional footballer, playing for Ipswich Town in the FA Women's Premier League. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield.

Cathie Wood is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer at ARK Investment Management LLC, which she founded in January 2014 after registering it as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As CIO and Portfolio Manager, she holds ultimate responsibility for investment decisions and led the development of ARK's philosophy and investment approach, focusing on disruptive innovation across areas including multiomic sequencing, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy storage, and blockchain technology.

Wood has been an active proponent of Bitcoin as an asset class, with ARK's first investment in Bitcoin dating back approximately ten years. She has publicly commented on Bitcoin's role during regional banking instability, the significance of the January 2024 launch of Bitcoin Spot ETFs, and the outlook for crypto markets in the context of Federal Reserve rate policy. Prior to founding ARK, she spent twelve years at AllianceBernstein as CIO of Global Thematic Strategies, where she managed over $5 billion. Before that, she co-founded Tupelo Capital Management, a hedge fund that managed approximately $800 million in global thematic strategies in 2000. She spent the preceding eighteen years at Jennison Associates LLC, where she held roles as Chief Economist, Equity Research Analyst, Portfolio Manager, and Director. She began her career at The Capital Group in Los Angeles as an Assistant Economist. Wood received a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Economics, summa cum laude, from the University of Southern California in 1981.

Cédric Lion is an Analyst at Animoca Brands, where he supports projects seeking to apply blockchain technology. He works to translate nascent ideas into concrete solutions within the Web3 space.

INSUFFICIENT_DATA---The source content provides fewer than 3 independently verifiable facts about Cédric Lion beyond his name, title, and employer. His educational background (University of Paris Dauphine) and location (Paris region) appear only in the existing biography provided as input, not in the retrieved source content, and therefore cannot be included per the accuracy rules. Returning INSUFFICIENT_DATA.

Cédric O is Co-founder & CEO at Mallow, a technology and internet company he co-founded in 2024, with presence in France and the United States. He also serves as a board member at Solocal, as a co-founding advisor at Mistral AI, and as a member of the strategic committee at La Plateforme_, a nonprofit based in Marseille.

From March 2019 to May 2022, O served as Secretary of State for the Digital Economy in the French government under Prime Ministers Édouard Philippe and Jean Castex, reporting to minister Bruno Le Maire. In that role, he worked on France's 5G network rollout, oversaw the TousAntiCovid contact-tracing application, and engaged with technology companies on digital regulation and the French Tech initiative. He was also a political advisor to President Emmanuel Macron from November 2017, and prior to that served as treasurer of the La République En Marche! party during Macron's 2016–17 presidential campaign. Earlier in his career, he worked as a project manager at Safran between 2014 and 2017, and as communications manager at Operationelle from 2007. Between 2022 and 2023, he served on the European Space Agency's High-Level Advisory Group on Human and Robotic Space Exploration. He was also a member of the French government's committee on generative artificial intelligence under the Prime Minister in 2023–2024. O graduated from HEC Paris in 2006, having previously attended Lycée du Parc. He is the brother of Delphine O, former member of the National Assembly.

Chadi El Adnani is Portfolio Manager at Re7 Capital, where he manages a $1 billion crypto fund focused on delta-neutral and directional DeFi strategies. Prior to this role, he served as Head of Research and Business at SUN ZU Lab, where his work included producing structured analysis of the Web3 space, including category mapping across blockchain infrastructure, blockchain applications, digital currencies, on-chain assets, and institutional financial services.

El Adnani holds degrees from HEC Paris and Telecom Paris.

Charles Aubert-Couturier is Senior Manager Blockchain Cryptoactifs at Blockchain Partner by KPMG, a position he has held since April 2021. In this role, he leads the blockchain and cryptoasset team, with responsibilities spanning strategic studies, scoping, training, and technical and functional recommendations. He operates within the General Management department at senior level.

Alongside his KPMG role, Aubert-Couturier holds several concurrent positions in the French digital assets space. Since September 2023, he has served as Co-Administrator at Adan, the association representing web3 actors in France and Europe. He has also been involved with Bitstack, a Bitcoin savings application, since December 2021; with Swaap Labs, a Paris-based decentralised finance company, since February 2022; and with Tilvest, a cryptocurrency platform targeting wealth management intermediaries, since August 2022. His total professional experience spans eight years. The existing biography references a degree from ESCP Europe and fluency in French, Italian, and English, but these details do not appear in the retrieved source content and are therefore excluded here.

Charles d'Haussy is the CEO of the dYdX Foundation, a non-profit organisation headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, focused on decentralised governance, developer enablement, and operations supporting the dYdX on-chain perpetual trading protocol. He has held the role since September 2022. His responsibilities at the Foundation include overseeing the protocol's migration from a Starkware layer 2 on Ethereum to a sovereign blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK, a move designed to fully decentralise the order book and eliminate dependence on third-party infrastructure such as AWS. Under this architecture, DYDX token staking secures the chain and validators are compensated in USDC. He also serves as an advisor to Bit Digital (NASDAQ: BTBT) and CIGP, an independent financial advisory group.

Prior to dYdX, d'Haussy held several roles at ConsenSys: Director of Strategic Initiatives (2019–2021), Managing Director for APAC (2021–2022), and Global Head of Business Development (2022). At ConsenSys, he led central bank digital currency projects with institutions in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Dubai, China, and South Korea, and set up the firm's Hong Kong office. Before ConsenSys, he served as Head of FinTech at InvestHK, the Hong Kong government's investment promotion department, where he co-founded Hong Kong FinTech Week. He also held executive roles in Hong Kong's private sector, including co-founding an electronics company and a role at 8 Securities, where he helped launch the first robo-advisor in Asia. He is the co-author of two books: Block Kong (2021), on Hong Kong's blockchain leaders, and Arabian Crypto (2025), on the crypto industry in Arab countries. He studied at ESC Rennes and also studied in Canada and China. He holds SFC licences 1 and 4, a Certified Bitcoin Professional designation, and completed a blockchain business strategy programme at Be9 London.

Charles Guillemet is Chief Technology Officer at Ledger, a position he has held since July 2019. In this role, he oversees software engineering, security research, product security, infrastructure, architecture, and innovation. He joined Ledger in December 2017 as Chief Security Officer, where he founded the company's internal security research team, the Ledger Donjon, oversaw security assessments of Ledger's products, and procured independent security certifications for the Ledger Nano S and Ledger Nano X. He has led the development of open source hardware and software security tools and has overseen security assessments of competitor devices, disclosing vulnerabilities under responsible disclosure practices.

Under his technical leadership, Ledger launched two hardware wallet devices featuring secure touchscreens — the Ledger Flex and the Ledger Stax — and introduced the Ledger Recover service, which uses Shamir's cryptographic algorithm to split a user's seed phrase into three encrypted fragments distributed across three independent backup providers. He has also developed the Ledger Key Ring Protocol, a confidentiality-focused cryptographic protocol for the blockchain environment. Guillemet has spoken publicly on the quantum computing threat to elliptic curve cryptography and its implications for blockchain security. Before joining Ledger, he spent approximately ten years in cryptography and hardware security, including a role as Cryptosystems Design Expert at Tiempo S.A.S. and a position as Technical Manager at CEA-LETI ITSEF, a Common Criteria-accredited security evaluation laboratory. He also served as a lecturer at ENSIMAG. He holds a Master of Science in Cryptography and Security from ENSIMAG, where he graduated as valedictorian, and a Master 2 in Security, Cryptology and Coding of Information Systems from Université Joseph Fourier.

Charles Hoskinson is CEO and Founder of Input Output Group (IOG, also known as IOHK), the engineering and research company behind the Cardano blockchain. He co-founded Ethereum in late 2013 alongside Vitalik Buterin as one of five original founders, holding the position of chief executive before being removed in 2014 following a dispute over whether the project should operate as a commercial or nonprofit entity. In late 2014, he formed IOHK with former Ethereum colleague Jeremy Wood to build cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Cardano, IOHK's primary project, is a public blockchain and smart contract platform hosting the ADA cryptocurrency. Hoskinson chose not to pursue venture capital for Cardano, citing concerns about blockchain principles and the risk of outsized project control. IOHK has sponsored blockchain research at the University of Edinburgh, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Wyoming.

Prior to Ethereum, Hoskinson founded the Bitcoin Education Project in 2013, served as founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation's education committee, and helped establish the Cryptocurrency Research Group. He also co-founded Invictus Innovations, a Bitcoin-related start-up. In September 2021, he donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon University's philosophy department to establish the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics. He contributed $1.5 million to fund a 2023 Galileo Project expedition led by Avi Loeb to recover debris from meteorite CNEOS 2014-01-08 near Papua New Guinea. Outside of crypto, he operates an 11,000-acre bison ranch, owns a construction company, and runs an anti-aging healthcare clinic in rural Wyoming. He attended Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder to study mathematics.

Charles Jansen is Managing Director, Digital Assets, DeFi & Tokenization at S&P Global, currently serving as Head of DeFi Transformation within S&P Global Ratings, a position he has held since June 2024. In March 2026, he represented S&P Global at a breakfast event during EthCC in Cannes, organised by The Big Whale in partnership with DFNS, Bitwise, Zama, Apollo, and Native, focused on how institutions are approaching on-chain finance.

Jansen has been at S&P Global since April 2012, accumulating over 14 years at the firm across a series of progressively senior roles. Prior to his current position, he served as Senior Director and Head of DeFi Transformation from April 2022 to June 2024. Before moving into DeFi, he led Cognitive Automation within S&P Global's Chief Data Office and later within S&P Global Market Intelligence, where he built and managed a global team of 58 automation specialists, data scientists, machine learning engineers, cloud engineers, and project managers across India, the Philippines, Pakistan, the US, and Latin America. That team delivered automation of the Ownership, Estimates, Financial, Transaction, and Translation groups at S&P Global Market Intelligence. He also evaluated and selected data extraction machine learning vendors for partnerships and acquisitions during that period. Earlier roles at the firm focused on research and automation within Capital IQ. Before joining S&P Global, he worked independently as a developer from 2009 to 2012, working in C, PHP, Python, SQL, and HTML5/CSS3.

Chintan Turakhia is Senior Director of Engineering at Coinbase, where he leads engineering for the Base App (formerly Coinbase Wallet) across iOS, Android, web, and browser extension, with a stated mandate to bring a billion users onchain. He has held the Senior Director role since August 2023, having previously served as Director of Engineering at Coinbase from July 2021, with responsibility for the self-custody wallet product. He also leads AI adoption efforts across Coinbase's engineering organisation. Under his tenure, the wallet grew from one million to over 20 million users, and annualised revenue attributed to the product grew from $5 million to a peak of over $75 million. Specific technical initiatives he has led include the migration of Coinbase Wallet's mobile apps to React Native, the buildout of the Coinbase Wallet browser extension, and the launch of the Base App. His AI adoption work at Coinbase included implementing a "PR speed run" methodology that reduced pull request review cycle times from 150 hours to 15 hours, and building internal Slack-based agent tooling that chains Linear, MCPs, and multiple codebases to automate workflows from user feedback to shipped code.

Prior to Coinbase, Turakhia held engineering roles at Uber and Qualcomm. He holds a degree from UCLA. He is also an advisor to Workgrounds and previously advised Arize AI.

Chris Cox is Head of Investor Services at Citi, responsible for custody, fund services and execution services within the Services division. Appointed in 2025, he previously led Citi's Trade and Working Capital Solutions and held senior securities services roles. Over three decades in financial services.

Chris Dixon is Founder and Managing Partner of a16z crypto, the dedicated crypto and blockchain investment arm of Andreessen Horowitz, which he founded in 2018. He has been a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz since 2013. Through five dedicated funds, a16z crypto has raised more than $9.8 billion to invest in crypto and blockchain companies. Dixon ranked first on the 2022 Forbes Midas List.

Prior to his current role, Dixon co-founded Founder Collective in 2009, a seed-stage venture capital fund. He also founded two startups: SiteAdvisor, an internet security company acquired by McAfee in 2006, and Hunch, a recommendation technology company acquired by eBay in 2011. Earlier in his career, he worked as a professional programmer at the high-speed options trading firm Arbitrade, and joined Bessemer Venture Partners in 2003. He has made personal angel investments in companies including Uber, Venmo, Pinterest, Kickstarter, BuzzFeed, and Makerbot. In January 2024, he published Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet (Random House), which became a New York Times bestseller. Dixon holds a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia University and an MBA from Harvard University.

Chris Old is Global VP of Organic Growth at Crypto.com, a role he assumed in May 2025. He leads global strategy and execution across SEO, AIO, ASO and full-funnel organic content, with a mandate to scale growth across all products and markets. He manages teams across multiple regions.

Old joined Crypto.com from IG Group, where he served as Head of Organic Growth from May 2024 to May 2025, and prior to that as SEO Lead from October 2019 to April 2024, and SEO Manager from July 2018 to October 2019. At IG Group he oversaw SEO, web content, ASO, market analysts, social media, influencer, YouTube and podcasts, scaled the international SEO team across 27 countries, and grew organic traffic by 10x and organic revenue by 9x. He also developed the Club Sandwich Model, a generative AI content production process that reduced production time by 50% and doubled output. Before IG Group, he held SEO-related roles at Cancer Research UK and Truly Experiences. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Studies from the University of Nottingham.

Christian Leger is Head of Distribution – Switzerland at Franklin Templeton, based in Zurich, where he is responsible for business development and the distribution of the firm's investment strategies to wholesale and institutional clients. He leads a team of distribution professionals in Switzerland and works in coordination with Franklin Templeton's regional distribution teams and its alternatives distribution specialists. At the Web3 Banking Symposium in Zurich, Leger argued that payment rail infrastructure, the emergence of wallet-native models, and Franklin Templeton's own blockchain-related developments represent areas banks and asset managers can no longer ignore. He has stated that in a wallet-native world, clients would no longer operate inside bank platforms, reversing the traditional client–bank relationship and forcing institutions to define their value proposition. His recommended response for institutions facing deposit outflows to stablecoins and tokenized yield-bearing assets is to own infrastructure, build on blockchain, and position as wallet service providers.

Prior to Franklin Templeton, Leger was Managing Director and Head of Switzerland at Nuveen, with a focus on institutional clients and private wealth investors. Before that, he held the roles of Swiss Country Head and Head of European Banks at Allianz Global Investors. He began his career at Capital Group, where he held various senior positions over 17 years. He holds a BA (Honours) from SOAS University of London, where he studied Politics and Arabic.

Christian Rau is Senior Vice President Crypto and Fintech Enablement at Mastercard Europe, a position he has held since April 2022. In this role, he works with European and global account and product teams, customers, and partners to design and deploy digital payment propositions. He leads Mastercard Europe's Web3 business and serves as the primary voice on the company's crypto strategy across the region.

Rau's mandate covers both on-ramp and off-ramp services, enabling users to buy digital assets via Mastercard and convert them back to fiat. He is directly involved in partnerships with blockchain networks including Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, and in the rollout of Mastercard's Crypto Partner Program, which counts Binance and Bybit among its participants. He has publicly addressed stablecoin adoption in the EU, including participation in an XRPL roundtable panel discussion on that topic. Prior to his current role, Rau served as General Manager of the Mastercard Vienna office, responsible for the Austrian market. Before that, between 2015 and 2019, he headed the Central European Product Team, during which he oversaw the introduction of Debit Mastercard in Germany and Switzerland. He joined Mastercard in 2012, having previously held positions in the telecommunications and banking sectors. No educational background is stated in the available source material.

Christine Moy is a Partner, Head of Digital Assets, Data & AI Strategy at Apollo Global Management, a position she has held since April 2022. In this role, she leads efforts to apply blockchain and data technologies to Apollo's businesses and plays a central role in Apollo's strategy to invest in digital asset companies focused on transforming the financial services sector. A concrete expression of this mandate was Apollo's investment in Morpho, a DeFi lending protocol, under which Apollo agreed to acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens — approximately 9% of total supply — over four years. Moy has described DeFi as a "paradigm shift" for traditional finance. She also participated as a speaker at a March 2026 institutional finance event during EthCC in Cannes, where her listed title was Head of Digital Assets, Data & AI Strategy.

Prior to joining Apollo, Moy spent approximately 18.5 years at J.P. Morgan, where she held a series of progressively senior roles. She co-led the 2020 launch of Onyx, J.P. Morgan's blockchain unit, and served as Global Head of Blockchain & Crypto from February 2016 to February 2022. She also held the titles of Global Head of Liink and Global Head of Metaverse within the Onyx team, the latter being her final role before departing in early 2022. Earlier in her J.P. Morgan career, she worked across syndicated loan trading, asset-backed securities origination and syndication, global commodities sales and marketing, and private bank product and platform development. Moy is a graduate of Brown University.

Christophe Barraud is Head of Discretionary Management and Research at LIOR Global Partners, a global macro discretionary asset manager based in Monaco, a position he has held since October 2025. In this role he oversees research and discretionary portfolio management, applying a top-down macroeconomic framework that integrates sustainability into the investment process.

Prior to joining LIOR Global Partners, Barraud spent nearly fourteen years as Chief Economist and Strategist at Market Securities Group, where he also served as CEO of Market Securities Monaco S.A.M. from November 2023 through the end of 2025. Over that period, Bloomberg ranked him Top Forecaster of the U.S. Economy in 2012–2020 and 2022–2024, Top Forecaster of the Eurozone Economy in 2015–2019 and 2022–2024, and Top Forecaster of the Chinese Economy in 2017–2020 and 2024. In January 2026, Bloomberg recognised him simultaneously across all three regions, covering the 2025 ranking cycle. MarketWatch named him Forecaster of the Year in 2020. His research is addressed to institutional investors including banks, insurers, asset managers, and pension funds, as well as public bodies; he is regularly consulted by the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance and by the Elysée. Since 2021, he has been Adjunct Lecturer in the MSc Finance programme at ESCP Business School. On the academic side, he holds a Master II in Finance and wrote a thesis in Financial Economics at Paris-Dauphine University focused on parallels between the sports betting market and stock markets. In 2021, he was appointed Knight of the National Order of Merit, a distinction conferred by Bruno Le Maire on 10 November 2021.

Christopher Goforth is Director, Digital Assets Deputy BSA/AML Officer at Charles Schwab, a position he has held since December 2025 and is based in Southlake, Texas. His mandate sits within Finance and Accounting at the Director level, with a focus on digital assets alongside BSA/AML compliance responsibilities.

Goforth has seventeen years of experience in financial services. The nine years prior to his current role were concentrated on AML surveillance, model development, and digital assets. Before joining Charles Schwab, he spent over thirteen years at Fidelity Investments across a range of progressively senior roles. His most recent position there was Director, Digital Assets, Financial Crimes Analytics, held from January 2024 to November 2025. Prior to that he served as Senior Manager, Digital Assets, Financial Crimes Analytics from July 2022 to December 2023, and Lead Analyst, AML Surveillance from October 2021 to July 2022. Earlier Fidelity roles included Sr. Analyst and Analyst in AML Fraud Surveillance, a Managing Director position in General Management, and customer service functions dating back to 2008.