People

Christopher Grilhault des Fontaines is Co-CEO and Co-founder at Dfns, a Wallets-as-a-Service platform providing web3 wallet infrastructure for digital asset operations. He has held the Co-CEO role since November 2023. At Dfns, he co-founded the company in 2020, initially serving as Chief Operations Officer before transitioning to Co-CEO. The company is a Techstars alumnus.

Beyond Dfns, he serves as Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Super Capital, a venture capital entity that brings together entrepreneurs, angel investors, and consultants to support startups. He is also an angel investor at WAGMI Ventures, a web3-focused investor syndicate. Since November 2024, he has chaired the Cybersecurity Committee at the Ligue pour la sécurité du web3 (LSW3), a public-private association focused on security for cryptocurrency and blockchain infrastructures. Earlier in his career, he founded and led Jollyclick from 2014 to 2019, and prior to that founded Aion from 2010 to 2015. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Le Village by CA in 2020 and at Techstars in 2021. He also served as a board member at Super Capital from 2022 and as Marketing Chair for Security Applications at the MPC Alliance. His background spans HR Tech, sports, food, and social media sectors. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the Université de Bordeaux and a Master's degree in Management and Organizational Behavior Studies from Université Paris Dauphine. He is a laureate of the Institut de l'Engagement.

Christopher Jensen is Portfolio Manager and Director of Digital Asset Research at Franklin Templeton, where he holds two concurrent roles. As Portfolio Manager, effective November 2024, he co-manages an actively managed digital asset token fund for qualified investors. As Director of Digital Asset Research, a position he has held since February 2024, he leads a team of fundamental analysts covering digital asset token analysis, including market and competitive analysis, tokenomic design, financial modeling, valuation, key personnel diligence, technical due diligence, and risk management frameworks. He also co-leads the Digital Asset Investment Strategies Group's Investment Committee.

Jensen joined Franklin Templeton in 2015 as a Vice President and Senior Research Analyst in the Fixed Income group. In 2019, he became Head of Credit Data Science and Digital Lending Strategies, a team that combines machine learning, big data analytics, and fundamental credit analysis to invest in marketplace loans and other digital asset classes. Prior to Franklin Templeton, he was a Principal at SLR Capital Partners, an alternative asset manager in New York focused on cash flow, asset-based lending, and specialty finance, where he worked from April 2011 to May 2015. He also previously served as an Assistant Vice President at CIT Group, now a division of First Citizens Bank. His career spans approximately 22 years across venture capital, private equity, and private credit with a focus on technology investing. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Princeton University, an MBA from the Yale School of Management, and a Certificate in Data Science from Stanford University. He is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Claire Balva is General Manager at Adan, the French nonprofit representing Web3 actors in France and Europe, a position she has held since September 2025. Prior to this, she served as VP Strategy at Deblock from January 2024 to September 2025. Deblock is a fintech combining a current account with a self-custody crypto wallet, founded by former Revolut and Ledger employees, licensed by the Bank of France and the AMF, and having raised $26 million. She also serves as a consultant at BFM Business, where she covers economic and financial news, a role she has held since June 2021.

Balva has worked in the blockchain and crypto sector since 2015, when she co-founded Blockchain Partner, a French blockchain consulting firm that worked with clients including the Banque de France, BNP Paribas, L'Oréal, and Aéroports de Paris. Blockchain Partner was acquired by KPMG in 2021, at which point Balva joined KPMG France as Blockchain and Crypto Director, a role she held until September 2022. She subsequently worked as an independent consultant in crypto advisory, conferences, and expertise from October 2022 to January 2024. She is co-author of Bitcoin et cryptomonnaies faciles, published in 2022, and is a board member of Le Cercle du Coin. She launched the podcast Unhosted in April 2024. She holds a degree from ESCP Business School, where she studied from 2011 to 2015 with a specialisation in entrepreneurship and strategic consulting, including study periods in Madrid and Berlin.

Claire Calmejane is a former Group Chief Innovation Officer at Société Générale, appointed to that role in September 2018 reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer and serving as a member of the Group Management Committee. Her mandate at Société Générale covered fostering innovation culture, driving venturing efforts in internal and external startups, identifying market trends, and developing partnerships across the external fintech and technology landscape. She led the AI team contributing to €500 million in projected value by 2025, scaled the digital business from 3% to 30% direct sales, created SG Ventures — the corporate venture arm steering €400 million in startup investment — and initiated two business lines covering digital assets and banking as a service. She also served as a non-executive director of Boursorama, including as Chairwoman of its audit committee.

Prior to Société Générale, Calmejane held senior roles at Lloyds Banking Group, where she served as Risk Transformation Director and previously as Innovation Director, establishing the Innovation Labs and the Digital Academy. Before that, she worked at Capgemini Consulting from 2006, focusing on technology transformation for financial institutions, and contributed to a digital transformation study conducted in partnership with MIT in 2011. She has lectured on the fintech landscape and digital transformation at MIT, CFTE, Oxford, and HEC. She is a member of the World Economic Forum's Future of AI and Financial Services group. She holds an engineering degree from EPITA, where she graduated first in her class in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science, and a Master's degree from HEC. She was also a visiting researcher at MIT.

Clara Chappaz is Ambassador for Digital Affairs and Artificial Intelligence at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position she has held since December 2025. Prior to this appointment, she served in the French government as Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies from December 2024 to October 2025, having first entered government as Secretary of State for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies in September 2024, making her France's first AI minister. During her ministerial tenure, she unveiled the National Institute for AI Evaluation and Safety (INESIA), launched Dare AI — a plan for integrating artificial intelligence across France's economy by 2030 — and led the creation of a 91-partner coalition to address AI's environmental impact at the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025. The French government also announced a $400 million investment in public interest AI at that summit. She was named to TIME's list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025.

Before entering government, Chappaz served as Director of La French Tech from October 2021 to September 2024, where she led the mission supporting the growth of the French startup sector in France and internationally. Prior to that, she held C-level positions at Vestiaire Collective, serving as Chief Growth Officer from January 2019 and Chief Business Officer from October 2020 to October 2021. Earlier in her career, she served as director general of Zalora, starting in 2015. Chappaz holds a Master of Science from ESSEC Business School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Clarisse Hagège is Co-founder & CEO of Dfns, a cybersecurity company specialised in wallet infrastructure for web3, which she founded in 2020. Dfns provides wallet infrastructure that helps organisations manage digital asset operations and onboard users into crypto. The company has raised $30.6M across two funding rounds and has been accelerated by Techstars, Station F, and Crédit Agricole. Alongside her role at Dfns, Hagège serves on the board of the MPC Alliance, where she focuses on raising industry awareness and adoption of multiparty computation technology. She also mentors for the Techstars Web3 Launchpad and advises crypto startups at Station F.

Before founding Dfns, Hagège spent ten years in investment banking, holding roles at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Crédit Agricole CIB. At Crédit Agricole CIB, she became the youngest person to serve as Chief of Staff to the CEO, and also held roles spanning research analysis, wealth management, and global coverage. She initiated the bank's first hydrogen financing project. Her academic background includes a BSc in Geopolitics and History from Sorbonne, an MSc in Finance from Sciences Po, and an MSc in Applied Economics from Dauphine University. She splits her time between New York and Paris.

Clément Garcia is a graduate of ESSEC Business School and holds a certificate in technological entrepreneurship from edX. He is currently working at Stealth.

Clément Moutier is Head of Prime Sales Hedge Funds, Continental Europe, at Société Générale CIB. A graduate of INSEEC, he is also a volunteer with the French Red Cross.

Clément Peace is an analyst at The Big Whale, specializing in digital assets and DeFi.

Colas Gabriac is a Consultant at Sia Partners, where he has focused on crypto and blockchain since December 2018. His areas of coverage include public blockchains, decentralised finance (DeFi), automated market makers (AMMs), MEV, high-frequency trading, stablecoins, and tokenisation. In November 2024, he was interviewed by The Big Whale on the subject of blockchain-based AI agents, discussing the mechanics of LLM-based autonomous agents, the Truth Terminal case study, and the emergence of AI-managed investment vehicles such as AI16z. He explained how AI agents trained on open-source large language models can develop distinct behaviours and interact autonomously on-chain, including executing financial strategies on DeFi protocols such as Aave or Morpho.

Prior to joining Sia Partners, Gabriac worked as a Blockchain Developer at Lombard Odier Group from February to August 2018, based between Grenoble and Geneva, and as a Blockchain Analyst at Allianz France from March to August 2017 in Paris. He holds an Engineer's degree with a specialisation in Quantitative Finance from ECE Paris, where he studied from 2015 to 2018, and completed preparatory classes in Mathematics at Lycée Berthollet in Annecy. He holds the AMF certification, issued by the French financial markets regulator in October 2018.

Colborn Bell is Co-Founder and Director at zeroone, a cultural distribution platform enabling individuals to create, collect, and connect, and simultaneously serves as Founder and Director of the Museum of Crypto Art (MoCA), a nonprofit digital museum he established in April 2020. At MoCA, he oversees a metaverse-based institution that exhibits work from hundreds of digital artists. He co-founded zeroone in October 2022, with the platform formally headquartered in New York.

Bell's entry into digital assets began in 2016, with his first ether purchase in February 2017. His interest in smart contracts and early-stage crypto projects, including participation in multiple ICOs, preceded his pivot toward NFTs, which accelerated following his attendance at the Satoshi conference in January 2020. That year he was also engaged to conduct a compliance review of the NFT marketplace SuperRare. Prior to his work in digital art and crypto, Bell spent approximately six years as a Private Wealth Manager at a family office, from May 2014 to May 2020, and held an earlier position as Trader and Portfolio Analyst at Abacus Wealth Partners from August 2012 to April 2014. Between 2017 and 2020, he founded and directed Frontier Technology at 5th Element Group, PBC, and separately founded Finite Square Well. From August 2021 to June 2023, he served as Artistic Director at DMINTI. Bell studied finance and psychology in New York and holds a degree from Columbia University.

Côme Prost-Boucle is Country Manager at Coinbase France, a position he has held since February 2024. In this role, he leads product, growth and regulatory expansion in the French market. Coinbase obtained its PSAN registration from the AMF prior to his appointment, and the stated objective for the French operation is to become the market leader in France. Prost-Boucle is, as of the time of reporting, Coinbase's only direct employee in the French market, working in coordination with Coinbase teams based in Ireland, the UK and Germany.

Before joining Coinbase, Prost-Boucle co-founded NFT Paris in 2021, serving as General Director until February 2024. The conference grew from approximately 700 attendees to over 18,000 visitors and became Europe's largest event focused on web3 technologies, held at the Grand Palais in Paris. Prior to NFT Paris, he served as Chief of Staff at Mon Petit Placement, a fintech focused on democratising access to investment, where he worked on fundraising, strategy, B2B and B2C partnerships, and recruitment. He has also held positions in venture capital and innovation consulting. He studied at HEC Paris, completing a joint master's degree in entrepreneurship with École Polytechnique. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Cristiano Ventricelli is Vice President – Senior Analyst, Digital Economy at Moody's Ratings, where his work focuses on the analysis of digital assets, tokenisation, and blockchain-based financial infrastructure. He has contributed analysis on digital bond ratings, including Moody's assessments of digitally native notes issued by the Government of Hong Kong SAR and Bank of Communications HK Branch, participating as a speaker in Moody's analyst briefings on both transactions.

Ventricelli has written on topics including real-world asset tokenisation, the role of Ethereum as infrastructure for tokenised assets, stablecoin risk following the USDC depeg during the 2023 banking crisis, and the risks associated with private asset tokenisation. He has argued publicly that blockchain technology is undergoing a structural shift from retail and cryptocurrency use toward institutional adoption, with applications spanning digital bonds, central bank digital currencies, and asset digitisation across sectors including finance and luxury goods. He has also addressed the intersection of cyber risk and digital finance, contributing to Moody's 2025 outlook on the digital economy. His published commentary spans outlets including CoinDesk and The Big Whale, and he has participated in Moody's Focus on Finance podcast series.

Cyrus Fazel is the Founder and CEO of SwissBorg, a crypto wealth management platform he co-founded with Anthony Lesoismier-Geniaux in 2017 and has led since June 2016. His role encompasses overall strategic direction of the platform, which offers cryptocurrency buying and selling, yield strategies, and investment tools across multiple fiat currencies. Under his tenure, SwissBorg launched a Meta-Exchange (MEX), an aggregator combining access to both centralised and decentralised exchanges, designed to give retail users access to competitive pricing across more than sixty tokens. He has also overseen the development of self-learning algorithms for investment mandates, the SwissBorg Earn product, a Launchpad, and a gamified Bitcoin prediction app. The company raised 50 million CHF in its ICO and subsequently obtained French PSAN registration as a Digital Asset Service Provider. In a 2022 letter to the SwissBorg community, Fazel reported 680,000 users, 38,433 Premium users, and 285 employees, up from 85 in March 2021.

Prior to founding SwissBorg, Fazel served as Head of Investment Management Platform and Senior Hedge Fund Advisor at SEQUOIA Asset Management SA from 2014 to 2016, where he built an institutional investment platform. From 2010 to 2014, he was Vice President at Aramis Capital SA and FORT LP, conducting hedge fund selection analysis. Earlier roles include Portfolio Advisor at Julius Baer from 2007 to 2009, Junior Investment Manager at FINEP SAS in 2006, and an internship with the UNDP in 2005. Between 2016 and 2017, he co-organised Startup Weekend FinTech and Blockchain in Geneva. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in International Business Management from EDHEC Business School and a BS in Finance and Management from the International Business School.

Daniel Bringle is Director of Crypto Operations at Charles Schwab, a position he has held since October 2025. His role sits within the Operations department at the director level, based out of Westlake, Texas.

Bringle brings approximately 19 years of experience in back and middle office operations and trading desk functions. Before joining Schwab, he held a series of roles at Robinhood spanning September 2022 to October 2025, progressing from Crypto Operations Senior Specialist through Crypto Operations Lead for Settlements, Manager of Crypto Operations for Wallet Ops, Manager of Crypto Operations covering Money Movements (including settlements, wallet operations, and trading operations), and ultimately Senior Manager of Crypto Operations for Money Movements. Earlier in his career he worked in portfolio accounting and performance reporting using Fiserv Security APL and Advent Axys, including composite maintenance and GIPS verification. He also held trading responsibilities managing six investment models across 15 WRAP platforms, handling best execution for institutional and non-directed SMA accounts and the settlement of those trades. At Advisory Research he managed reconciliation of domestic and international strategies, cost basis reconciliation, corporate actions processing, and trade settlement via Omgeo TradeSuite, Advent DTCC, and Omgeo CTM. His earlier career began at Hillman Capital. No educational details are present in the available source content.

Daniel Coheur is Global Head of Digital Assets and Fund Distribution at Apex Group, a role he assumed following Apex's acquisition of Tokeny, the tokenisation and compliance infrastructure provider he co-founded and led as Chief Commercial Officer for eight years. At Apex, he drives the group's global digital asset strategy, integrating tokenisation, on-chain compliance, and fund distribution solutions across its network of fund managers.

Coheur co-founded Tokeny in November 2018 and also co-founded T-REX Network, a protocol built on the ERC-3643 standard that ties compliance to investor identity at the smart contract level, enabling regulatory requirements to be layered through the identity and attestation layer without modifying the underlying asset. Prior to founding Tokeny, he held roles scaling transaction-based enterprises in capital markets at Clearstream Banking, part of Deutsche Börse, and in telecommunications at Syniverse, owned by The Carlyle Group. Throughout his career he has mentored and funded several start-ups and founded his own investment boutique. He is based in Walferdange, Luxembourg.

Daniel Seifert is VP Regional Managing Director, EMEA at Coinbase, a position he has held since October 2022. Based in Dublin, Ireland, he leads Coinbase's operations across the EMEA region, with responsibility for the company's market-by-market expansion strategy in Europe. He co-authored Coinbase's November 2022 announcement of five EMEA business leadership appointments and has been a public signatory of key European regulatory milestones, including the company's VASP registration in France, obtained from the AMF in December 2023. He has also represented Coinbase publicly on European regulatory matters, including the company's selection of Ireland as its MiCA entity location and its BaFin licence obtained in Germany in 2021.

Prior to joining Coinbase, Seifert served as COO at Solaris from February 2020 to October 2022. He holds a PhD from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, completed between 2007 and 2010, and a business degree from ESCP Business School, completed between 2003 and 2005.

Dan Maggs is Senior Innovation Manager, Digital Assets at ABN AMRO Bank N.V., a position he has held since October 2024, based in Amsterdam. His role sits within the Product function at the bank's Digital Assets unit.

Prior to joining ABN AMRO, Maggs spent nearly nine years at Lloyds Banking Group across a series of progressively senior roles. From January 2022 to October 2024 he held the position of Senior Manager, Blockchain & Digital Currencies in Commercial Banking, where he worked on the application of digital currencies and distributed ledger technology within financial services. In that capacity he was involved in Lloyds' participation in Fnality International's Sterling Fnality Payment System, which in December 2023 completed what was described as the first blockchain-based payments using central bank funds held at the Bank of England's RTGS system. Earlier at Lloyds, he held roles in strategy for Business Banking, loan product management in Commercial Banking, and completed the Commercial Banking Graduate Programme between 2015 and 2017, covering pricing and capital allocation, SME relationship banking, capital markets, and business development. In 2023, he completed a course in Blockchain Innovation and Application at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Dan Ross is Co-Founder and CTO at Native, a digital assets insurance company headquartered in London, founded in 2024. Native focuses on insurance products for digital assets businesses, with $2.6M in total funding. Ross co-founded the company in June 2024 and has spoken publicly on institutional adoption of on-chain finance, including at a breakfast event organised by The Big Whale during EthCC in Cannes on 31 March 2026, in partnership with DFNS, Bitwise, Zama, Apollo, and S&P Global.

Before co-founding Native, Ross spent nearly four years at Superscript as a Web3, Crypto and Blockchain Underwriter, a period that included a role as Digital Assets Underwriting Innovation Manager from September 2023 until his departure in June 2024. Prior to Superscript, he held a three-month position as Insurance Solution Designer at Cover Genius in Sydney, and before that spent two and a half years as a Cyber Underwriting Assistant at MS Amlin in London. His professional focus throughout has been on blockchain and cryptocurrency risk, distributed consensus protocols, and the application of technology in the decentralised space.

Dante Disparte is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy at Circle, the company that issues the USDC stablecoin. In his role, he leads Circle's strategic and policy positioning, including the company's expansion into European markets. He has been central to Circle's decision to establish its European headquarters in Paris, citing the French regulatory environment and political engagement with digital assets as determining factors. Circle has submitted applications to the AMF to obtain PSAN (service provider for digital assets) status and to become an electronic money institution in France, with an stated objective of issuing a digital euro in Europe.

Disparte has publicly positioned USDC as distinct from algorithmic stablecoins such as Terra Luna's UST, framing it instead as a competitor to Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum.

Daren Matsuoka is a partner on the crypto investment team at a16z crypto, where he supports deal flow and portfolio companies by extracting data from public blockchains. His LinkedIn profile lists his title as Head of Data and Fund Strategy, with his current role at Andreessen Horowitz beginning in February 2021.

Prior to a16z, Matsuoka was a Senior Manager on the Data Science team at SVB Capital, where he worked from November 2014 to February 2021. In that role, he created a relational database from unstructured data to house proprietary investment information, built an analytics platform to support the firm's venture capital investment strategy, and managed data operations including oversight of a ten-person team in India. Before SVB Capital, he completed financial training programs at Morgan Stanley and State Street. Matsuoka holds a B.S. in Economics and Computer Science from the University of California, Davis.

David Duong is Global Head of Research at Coinbase, where he leads cryptocurrency research for institutional clients. His output includes weekly market commentaries, monthly outlooks, and market intelligence covering macro trends, tokenomics, digital asset performance, blockchain protocols, and systematic trading strategies for digital assets. He holds the CFA designation.

Before joining Coinbase in November 2021, Duong was Head of Latin America FX Strategy and Research at HSBC, where he led research coverage across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, publishing macro views and trade ideas for institutional and corporate clients and conducting econometric analyses to forecast investment scenarios. Prior to HSBC, he served as Vice President and Senior Latin America Rates Strategist at Santander from 2011 to 2016, developing quantitative models and macroeconomic outlooks for institutional investors with a focus on Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. He holds a BA in computer science and political science from Colgate University and an MSc from the London School of Economics.

David Durouchoux is Deputy CEO of Société Générale - FORGE, holding responsibility for client relationship, business development, regulator relations, market infrastructures, and coverage of central banks and CBDCs. He has held this role since the entity's creation in March 2018. Within FORGE, his mandate spans primary markets, client-facing activity, and engagement with regulators and market infrastructures. He has represented FORGE at institutional forums addressing stablecoins, DeFi lending, and tokenisation, including a panel at ODDO BHF in Paris in February 2026 focused on the integration of stablecoins into institutional strategies.

Before joining FORGE, Durouchoux was Chief Operating Officer at Société Générale's Corporate and Investment Banking division in France, where he oversaw the IT service for SG Securities Services with a budget of 150 million euros under management, covering operational risk, HR and sourcing, and advisory responsibilities to the CIO. Prior to Société Générale, he held a Financial and Legal Project Manager role at LVMH Group and was involved in co-founding financial projects. He has more than 20 years of experience in the financial sector. He holds an engineering and project management degree from ISEN and a qualification in mergers and acquisitions, strategy, and corporate finance from Arts et Métiers (ENSAM). He is a native French speaker with full professional proficiency in English.

David Prinçay is Président (France) at Binance, where he leads the company's French operations. He has spoken publicly on blockchain and cryptocurrency topics, including at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit 2023 and the Paris Finance Forum.

His professional skills span project management, business strategy, business development, cryptocurrency, and blockchain, among others. He holds a Specialized Master's Degree in Management de grands projets.

Declan Fox is Director of Product Management at Consensys, where he serves as Product Lead for Linea, the company's Layer 2 network built on zkEVM technology. He has held the Director of Product Management title since July 2024, while his role as Product Lead for Linea dates to February 2023. In his capacity leading Linea, Fox has overseen the development of the network's token launch, including its tokenomic architecture, a native ETH yield mechanism via Lido V3 for bridged ETH deposits, an ETH burn mechanism designed to align Linea with Ethereum's Layer 1, and a consortium-led governance model. The native yield generated from staked bridged ETH is directed into a fund used to reward users who deploy liquidity on the network, including on Etherex, Linea's primary DEX.

Prior to his current role, Fox was Senior Product Manager at Consensys for Consensys Rollups from May 2022 to September 2023. Before joining Consensys, he spent nearly three years at Luther Systems in London, progressing from Product Manager to Lead Product Manager in blockchain. Earlier in his career, he co-founded What's Wellbeing, a wellness consultancy, and before that spent two years at Jaguar Land Rover as a Product Programme Manager, working on autonomous driving systems and battery electric vehicles. Fox holds a degree from Cardiff University.

Deep Shah is Lead, Gnosis App at Gnosis, based in London, where he leads the consumer business. He was part of the founding team at Gnosis Pay, where he led distribution from inception. In Gnosis Pay's first year of operation, the product crossed $50 million in payment volume. He previously held the title of Head of Growth at Gnosis from September 2024 to September 2025, before moving into his current role leading the Gnosis App in September 2025.

Gnosis Pay is a decentralised payments product designed to function as a blockchain-based bank account, offering users an IBAN, stablecoin spending via a Visa debit card, and peer-to-peer bank transfers. Shah has described the product's objective as delivering a neobanking experience without requiring users to engage with technical Web3 concepts. As of the period covered by the source interviews, Gnosis Pay had over 6,000 active cardholders and approximately 20,000 people on a waiting list across around 35 countries, with France representing roughly 20% of the active user base. Shah is also currently serving as Chief Executive Officer of Ziya, a role he has held since March 2025. Prior to Gnosis, he worked in the founder's office at Catapult, a software development company, from August 2022 to June 2023. He was a founding member of the London Business School Blockchain Society and attended London Business School.

Diederik van Wersch is Regional Sales Director, ASEAN at Chainalysis, based in Singapore, a position he has held since November 2023. In this role, he oversees the company's commercial activities across the ASEAN region, covering sales and business development in the blockchain analytics space. He has spoken publicly on cryptocurrency adoption trends in Asia, noting that countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines are significant drivers of demand, particularly around DeFi, gaming, and cross-border money transfers via crypto and stablecoins. He has identified the scale of crypto companies headquartered in Asia — including Bybit, Crypto.com, BitGet, Gate.io, and Animoca Brands — as a distinguishing feature of the regional market relative to Europe and the US.

Van Wersch has been at Chainalysis since March 2018. Prior to his current position, he served as Director of Mid-Market Sales from November 2022 to November 2023, Head of Mid-Market Sales EMEA from August 2021 to December 2022, and in a Business Development EMEA role from March 2018 to August 2021, all based in London. Before joining Chainalysis, he was Head of Business Development Canada at POLYAS GmbH from July 2016 to February 2018, where he opened the company's Canadian branch in Vancouver. Earlier, he worked as Senior Sales Manager for the Netherlands and UK at Nestpick, part of Rocket Internet SE, from July 2014 to June 2016. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Politics with International Relations from the University of York, where he studied from 2011 to 2015, and completed the International Baccalaureate at ABA, An IB World School, between 2008 and 2011.

Diego Del Olmo is Head of Digital Commerce & Marketplaces at BBVA México, with a focus on GMV growth, customer experience, operations excellence, P&L, strategy, and product innovation. He has served as a judge and evaluator of startups at BBVA Open Talent and as a mentor to FinTech startups at Orion Startups Business Accelerator.

Del Olmo holds more than 13 years of professional experience in efficiency and continuous improvement projects within the financial sector, leading projects in process transformation, business model redesign, and the implementation of emerging technologies. His areas of knowledge include digital transformation, digital strategies, the FinTech and blockchain space, investment banking, and fiduciary business. He holds certifications as a Certified Bitcoin Professional (CBP), Certified KPI Professional, Black Belt Six Sigma (ITESM), and ScrumMaster (Scrum Alliance). He completed programmes at MIT and Columbia Business School covering FinTech and digital business strategy. His academic background includes an Industrial Engineering degree with a specialisation in Production and a Master's in Innovation for Business Development (MID) from ITESM, awarded with Honorable Mention of Excellence.

Dimitri Granger is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at The Big Whale, a Web3-focused media company based in Paris, where he has held his co-founder role since April 2022. He participates directly in editorial and industry events as a speaker, including a May 2026 webinar on MiCA authorizations co-hosted with Homsy Legal, where he appeared alongside The Big Whale's Head of Research to address operational compliance requirements for CASPs ahead of the July 2026 deadline.

Granger has approximately 20 years of experience across corporate communications, brand communication, and growth marketing. Prior to co-founding The Big Whale, he served as Directeur Général, Digital Influence at Publicis Consultants from 2014 to 2017, where he led the public relations department with a focus on digital and social media strategy. He also co-founded .YZ Paris, a creative digital agency, in July 2017, and Blocs, a French-language blockchain accessibility project, in April 2018. His areas of focus include blockchain applications in finance, media and journalism, content marketing, digital PR, and business development.

Dirk Kruwinnus is Chief Product Officer at Seturion, a role he has held since February 2025. Seturion is a pan-European platform for the tokenization, registration, and settlement of DLT-based financial instruments, built with an open architecture that supports both public and private blockchains and enables settlement in central bank money as well as on-chain cash. The platform is already operational at BX Digital, Switzerland's FINMA-regulated DLT trading facility, and was tested in the European Central Bank's blockchain trials with leading European banks in 2024. In his role, Kruwinnus leads product strategy and development for the platform.

Kruwinnus has been with Boerse Stuttgart Group since 2007. He first engaged with distributed ledger technology and tokenization in 2018. From December 2020 to December 2021, he served as Tokenization Product Owner Expert at Boerse Stuttgart Digital, working on tokenization services including business model design, token design, and a B2B issuer web application. From January 2022 to January 2025, he worked in the Group Strategy, M&A, and Innovation division of Boerse Stuttgart Group, with a focus on building DLT-based capital market infrastructure in Europe. In parallel, between April 2021 and December 2024, he worked independently on tokenization projects covering token engineering, token flows, and digital assets structuring. Prior to his tenure at Boerse Stuttgart Group, he held positions within the Allianz Group. He holds a degree in business administration and economics (Diplom-Ökonom) from the University of Hohenheim.

Dominic Williams is the Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, a non-profit research and development organisation headquartered in Zurich, with additional operations in San Francisco and Palo Alto. He founded DFINITY in 2016 with the mandate to develop the Internet Computer, a decentralised computing infrastructure designed to host applications directly on the internet without reliance on traditional servers or centralised cloud providers such as Amazon or Google. The Internet Computer operates on a global network of physical nodes run by independent providers on sovereign hardware, and integrates an advanced blockchain as both a decentralised consensus layer and a distributed computing platform capable of executing code with low latency and high scalability. Williams has also contributed to the development of concepts including the Threshold Relay and Probabilistic Slot Protocol blockchain consensus mechanisms, the Blockchain Nervous System for algorithmic governance, and cryptographic research spanning Validation Towers and Trees, USCIDs, and the 3 E's of Sybil Resistance. He has been a contributor to CoinDesk, writing on topics including the intersection of AI and blockchain and the potential for AI-driven development of Web3 applications.

Prior to founding DFINITY, Williams served as President and Chief Technology Officer of String Labs, a Palo Alto-based incubator focused on open protocol projects. He founded Fight My Monster, a massively multiplayer online game that reached millions of users, during which he developed distributed computing techniques for scaling semi-decentralised systems. Earlier ventures include System 7, a SaaS platform for commercial web portals founded and sold in 2003, and Airdocs, a remote file sharing product connecting mobile users to corporate file servers over cellular networks, founded in 2001. He transitioned to working full-time in cryptography in 2013. Williams holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with First Class Honours, completed between 1992 and 1995.

Dramane Meite, CFA is Head of US and Europe Product at Hashdex, where he leads product strategy, capital markets, and the development of the firm's ETF and ETP platform. He joined Hashdex in October 2021 and is based in London.

Prior to his current role, Meite held two positions at PIMCO: Vice President, Product Strategist, Client Solutions and Analytics, and Vice President, Business Manager in the Executive Office. Before PIMCO, he was a member of Stanford Venture Studio, where he worked on launching a digital financial services platform for Africa. Earlier career experience includes roles at Standard Chartered in sales, trading, and ALM in Africa, and at the International Finance Corporation in treasury client solutions and structured finance across Latin America and EMEA. He also completed short consulting and product engagements at Exten in Brazil and an early stint at Hashdex in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. Meite holds an MBA and an MS from Stanford University and is a CFA Charterholder.

Duncan Smith is Chief Risk Officer (CRO) at Uphold, a position he has held since January 2023, based in Braga, Portugal. He also serves as Director of Uphold Digital Assets Europe Lda, a directorship he assumed in January 2025. Prior to becoming CRO, he served as Head of Financial Risk at Uphold from October 2022 to January 2023, and before that as Senior Trading System Engineer at the same company from January 2022 to October 2022.

Earlier in his career, Smith worked as a Contract Developer at Credit Suisse from March 2010 to July 2019, where he worked on Mars, the bank's market risk calculation engine. Before that, he was an Assistant Vice President at Barclays Capital from June 2008 to March 2010, where he designed, developed, supported, tested, and released FX and credit components of the FOToolkit, including an Excel plug-in providing quantitative functions for 7,000 Excel users. He also held a directorship at DVS Engineering Ltd from March 2010 to December 2021, and worked as a Developer at StoreTech from October 2019 to November 2021. Smith holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Loughborough University, where he studied from 2004 to 2009, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Leeds, where he studied from 1997 to 2001.

Dylan Dwyer is Vice President, Digital Asset Custody Operations at BNY, a position he assumed in January 2026 within the bank's Product and Innovation Hub. He sits within BNY's Digital Assets Division alongside a team of specialists covering product management, risk, compliance, and technology for the bank's digital asset offerings. Prior to this promotion, he served as Senior Associate in the same Digital Asset Custody Operations function at BNY from November 2024 to January 2026.

Before joining BNY, Dwyer spent approximately two and a half years at Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custody firm, where he held two roles: Analyst in Client Service from March 2021 to July 2022, followed by Associate in Custody Operations from July 2022 to November 2024. His cumulative focus on digital asset custody operations spans both a crypto-native firm and one of the world's oldest financial institutions. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Dayton, where he studied from 2016 to 2020, and previously attended Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York.

Eli Ben-Sasson is CEO and Co-Founder of StarkWare Industries, a role he has held since February 2024, having previously served as President and Chairman of the Board from 2020. StarkWare develops ZK-Rollup technology for blockchain scaling, with its two principal products being StarkEx, a Validium L2 scaling engine on Ethereum, and Starknet, a permissionless Validity-Rollup Layer 2 network. Ben-Sasson co-founded StarkWare in 2018 alongside Uri Kolodny, Michael Riabzev, and Alessandro Chiesa. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Ben-Sasson co-invented the STARK and FRI protocols, which produce a class of zero-knowledge proof offering quantum-resistance, quasi-linear proof time, polylogarithmic verification time, and transparency through the absence of secret keys. He was also a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol, which formed the basis of Zcash, and remains a Founding Scientist at Electric Coin Company. In 2014, the Zerocash research received the IEEE Test of Time Award. StarkWare is currently working to expand Starknet's STARK proof verification to Bitcoin, with a planned three-phase approach involving an indexer-based first step, integration with BitVM, and eventual support for a Bitcoin soft fork such as OPCAT. Ben-Sasson earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2001, under the supervision of Professor Avi Wigderson, and subsequently completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard and MIT. He joined the Technion faculty in 2005 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2015, a position he held until leaving in 2020.

Eliézer Ndinga is Global Head of Research at 21Shares, the world's largest ETP issuer of cryptoassets. He founded and leads the research department at 21.co, the parent company of 21Shares, producing data and analysis used by financial institutions, regulators, and media. His work focuses on thesis-driven insights into crypto markets and patterns associated with the global economy and geopolitics. The research department also develops frameworks and tools to support product innovation. Under his tenure, assets grew from $20 million to over $2 billion.

Ndinga has nearly ten years of experience in crypto. Previous research papers have been featured by organisations including RAND, a global policy think tank. He began his career in venture capital, investing in seed and early-stage companies in New York, including a billion-dollar fintech startup. He is a guest lecturer on blockchain technology. He holds a master's degree in International Business with Honors, for which he wrote a thesis on how the Bitcoin network could improve financial inclusion in developing economies, and has studied at institutions including the Université d'Orléans, INSEEC, Harvard University, and Grenoble École de Management.

Elise Soucie Watts is the Executive Director at Global Digital Finance (GDF), a nonprofit industry body promoting best practices and conduct standards for the digital asset industry, where she also serves as a board member. In her role, she runs GDF's policy and regulatory programme, leading active policy working groups covering EU, UK, APAC, and MENA regions. Her work spans consultation responses, industry working groups, and outreach to policymakers, central bankers, and government departments across multiple jurisdictions, including Washington DC, Westminster, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. Specific policy contributions include co-authoring a Smart Contract Primer used by MAS' Project Guardian, leading on core recommendations from the Digital Finance APPG report adopted by the UK government on Gilts, and contributing to the clarification that staking does not constitute a collective investment scheme under UK FSMA. She also serves as a Policy Advisory Board Member at Mesh and co-hosts The Outside Context podcast.

Prior to GDF, Watts was an Associate Director at the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), where she led Digital Assets and Data Strategy work, focusing on the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation and the European Commission's targeted consultation on open finance and data sharing. Before that, she worked at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) across their Technology, Resilience and Cyber Division and International Division, where she pioneered the FCA's International Digital Assets strategy in 2022 and led technical policy dialogue on DLT, consumer risks, CBDCs, and DeFi. She was named Next Generation Leader of the Year at the 2022 Women in Finance Awards UK and was included in the Innovate Finance Standout 45 on the Women in Fintech Powerlist 2024 as a Regulatory and Policy Expert.

Emilien Bernard-Alzias is a Partner at Simmons & Simmons LLP in Paris, specialising in financial and insurance regulatory matters. His practice covers asset management, banking, and insurance regulation, with a focus on the offering of financial and insurance products, provision of investment services, and FinTech initiatives. He advises investment service providers, management companies, banks, insurance companies, brokers, payment service providers, and crypto-asset service providers. He is ranked Band 2 in FinTech Legal for France by Chambers and listed as a Next Generation Partner in Banking and Finance: Bank Regulatory by Legal 500, which specifically notes the firm's crypto and MiCA regulation knowledge.

Bernard-Alzias has specific experience in licensing and authorisation processes before the ACPR (including the ECB) and the AMF, and assists clients in the context of supervisory audits. His work in digital assets includes advising on blockchain, crypto-currencies, ICOs, and MiCA regulation, as well as assisting high-profile cryptocurrency businesses with geographical expansion, licensing, and government investigations. He joined Simmons & Simmons in 2011, having previously worked at Edmond de Rothschild's legal department. He holds a Master's degree and a DJCE in business law from Aix-Marseille University, and was admitted to the Paris Bar in 2011.

Emma Lovett is Executive Director, Markets DLT – Credit Lead at JPMorgan Chase & Co., a position she has held since February 2022. In this role, she works on developing capabilities to drive the evolution of digital assets using blockchain technology within credit markets, with a focus on complementing existing frameworks and supporting clients' needs. Alongside this, she serves as Co-Chair of the Fintech and Digitalisation Committee at the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), where she leads discussion and advancement across digital and AI topics in international capital markets. The ICMA committee's work includes promoting straight-through processing, establishing common standards for data handling, and facilitating dialogue between industry stakeholders and regulators.

Prior to moving into the DLT space, Lovett was Head of EMEA Deal Management for Fixed Income New Issues (Syndicate) at J.P. Morgan, a role she held from September 2014 to February 2022. Her broader areas of expertise cover the lifecycle and operational components of new bond issuances, including technology, regulation, legal and compliance, internal procedures, and settlement on both the issuer and investor side. She became an Executive Director at the firm in January 2015, having previously served as a Fixed Income Syndicate Vice President from 2010 to 2015 and in a syndicate assistant role from 2003. She has been at J.P. Morgan for over 20 years, with 15 years in the primary markets business.

Erald Ghoos is CEO Europe at OKX, a position he has held since March 2023 and is based in Malta. His mandate has centred on structuring OKX's European entity, obtaining financial licences, and adapting the product to local markets. OKX became the first global platform to receive a MiCA licence, a process Ghoos describes as two years of work. The company subsequently obtained a MiFID licence through the acquisition of an entity already holding that authorisation, enabling OKX to offer derivative products — futures, swaps, and options — to European institutional investors once remaining administrative formalities are complete. He has also overseen the launch of OKX Earn and spot margin trading in Europe, and has publicly stated that institutional participants, including banks, insurance funds, pension funds, and high-net-worth individuals, now represent a significant and growing segment of OKX's European user base.

Prior to OKX, Ghoos served as Head of Europe at Binance, and before that as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Compliance Officer at Crypto.com, joining that company in 2017 shortly after its founding. Earlier in his career he held a COO role at Payreto GmbH, a financial process sourcing firm based in Berlin, where his focus was operational and compliance workflows for the financial industry. Before moving into crypto, he was involved in the creation of several banks in Europe and held a Head of Global Operations position at an international payments company. He is a graduate of VLEKHO Business School Brussels. His total professional experience spans 24 years across payments, operations, compliance, licensing, and mergers and acquisitions.

Éric Anziani is an executive at Crypto.com, a fintech and blockchain expert, and is involved in several industry associations in Singapore. A graduate of INSEAD, he has recognized international experience.

Erick de Moura is Co-Founder and CEO of Cartesi, a project building an operating system for decentralized applications that enables complex computations to run in a Linux environment outside the blockchain while maintaining decentralization. He has dedicated over 20 years to the software industry, with experience across fintech, healthtech, and e-commerce verticals.

Prior to Cartesi, which he co-founded in January 2018, de Moura worked as a software engineer and tech lead at Arizona Bay from 2008 to 2018. Concurrently, from 2009 to 2015, he served as Engineer and Team Lead at WebRadar, where he acted as software architect, managed development processes, and helped build systems for the telecom and transport markets, including big data and analytics systems used by major South American telecom companies. He has also held roles at M4U, WiNGS Telecom, View Engenharia e Automação Ltda, Tecgraf / PUC-Rio, and K2 Sistemas. He became an Expert at the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum. De Moura holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, completed between 1995 and 2000, and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UCLA, pursued between 1997 and 1998.

Erik Lenoir is Head of Technology, AssetFoundry at BNP Paribas CIB, a position he has held since September 2022, based in Paris. AssetFoundry is BNP Paribas CIB's tokenization platform, with a mandate to serve issuers and investors by enabling financial instrument tokenization through more granular issuances, embedding asset data such as ESG metrics, and integrating with the bank's systems for distribution and custody. The platform is described as a next-generation originate-to-distribute platform built in close collaboration with business lines, legal, IT, and compliance functions.

Lenoir's technical focus spans application security, cloud infrastructure, blockchain, data and analytics, DevSecOps, FinOps, performance optimization, and regulatory compliance. He holds certifications including AWS Security – Specialty, AWS Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, R3 Corda Developer, Elastic Engineer, DPO, and PRINCE2. Prior to his current role, he worked within BNP Paribas CIB's 021 Exploration Engineering team from January 2020 to November 2022, where he framed and developed MVPs for high-value projects using a lean startup approach. He held earlier roles in the bank's IT Digital Accelerator and Fast IT units between 2018 and 2019. His total professional experience spans approximately 14 years. He writes occasionally for French technology publications including Programmez! and MISC, and gives conferences. His education is from Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

Erin Armstrong has 13 years of experience in the finance industry, currently working at Longbow Capital. She holds education credentials from the Canadian Securities Institute.

Evan Auyang is Group President at Animoca Brands, a blockchain technology and investment company focused on digital property rights, tokenisation, and AI-driven consumer and institutional ventures, with an investment portfolio of more than 600 companies. In this role he oversees general management across the group and represents the company publicly on Web3 strategy, regulatory developments, and market positioning, including the company's growing focus on the United States following shifts in the US regulatory environment. He also serves as an Independent Non-Executive Director of Sun Hung Kai & Co. Ltd. and Asia Financial Holdings Limited, and as a Board Director of the Innovation City Authority of Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE.

Beyond Animoca Brands, Auyang chairs Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong public policy think tank, and serves on the board of Voyage, a poverty and youth-focused nonprofit. He holds advisory roles at Our Hong Kong Foundation, the Web3 Development Task Force's Subcommittee on Ecosystem and Infrastructure, the Hong Kong Council of Social Service's Development Fund Committee, and Brown University's Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Prior to joining Animoca Brands, he was Managing Director and Head of GLG International, where he ran the expert insight platform's operations across 15 locations spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Before that, he served as Deputy Managing Director of Kowloon Motor Bus Co. (1933) Ltd. and as a board director of its parent, Transport International Holdings Limited. Earlier in his career he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company and worked in Citigroup's Derivatives Structuring and Marketing unit. He holds an undergraduate degree in Economics and Political Science from Brown University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

Fabian Dori is Chief Investment Officer of Sygnum, the digital asset banking group, leading institutional investment strategies and asset management products. He previously held executive positions at Notenstein La Roche Private Bank and 1741 Asset Management. He holds an MA in Quantitative Economics and Finance from the University of St. Gallen.

Fatih Balyeli is Co-Founder and CEO of Exaion, a subsidiary of the EDF Group founded in January 2020 and specialising in blockchain infrastructure, HPC, 3D cloud, quantum computing, and AI. He leads the company's positioning as an infrastructure provider — not an application layer — serving protocol developers, financial institutions, and enterprises requiring sovereign, decarbonised computing services. Exaion's data centres operate on nuclear and wind energy in northern France, with computing capacity in Canada supplied by hydraulic energy.

On the digital assets side, Balyeli oversees Exaion's operation of RPC nodes, validation nodes, and blockchain archive infrastructure, as well as an internally developed staking activity. Following the company's PSAN registration, he is directing the build-out of an institutional-grade offering — covering digital asset custody, staking, and fiat-crypto, crypto-fiat, and crypto-crypto swaps — targeted at banks and investment funds entering the crypto space, with a planned commercial launch in the second half of 2025. He has stated explicitly that Exaion's positioning is as a technical infrastructure provider, not a financial intermediary. Before founding Exaion, Balyeli served as Investment Director at EDF Pulse Ventures from 2017 to 2019, where he held board positions at portfolio companies including Metroscope. Prior to that, he worked as Project Manager at Enedis from October 2012 to December 2016. Earlier in his career, he worked as a trader at BNP Paribas in Hong Kong and London. He holds an engineering degree from MINES ParisTech.

Faustine Fleuret is Head of Public Affairs at Morpho, a French fintech company developing open blockchain infrastructure for lending and borrowing. In this role, she focuses on fostering dialogue between DeFi builders and regulators, ensuring that policy discussions are grounded in how decentralised lending protocols function and in their potential contribution to more open financial markets. She joined Morpho as a Public Affairs Advisor in February 2025 before being appointed to her current position in August 2025.

Prior to joining Morpho, Fleuret co-founded Adan, the Association for the Development of Digital Assets, and served as its President and Managing Director from 2021. During her tenure, she grew the association from approximately fifty member companies to over 200, spanning crypto, DeFi, NFTs, and video games, and welcomed major players including Visa and Mastercard. She was re-elected as President in 2023 for a two-year term before stepping down at the end of 2024. Her work at Adan centred on crypto-asset regulation at both French and European levels, including engagement around the MiCA framework. She is also the author of four books on financial and crypto regulations, and currently serves as Chairwoman of the Supervisory Board at Dowgo, a company focused on green bonds on the blockchain, and as an Advisor to Cube3. She completed studies at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Filippo Chiricozzi is Stream Manager – Web3 Digital Assets Innovation at Banca Sella, a position he has held since August 2022. In this role, he coordinates the bank's web3, cryptocurrency, and metaverse development activities within the Innovation team. He also teaches on the executive master programme "NFT Creator & Metaverse Design" at w.academy Business School, covering modules on blockchain fundamentals, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NFT history and use cases.

Chiricozzi entered the crypto space in 2017 and purchased his first NFT in December 2020, subsequently building a network focused on NFT education. Prior to Banca Sella, he worked as Partnership & Marketing Manager at Oval Money, a fintech firm. Earlier in his career, he co-founded two startups in 2014 — Moovenda and OffLunch — both built around a logistics-based approach to food delivery in Italy. Following a merger with another Italian operator in 2019, he transitioned to fintech. In 2022, he was selected for Operation3, a six-week programme run by Jericho designed to develop web3 skills, with involvement from founders of companies including The Sandbox and Ledger. His areas of expertise span finance and banking, marketing strategy, community building, and web3, with specific topic focus on NFTs, blockchain, and retention marketing.

Fiona M. Kennedy is Sr. Security Operations Manager at Andreessen Horowitz, based in Menlo Park, California, a position she has held since January 2022. Since October 2023, she has also held a concurrent role as Events, Security Partner for the firm's crypto division, giving her direct operational responsibility within a16z's crypto practice. Alongside her work at Andreessen Horowitz, she has operated as an independent Security Consultant since November 2016, working across the San Francisco Bay Area.

Kennedy's career spans more than two decades in security and operations. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, she served as Global Security Area Manager at Facebook from September 2018 to November 2021. Before that, she was Security Manager at Bently Reserve, Regional Security Manager at International SOS and Control Risks, and GSOC Manager at G4S. Earlier roles include Senior Consultant at TSG Solutions Inc., Emergency Response Manager at NBC Universal, and Director of Risk Management and Corporate Security at Oxygen Media. She holds a Master of Science in Protection Management from the City University of New York–John Jay College of Criminal Justice, completed between 2006 and 2010.

Florent Vallon is an Analyst at The Big Whale, a Paris-based crypto and web3 media founded in 2022, where he has held the role since February 2025. His published work at The Big Whale covers DeFi protocols and on-chain finance, including analyses of Uniswap v4, Aave, Lido, EtherFi, restaking, DEX vaults, real-world assets, and tokenised indices. He also covers broader crypto market topics such as Solana, memecoins, Cardano, and decentralised AI platforms.

Alongside his role at The Big Whale, Vallon is a partner at White Loop Capital, a Paris-based private investment firm specialised in crypto-assets, a position he has held since October 2021. He is also co-founder of SCALIVM, a business consulting firm he launched in January 2020. Prior to these roles, he spent nearly a decade in commercial and entrepreneurial functions across e-commerce, crypto, and SaaS. He is based in the Greater Paris region, holds a degree from Boston University, and a Binance certification.

Francisco Maroto is Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at BBVA, a position he has held since October 2018. In this role, he leads the blockchain discipline across the BBVA Group, drives the company's blockchain and crypto strategy, and acts as Product Owner and Portfolio Manager for blockchain and distributed ledger technology projects within the group. He also represents BBVA externally in the blockchain space and is responsible for spreading blockchain expertise internally.

Prior to his current role, Maroto served as Head of the Swift Global Centre within BBVA's global engineering and operations function, where he led payments and Swift-related projects including SEPA migration, Bizum, and Swift GPI. Earlier in his career, he held roles at OPPLUS as Centralised Foreign Operations Coordinator and worked in financial management at Grupo Dragados. Beyond BBVA, he serves as Treasurer and Board Member at Alastria Blockchain Ecosystem and as an Advisory Board Member at INETCO Systems Limited. Since September 2024, he has taught Digital Assets on the Financial Technologies Master programme at Universidad Pontificia Comillas. He has spoken publicly on digital asset regulation, arguing at the European Blockchain Convention that strong global regulatory frameworks such as the EU's MiCA regulation will provide stability for the digital asset sector and reduce the severity of market downturns. He holds a degree in Business Management and Administration from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a master's degree in International Relations and Foreign Commerce from Aliter in partnership with U.C. Berkeley.

Francis Pouliot is the CEO and Founder of Bull Bitcoin, a non-custodial, Bitcoin-only exchange and payment processing service based in Canada, which he founded in 2015 without outside investment. Bull Bitcoin's model requires users to provide their own Bitcoin address before completing a purchase, meaning the company holds neither user funds nor manages assets on their behalf. In 2015, Bull Bitcoin acquired Bylls, described as the world's first Bitcoin bill payment processing service, which operates as Canada's largest Bitcoin payment processor. Bull Bitcoin also develops and maintains open-source Bitcoin infrastructure, including Cyphernode, a modular Bitcoin full-node microservices API server architecture. Pouliot has been active as a Bitcoin entrepreneur and industry spokesperson since 2013.

Beyond Bull Bitcoin, Pouliot co-founded Catallaxy in June 2017, serving as Director of Research and Cryptoassets until July 2018. He served as a Fintech Advisor to the Ontario Securities Commission from January 2017 to January 2018, advising on Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and applied cryptography. He also served on the Independent Advisory Committee of 3iQ Corp, Canada's first cryptocurrency fund approved by the Ontario Securities Commission, from June 2017 to October 2023. Earlier roles include CEO of Bitcoin Foundation Canada from July 2014 to May 2015, Director of Public Affairs at The Bitcoin Embassy from March 2014 to July 2017, and Member of the Board at the Bitcoin Foundation from January 2016 to January 2018. He won the 2016 OSC Fintech hackathon. Pouliot holds a Master of Arts from King's College London, University of London, and a Bachelor of Science from the Université de Montréal.

Franck Guiader is Head of FinTech and Innovation at Gide Loyrette Nouel, where he leads the firm's practice in digital finance, fintech, AI, and Web3. He advises public and private companies and institutions on development projects requiring technology-specific legal structuring, covering areas including blockchain, security tokens, ICOs, stablecoins, NFTs, the metaverse, roboadvisors, crowdfunding, and AI. The practice has been ranked Band 1 in the Chambers FinTech Legal Guide for five consecutive years from 2022 through 2026.

Guiader is a member of the AMF's Asset Management and Institutional Investors Consultative Commission and of the Technological Innovations and Regulatory Developments Committee of the French Asset Management Association (AFG), where he also chairs the AFG's Artificial Intelligence Working Group. Since July 2024, he has served as Independent Board Member and Chairman of the Audit Committee at Groupama Asset Management. Prior to joining Gide in 2018, he was Division Director at the AMF from 2011 to 2018, responsible for asset management regulation and for the fintech, innovation and competitiveness division. His earlier career included roles in investment banking, asset management, and stock exchange. He holds degrees in business law, finance, and mathematics from the universities of Paris Panthéon-Assas and Paris Cité, and from Neoma Business School.

Francois-Xavier Thoorens is CEO and CTO at Vaultys, a position he has held since January 2022. Vaultys develops solutions for digital identity and access management, including a secure keyring designed as a pass to the decentralised web, and targets the elimination of phishing through its identification products. The company, headquartered in Haguenau, France, has raised $600,000 in total funding. Thoorens holds a majority stake of 51% in the company.

Prior to Vaultys, Thoorens co-founded ARK Ecosystem in October 2016, an open-source, TypeScript-based layer-1 blockchain protocol, where he served first as Co-founder and Head of Development, then as Co-founder and CEO until June 2021. He also served as a Core Developer at Lisk from May to August 2016, contributing to blockchain network stabilisation and user interface improvements. Between September 2014 and March 2022, he co-founded Donatio, where he led development of accounting management software for donations. Earlier, he was CEO at Sigmeus from June 2014 to January 2017. Thoorens is a graduate of Télécom SudParis.

Frédéric Dalibard is Chairman/CEO at Hexarq, a 100% subsidiary of BPCE SA created in 2024, and Global Head of Blockchain at Groupe BPCE. Hexarq is licensed by the Autorité des Marchés Financiers as a Crypto-Assets Services Provider (CASP, number A2026-010) and registered with the ACPR as agent of Payment Service Provider. The entity offers custody, purchase/sale, exchange and transfer services for crypto-assets, distributed through the remote banking applications of Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Epargne. Dalibard also serves as board member and advisor to startups.

Prior to Hexarq, he held the role of Head of Digital for CIB and Global Blockchain Coordinator at Natixis, a position he took up in April 2015. In 2017, Global Finance Magazine recognised him in its Innovators list under the Trade Finance category, citing two initiatives: the Digital Trade Chain and a crude oil transaction in the US involving Trafigura and IBM. He also represented Natixis on the Steering Committee of the R3CEV Distributed Ledger Group Consortium from November 2015. In April 2026, Dalibard participated as a panellist at a Corporate Breakfast organised by The Big Whale in Paris, alongside representatives from Coinhouse and Banque Delubac, addressing the adoption of digital assets by French banks, fintechs and asset managers.

Frédéric Montagnon is Co-founder & Chairman of Arianee, a Paris-based protocol for tokenized digital product passports that enables direct connections between brands, physical products, and owners. He has held the Chairman of the Board role since August 2017. The Arianee Protocol is used by over 50 global brands including Breitling, Audemars Piguet, Moncler, and Richemont Group subsidiaries such as Panerai, IWC, Vacheron Constantin, and Jaeger-LeCoultre, with over 2.2 million physical products tokenized on-chain. The protocol supports circular business models, including repair, resale, rental, and remanufacturing services, with a focus on data sovereignty for both brands and consumers.

Prior to Arianee, Montagnon co-founded LGO, a cryptocurrency exchange targeting institutional investors, serving as Executive Chairman from June 2017 to December 2020, and subsequently as Président of LGO Europe until September 2021. Before that, he co-founded Secret Media Inc. in March 2014, a company focused on ad-blocking solutions for publishers, a role he held until July 2017. He is currently also an investor and advisor at p00ls, a Web3 platform, a position he has held since June 2021. The Arianee about page references earlier ventures including Overblog and Teads as part of his entrepreneurial background.

Gabriel Jaccard is CEO and Founding Partner at Arbitri, a Geneva-based consulting firm specialising in blockchain and AI, which he founded in September 2020. He holds a PhD in smart legal contracts and is a lecturer at the Haute Ecole de Gestion de Genève. He currently also serves as a legal associate at The Innolegal Firm, where he is completing his attorney traineeship. His academic and professional work focuses on contract law, corporate law, financial law, and intellectual property, with particular emphasis on smart contracts and blockchain regulation.

Jaccard is the founder and Vice-President of The Good Token Society, a Geneva-based non-profit association that brings together entrepreneurs, institutions, researchers, and civil society to address governance challenges raised by blockchain and artificial intelligence. He serves as President of the Board of Directors at Clevor SA, a Geneva-based company developing smart cards for the web3 environment. He has contributed to the Chambers and Partners Global Practice Guide on blockchain trends and developments in Switzerland, and has provided commentary on the Swiss regulatory framework for tokenisation, including the functional approach adopted by Swiss authorities and the role of FINMA's token classification categories. He has also contributed formal responses to Swiss regulatory consultations, including on the draft Lex Stablecoin legislation. Jaccard graduated from the University of Geneva.

Gabriel Thierry is an investigation journalist working as a freelance contributor across French and international media, with a specialisation in cybercrime, cybersecurity, and the intersection of digital technology with law enforcement and defence. He has published in Le Monde, Libération, L'Express, Le Canard Enchaîné, Marianne, Numerama, ZDNet.fr, Dalloz actualité, L'Essor de la gendarmerie, La Gazette des communes, Intelligence Online, La Lettre A, Le Télégramme, We Demain, and l'Usine Digitale, among others. At Le Monde, his work has included investigations into French hacker group ShinyHunters, McDonald's loyalty point fraud schemes, and a mass text message scam case brought to trial in France. He also contributes to LeMagIT on cybersecurity topics, with published pieces covering crypto-asset transaction obfuscation and cybersecurity industry developments.

Since September 2021, Thierry has edited and authored Pwned, a newsletter focused on cybercrime narratives including hacking and large-scale digital fraud. His freelance journalism career began in May 2017. He has also written on digital assets, with a bylined investigation into the Mt. Gox affair published via The Big Whale. Beyond digital and security topics, Thierry is the author of La Bière Bretonne (2017, Éditions du Coin de la rue), which received the Gourmand World Cookbook Award bronze medal in 2018, and co-authored the photographic work Dunkerque as well as Sur la route des bières du Nord-Pas-de-Calais. He studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Grenoble from 2006 to 2007.

Gaël Courrège is an Analyst at The Big Whale, where he focuses on decentralized finance. His work centers on DeFi research and analysis, with published pieces covering topics including decentralized stablecoins, DeFi lending markets, prediction markets, and yield-generating protocols such as Ethena, Aerodrome, Sky, and Maker. Prior to his current role, he has a background in design, marketing, and web projects.

Gajesh Naik is a Sr Software Engineer at Eigen Labs, where he works on EigenCloud. He began coding at age 7 using Scratch, progressing to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript. At age 10 he completed an internship at a multinational company where he built a chatbot. At 12 he completed the Google Foobar challenge in six hours. At 13 he entered blockchain development, taking on freelance work before launching Gaj Finance, a DeFi and NFT platform on Polygon that reached $7 million in total value locked within two months. He officially stepped away from that project in February 2023.

In April 2022 he joined Solana Labs as an intern. He subsequently launched Taksh, a gamified cross-chain yield aggregator, raising $1.3 million in pre-seed and seed funding before the project was acquired. He briefly worked with FTX on dApp development until the company went bankrupt in November 2022. After FTX, he contributed to Telegram Wallet as a Founding Software Engineer and also worked with Solana Labs and LayerZero Labs. He joined Eigen Labs in July 2023. His GitHub profile, active under the handle Gajesh2007 with 240 public repositories, shows recent contributions to Eigen Labs projects including agent-kit-templates, eigencloud-docs, eigencompute-containers, and ecloud. He holds certifications in Python from the University of Michigan, JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures from freeCodeCamp, Responsive Web Design from freeCodeCamp, and cloud architecture credentials from Qwiklabs, alongside Google Analytics certifications.

Gerjon Lagendijk is Venture Lead ID & Pay at ABN AMRO Bank N.V., a position he has held since January 2025. In this role, he leads ID & Pay, a pan-European payment and identity solution incubated within ABN AMRO. The product provides payment infrastructure, a central client and cash administration, and a one-stop-shop solution enabling non-bank financial platforms to process payments and hold cash in wallets, with embedded onboarding and KYC functionality including a reusable eID.

His current mandate sits within ABN AMRO's Strategy & Innovation department, specifically in the Digital Assets team. Prior to becoming Venture Lead, he served as Innovation Manager for ID & Pay from June to January 2025, and before that as Intrapreneur for the Personal Communication Channel (PCC) from October 2023 to June 2024, including a period as Venture Lead for that initiative. From January 2020 to October 2023, he worked as a Management Consultant in Innovation & Technology at ABN AMRO, supporting management decisions across strategy review, organisational design, and value assessments within and outside the IT domain. Before joining ABN AMRO, he was a Senior Consultant at Korn Ferry from May 2018 to December 2019, based in Amsterdam, where he worked within the Organisational Strategy practice on organisation design, effectiveness, and business and culture transformation. His total professional experience spans approximately 25 years. He holds a degree from RSM Erasmus University and is based in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Gerry Afentakis is Managing Director, Europe and Board Member of Zodia Custody (Europe) SA at Zodia Custody, roles he has held since January 2025 and March 2025 respectively. In his capacity as Director of European Operations, he has spoken publicly on Zodia Custody's positioning in digital asset custody, articulating the firm's rationale for separating custody from trading functions—a structure Standard Chartered designed in response to counterparty risk concerns illustrated by the collapse of FTX. Zodia Custody was established by Standard Chartered in 2020 and counts Northern Trust, Emirates NBD Bank, National Australia Bank, and SBI Holdings among its shareholders.

Prior to his current role, Afentakis served as Head of Europe and MENA Sales at Zodia Custody from June 2023 to January 2025. Before joining Zodia Custody, he was Head of Asset and Wealth Management, Europe at Matrixport from 2022. Earlier career positions include Chief Strategy Officer and Partner at EFA Invest from 2015 to 2020, Chief Operating Officer at NaRaYa from 2013 to 2015, and Head of Product Development at EFA Group from 2010. His stated professional background spans over 20 years in institutional sales strategy, with experience across digital assets, private credit, and Islamic finance. He has built and led teams and holds board-level governance experience across multiple jurisdictions, including exposure to FCA and CSSF regulatory frameworks. Afentakis attended Brown University and Harrow School.

Gilles Fedak is CEO and Co-Founder of iExec, a blockchain-based decentralized cloud computing platform built on Ethereum, which he co-founded in October 2016 alongside Haiwu He. iExec operates as a marketplace for computing resources, allowing users to monetize applications, datasets, and computing power over a decentralized network, while enabling developers to build web3 applications with end-to-end encryption to preserve data ownership and confidentiality. Fedak also serves on the Board of Directors at WiSEED, a European crowdfunding platform, a position he has held since June 2018, and has served as Deputy Director of Redchain Lab since April 2021, a joint research lab focused on scalability and privacy in decentralized marketplaces, created in partnership with the LIRIS lab at INSA/CNRS/University of Lyon and funded by the ANR.

Prior to co-founding iExec, Fedak worked as a Research Scientist at INRIA, based at LIP/ENS-Lyon, from September 2004 to October 2017, where he initiated the iExec project. His research focused on parallel and distributed computing, specifically the use of large, loosely coupled distributed computing infrastructures to support computationally demanding and data-intensive science. He co-authored approximately 90 academic papers, two of which received Best Paper Awards, and co-edited the Desktop Grid Computing Book with C. Cérin in 2012. In 2015, he received the Chinese Academy of Sciences PIFI Award. He was also a founding member of Adan, the French professional association for digital asset industry actors, from January 2020 to May 2021. Fedak holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Paris-Sud University (Paris XI), obtained in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution, completed in 2003, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego from 2003 to 2004.

Gillian Lynch is CEO of Europe at Gemini, a position she has held since April 2021, having joined the business to establish Gemini's European division. In that capacity, she led Gemini to obtain licensing as an Electronic Money Institution and secured registration as a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) under the Central Bank of Ireland, making Gemini the first crypto company to hold that registration with the CBI. She has overseen the exchange's expansion across European markets, including launches in France, Greece, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Czechia, Latvia, and Liechtenstein. She is an advocate for proactive engagement with regulators and has authored articles on Gemini's European regulatory and market expansion activity. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Master's in Business Studies, specialising in International Studies and Human Resources, both from University College Dublin.

Prior to Gemini, Lynch served as Chief Operating Officer and subsequently Chief Strategy Officer at Leveris, a Dublin-based fintech company building a cloud-based, non-legacy core banking platform, where she spent approximately two and a half years. Before that, she spent over a decade at Bank of Ireland, where her final role was Head of Retail Planning, a position she held from 2013 to 2019. Earlier in her career she worked at Post Office Financial and Travel Services, progressing from IT and Operations Manager to Head of IT over a four-year period.

Glenn Morgan is Digital Assets Practice Leader, Senior Vice President at Aon, based in San Diego, where he leads the firm's global strategy for the crypto sector and advises exchanges, custodians, asset managers, stablecoin issuers, DeFi and infrastructure providers on risk and insurance solutions. His coverage spans executive liability, cyber, tech E&O, and complex crypto exposures including custody, staking and smart contracts. He has been active in digital assets since 2013 and focused on crypto risks since 2017. He also contributes to Aon's thought leadership through media engagement, industry events and content development, and has supported innovation initiatives including Aon Growth Ventures' Web3 accelerator.

Prior to joining Aon in January 2022, Morgan launched and led the digital asset practice at Alliant Insurance Services, where he served as Crypto Digital Asset Practice Leader and Account Executive from May 2018 to January 2022. Before that, he was Assistant Vice President at Marsh from July 2014 to May 2018, supporting private equity and M&A clients. He holds a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) designation and an Associate in Risk Management (ARM) designation, both issued by The Institutes, along with a blockchain technologies certificate from MIT Sloan School of Management. He graduated from the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, where he served as President of the Insurance Society and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2013.

Gonzague Grandval is Co-Founder and CEO of SCEME, a regulated stablecoin infrastructure provider headquartered in Paris, with a presence in Luxembourg, which he co-founded in 2020. At SCEME, his stated role covers strategic oversight and the development of payment solutions. The company creates stablecoins — including token issuance and governance frameworks — and operates a stablecoin management and monitoring platform.

In January 2024, Grandval co-founded QWRTX, a Web3 start-up studio. As of December 2025, he is also a co-founder of DROPORA. He serves as a board advisor to Woorton, a regulated algorithmic trading desk operating in the digital asset liquidity space, a role he has held since 2018. Between January 2024 and July 2025, he was an investor in Usual, a multi-chain infrastructure project focused on tokenised real-world assets and stablecoins. He was president of SATX from September 2022 and stepped back from the role of CEO at CHAINFORGE in June 2024, according to French corporate records. He is also identified as a co-founder of Paymium. His total professional experience is stated as 27 years.

Grant Everist is an Analyst at The Big Whale, based in Brooklyn, New York. His work focuses on stablecoins and decentralized finance, and he has authored articles on digital monetary policy and asset tokenization. Published pieces associated with him include coverage of listed crypto companies in North America and analysis of governance structures in crypto projects.

Grégory Raymond is Head of Research and co-founder of The Big Whale. A specialist at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets, he has been covering the regulatory, institutional and technological developments of the sector since 2017 for an audience of decision-makers: ,banks, asset managers and fintechs. He is also the author of Bitcoin & Cryptos: L'enjeu du siècle (Talent Éditions, 2025), a book built around interviews with key figures from the ecosystem.

Guilhem Chaumont is Co-Founder & CEO of Flowdesk, a full-service digital asset trading and technology firm he co-founded in Paris in 2020 alongside Paul Bugnot. At Flowdesk, he leads the development of liquidity technology for digitalized financial markets, with the firm offering market making, OTC trading, and treasury management services to institutional clients including foundations, token issuers, and exchanges. Chaumont has stated his aim as bridging blockchain technology and mainstream adoption, and Flowdesk has built a trading infrastructure integrating more than 140 centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Prior to Flowdesk, Chaumont co-founded X-Network in 2018, where he served as CEO until 2021, developing privacy-centric technologies for Web3. Before that, he was a Trader on the Global Financial Resources Management Team at HSBC from December 2016 to July 2018, having joined as a Trading Analyst Intern six months earlier. He has been active in cryptocurrency trading since 2016 and began mining in late 2017. Earlier in his career, he worked as a student engineer at CEA — Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives from 2012 to 2015. Chaumont holds a Master's degree in International Finance from HEC Paris and a Master's degree in Engineering from École Centrale de Lyon.

Guillaume Chatain is Global Head of Institutional Sales at Keyrock, a position he has held since June 2025 and is based in Abu Dhabi. Prior to joining Keyrock, he served as Chief Revenue Officer at Societe Generale – FORGE, the crypto and tokenisation subsidiary of Société Générale, from September 2024 to June 2025, having initially joined as Head of Sales in February 2024. At SG-FORGE, his stated focus on joining was building partnerships across the broader bank and accelerating distribution of the subsidiary's stablecoin, the CoinVertible (EURCV), and its tokenised products.

Before SG-FORGE, Chatain spent three years at Coinbase as Head of Institutional Sales for EMEA and APAC, a role he held from February 2021 to February 2024. During that period he also built and led Coinbase's Solution Architecture team between February 2021 and January 2023. Earlier in his career he was Managing Director and Head of Equities for Asia at JP Morgan, where he worked from 2007 to 2017. He also founded and led a Techstars and VC-backed B2B SaaS fintech startup. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and is a former CFA Charterholder.

Guillaume Leti is CEO and Co-founder at Carbonable, a carbon portfolio management platform he co-founded in November 2021. At Carbonable, he leads the development of technology for planning, managing, and reporting carbon contributions, with a focus on transparency and auditability in nature-based decarbonization projects. He has spoken at the Corporate Investments into Forestry and Biodiversity (CIFB) conference in London, addressing topics including technology applications in quantifying carbon results and the role of nature in net zero. He is also a Partner at 50 Partners, a venture capital firm, a role he has held since March 2024, and an Advisor at Cauri Money since February 2025. He was a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Prior to Carbonable, Leti served as a Senior Product Consultant for a technology and media company from January 2019 to May 2022, covering market research, competitive analysis, and product definition. He was Head of Product at BroadbandTV (BBTV) from November 2016 to January 2019, leading the company's flagship product. Before that, he worked as a Producer and Product Owner at Stradigi AI from March 2015 to October 2016, and as a Key Account and Project Manager at Triton Digital from March 2013 to March 2015. He co-founded SEXTAN GROUP in May 2020, where he helped develop IMPACTr, a management platform for non-profits, and co-founded Art4Humans in February 2019, an organisation focused on promoting human rights through art. He holds an MBA from HEC Montréal and an engineering degree from Grenoble INP - UGA.

Guillaume Tenant de La Tour is a Board Member at ADI Foundation, an Abu Dhabi-based nonprofit building sovereign-grade blockchain infrastructure to modernize public systems in the UAE and beyond, a position he has held since April 2025. He also serves as Principal at Pacage, an investment and advisory firm he has led since 2006.

Prior to joining the ADI Foundation board, Tenant de La Tour spent four years at Groupe Crédit Agricole, where he served as Head of Group Innovation, Digital Transformation and IT. From 2022, his role shifted to Group Digital Assets Head and Design Authority Leader, in which capacity he led the group's digital assets strategy. Earlier work at the bank included projects spanning banking-as-a-service, KYC, payments, and digital transformation. Before Crédit Agricole, he was Founder and CEO of BlueFox.io from 2016 to 2020, and served as a Member of the Board of Advisors at Captivate, LLC from 2021 to 2023. His LinkedIn profile describes him as a results-driven CEO with expertise in digital transformation across finance and technology, with approximately 29 years of total professional experience.

Guy de Leusse is Group Deputy COO at ODDO BHF, a position he has held since July 2022. He is the public face of ODDO BHF's EUROD initiative, a euro-denominated stablecoin the Franco-German bank launched after more than two years of development. In an interview on the project, he explained that ODDO BHF identified stablecoins as the most accessible entry point into the digital asset space and chose to focus on the euro specifically, citing the near-absence of a euro stablecoin market as a strategic opportunity, in contrast to the saturated dollar stablecoin market. The stated rationale was to establish relationships with exchanges, brokers, market makers, and asset managers — counterparties with which ODDO BHF had no existing ties. EUROD's design incorporates decentralised finance, with holders intended to be able to generate on-chain returns. In February 2026, de Leusse participated as a panellist at a breakfast event co-organised by The Big Whale and Morpho at ODDO BHF in Paris, focused on stablecoins and DeFi in institutional strategy.

Prior to his current role, de Leusse served as COO of Capital Management at ODDO BHF from February 2011 to July 2025, overseeing middle office, reporting, management control, and IT teams across asset management, private banking, and securities services, as well as regulatory projects including MIF2, FATCA, AIFM, and related frameworks. Before that, he directed Oddo Services from April 2003 to February 2011, building back-office and IT teams and creating service offerings for asset managers and private banks in France. He held a compliance and risk control role at ODDO BHF from April 1994 to April 2003, and prior to joining the group worked as an auditor at Euronext from July 1990 to April 1994. He holds a Master in Business Administration with a focus on Finance and Financial Management Services from CNAM, completed in 1991.

Haseeb Qureshi is Managing Partner at Dragonfly, a global cryptocurrency investment fund, a position he has held since January 2019. Dragonfly has invested in more than 150 crypto companies. Qureshi co-founded the firm with Bo Feng, and operates from San Francisco, California.

Prior to Dragonfly, Qureshi was a General Partner at MetaStable Capital, where he led early investments in projects including Avalanche, NEAR Protocol, Algorand, and Starkware. Before moving into investment, he worked as a blockchain engineer at Earn.com, which was subsequently acquired by Coinbase, and before that as a software engineer at Airbnb focused on payments fraud. He served as Director of Product at App Academy, where he instructed students across multiple cohorts. He has taught a course on Web3 Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley and previously taught a course on cryptocurrencies for programmers at the Bradfield School of Computer Science. Qureshi entered the technology sector after a career as a professional poker player: he began playing at 16 with $50, reached a net worth exceeding $1 million by 19, and retired from poker permanently at 21, donating approximately half a million dollars he had accumulated. He subsequently wrote a book, How to Be a Poker Player: The Philosophy of Poker, which became a bestseller. He holds a Bachelor's degree in English with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed full-stack web development training at App Academy. Qureshi has publicly committed to donating 33% of his pre-tax income annually through Founders Pledge.

Haytham Mousa is VP, Digital Assets & Commodities Product Strategy, iShares EMEA at BlackRock, based in London, a role he took up in November 2025. His mandate sits within the iShares EMEA product function, covering digital assets and commodities product strategy.

Prior to joining BlackRock, Mousa spent over six years at the Bank of England in London, where he held two successive roles: Senior Analyst in Valuation and Market Intelligence from March 2019, and then Manager in Investment Banks Analysis and Supervision and Market Intelligence from May 2021 until October 2025. Before that, he was a Senior Consultant in Financial Markets Technology at IHS Markit from September 2015 to March 2019. Earlier in his career he worked briefly as an Economic Analyst at The Portland Trust and as a Financial Executive at Paltel, the Palestinian telecommunications company. No educational background is referenced in the available source material.

Hong Kim is Co-founder & CTO at Bitwise Asset Management, where he has been building the firm's technical infrastructure since co-founding the company in November 2016. He also serves as a Board Director. His mandate centres on bridging crypto and traditional finance through engineering and backend systems architecture.

In 2025, Bitwise launched its first on-chain vault products, an initiative enabled by a US regulatory environment willing to allow firms to build and iterate rather than wait for complete rule clarity. Kim participated as a speaker at The Big Whale's institutional breakfast during EthCC in March 2026, where the discussion covered on-chain finance, privacy as a barrier to institutional adoption, and the case for public blockchains with privacy layers over permissioned ledgers. Prior to co-founding Bitwise, Kim served as a Software Security Researcher in the Republic of Korea Army from May 2011 to April 2013, where he worked on cybersecurity testing infrastructure. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Hubert de Vauplane is a Partner, Financial Services at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, advising clients on EU and French banking and investment services law, regulatory matters, asset management and funds, insurance investment regulations, financial and securities litigation, e-money and payment services, and financial institution mergers and acquisitions. He provides legal counsel on fintech, blockchain, and cryptocurrency assets, and is authorized before the French Financial Market Supervisory Authority (AMF), the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. He chairs the FinTech section at Paris Europlace and is a member of the Legal High Committee for Financial Markets of Paris. He also holds membership in the Panel of Recognized International Markets Experts in Finance (PRIME) and previously served on the Financial Markets Law Committee in London from 2012 to 2019.

Prior to joining Morgan Lewis in January 2025, de Vauplane co-led the alternative investment management practice in the Paris office of another law firm. Earlier in his career, he served as Group General Counsel, Legal and Compliance at Crédit Agricole from January 2009, and before that as Global Legal Director of Crédit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank from 2007. He previously held the position of Legal Director for Corporate & Investment Banking at BNP Paribas from 2002. Earlier roles included seven years at stockbroker Oddo & Cie, first as a derivatives trader and then as head of the legal department, and a position at Banques Populaires as a financial lawyer. He is a professor of international banking and financial law at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences. Since 2001, he has written the "La finance décryptée par le droit" blog in Alternatives Économiques and contributes regularly to the Revue Banque. His book Traité de droit des marchés financiers received an award from the French Academy of Political Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in law from Université de Paris II Panthéon-Assas (1991).

Hugo Finkelstein is the founder and CEO of Rise, a company specializing in international talent management and payroll. A graduate of Babson College, he works to make work without borders a reality.

Hugo Panczak is Head of Agentic AI at The Big Whale, a position he has held since September 2024, based in Paris. He previously served as Chief of Staff at the same organization from May 2023 to December 2024. In his current role, he sits within General Management and oversees both crypto and operational functions for the media company.

Panczak is also CEO of White Loop Capital, a private investment firm focused on crypto-assets, which he co-founded in November 2021 and has led since. He has additionally held a private investor position at Ledger since July 2023. Earlier in his career, he spent two months as Product Manager at DeepSquare in 2022, where he worked with a team of four to build an AI tool identifying altcoins likely to outperform Bitcoin using social sentiment and on-chain data. The Big Whale's own profile describes him as an analyst and author specializing in macroeconomics and decentralized finance, with a focus on publishing reports and analyses on blockchain and DeFi.

Huy Nguyen Trieu serves as Council Member at ADI Foundation, a blockchain infrastructure initiative launched in Abu Dhabi that is developing a dirham-backed stablecoin designed as an internationally replicable model for sovereign digital currency issuance. In this capacity, he has represented the Foundation publicly, including speaking to its strategic ambitions around digital sovereignty, cross-border payments, and regulated stablecoin frameworks. The Foundation's infrastructure, built on Ethereum, reached mainnet in 2025, alongside announced collaborations with Franklin Templeton, Mastercard, and BlackRock. The dirham stablecoin, led by IHC and FAB, was described as forthcoming at that time. Nguyen Trieu's stated position on stablecoins is that a regulated intermediate model — between private stablecoins and full CBDCs — is necessary to prevent less transparent alternatives from establishing themselves by default in global markets.

Beyond ADI Foundation, Nguyen Trieu is co-founder and CEO of The Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE), a fintech education platform with operations in London, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi, built around certifications covering fintech, artificial intelligence in finance, open banking, and blockchain. He is also a Venture Partner at Mundi Ventures, an insurtech fund, and holds an entrepreneurship expert role at Oxford. Earlier in his career he served as Managing Director at Citi, where he worked with European insurance companies, pension funds, and international banks. He also served as founding partner of a fintech accelerator in Asia and as an industry fellow at Imperial College. He is the author of The AI-fication of Jobs.

Iain Monk is Director, Digital Asset Custody at BNY, a position he has held since November 2025. His focus is on creating and designing digital asset propositions, with a particular interest in the mainstream adoption of stablecoins for cross-border payments. His work involves deep analysis of payment flows and identifying opportunities to improve efficiency in how money moves across borders.

Prior to BNY, Monk held a product and strategy role at ClearBank, where he developed strategies, business cases, and led partnership and business development initiatives around digital asset technology and its revenue opportunities. Before that, he worked at Ripple, where he contributed to the development of the Standard RippleNet Payment Object (SRPO), a global data standard for payments built in collaboration with RippleNet participants and informed by data from over 100 payment schemes worldwide. Alongside his role at BNY, Monk is currently serving as Stablecoin Product and Operations advisor at Haycen, a multi-currency stablecoin platform focused on B2B global trade, and is advising independently on digital asset strategy for a cross-border payments start-up and a stablecoin start-up. His total professional experience spans approximately 18 years. No educational details are available in the source content.

Ian Rogers is Chief Human Agency Officer at Ledger, a role created in April 2026 to lead the company's AI initiatives and ensure that autonomous AI agents do not remove individual control over sensitive actions including logins, identities, money, and credentials. His mandate centres on maintaining human oversight through a hardware root of trust, requiring users to authorise important agent-proposed actions on a Ledger device. Prior to this appointment, Rogers served as Chief Experience Officer at Ledger from 2020, a period during which the company introduced secure touchscreen devices. He joined Ledger in December 2020 from LVMH, where he had served as Chief Digital Officer. Before LVMH, he was CEO of Beats Music and CEO of Top Spin Media.

In his CXO capacity, Rogers participated in Ledger's podcast series, including episodes covering NFTs and the Ledger Stax hardware wallet. In his current role, he is responsible for delivering the components of Ledger's 2026 AI Security Roadmap, which includes the Ledger Device Management Kit—available at the time of the announcement—as well as planned elements covering hardware-based agent identities, an agent policy and intent review framework, and a proof-of-human system. The identity layer is intended to build on Ledger's existing Keyring Protocol.

Ingrid-Mery Haziot is an Associate Founder at Avant-Garde Avocats, a Paris-based European business law firm she has led since March 2020, specialising in intellectual property law across the arts, entertainment, culture, and technology sectors. Her practice covers IP and IT law, with a focus on assisting start-ups in blockchain and AI, and providing patent and copyright solutions to clients in creative and cultural industries.

Haziot has been active in the Web3 legal space since 2018, when she joined the French Blockchain Professional Federation (FFPB) as a member contributing to its blockchain and metaverse strategic committees. She is an active member of the French AFNOR Committee for Blockchain ISO standardisation and contributed to the AFNOR and FFPB white paper on NFT concepts and technological standards. She is co-founder of NFT Factory, established in 2022 as a Paris-based collective dedicated to NFTs, where she also serves on the investor club selection committee. Since 2021, she has served as the legal voice on the NFT Morning podcast, producing monthly legal commentary. She has participated in hearings for the CSPLA report on copyright and non-fungible tokens, and spoken at the APRAM/MEDEF conference on NFTs, the Metaverse, and intellectual property. She teaches media, music, and publishing law to professionals and is a member of the Web3 trainer group NonFungibleSpeaker. She holds board membership at AFPIDA and is a member of APRAM and Art and Law. Haziot holds two Masters II degrees in intellectual property law and business law (1992), an LLM in Anglo-American business law (2017), and two university diplomas in mediation law (2015) and digital law (2018).

James Maxfield is Head of Trading EU at Gemini, based in Dublin, Ireland. He is responsible for managing the spot and derivatives trading portfolio during European hours, handling trade flow and executing client orders using algorithms to optimise P&L and reduce slippage. He also assists in the development, backtesting, and implementation of systematic trading strategies using Python, and compiles daily and weekly market commentary distributed to institutional and retail clients. In November 2025, he participated as a panellist at a breakfast event hosted by The Big Whale in Paris, in partnership with Gemini, focused on the institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies. The panel addressed topics including collateral management, on-chain repo, and the integration of stablecoins into banking workflows.

Prior to Gemini, Maxfield held trading and operations roles at Susquehanna International Group (SIG) in Dublin. From December 2020 to August 2021, he worked as a Trader, pricing and trading financial products including futures, CFDs, swaps, and FX forwards, and applied Python and SQL to automate desk processes. Before that, from August 2018 to December 2020, he completed SIG's Trading Operations Analyst Graduate programme, rotating through functions including risk, options trade support, ETF trade support, ETF pricing, stock loan, and corporate actions. He holds a degree from the University of Limerick and certifications in finance and data analysis.

James Watters is Assistant Vice President – Digital Assets at Barclays, based in London, a position he has held since January 2025. Prior to this role, he worked within Barclays as an Analyst in Fintech FX Sales from July 2023 to January 2025, and completed a Global Markets Summer Analyst internship at the bank in 2022. His skills, as listed on his profile, include FX sales, digital assets, fintech, and global markets.

Watters holds a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences, specialising in Computer Science and Economics (2:1, 68%), from Durham University, where he studied from 2020 to 2023. Prior to university, he attended Radley College, where he achieved A* grades in Maths and Economics, and A grades in Further Maths and Geography.

Jamy Malaigre, a payment innovation expert, has been advising executives at Swift for over 10 years. Winner of several challenges in finance and entrepreneurship, he is a graduate of INSEAD.

Jan Gorzny is Co-Founder at Zircuit, a Layer 2 blockchain infrastructure project built on Ethereum focused on zero-knowledge proof systems and transaction security. Zircuit's architecture incorporates an AI model designed to detect and block fraudulent transactions, with the stated goal of attracting institutional users by raising the security standards of Layer 2 infrastructure. Gorzny co-founded the project in June 2022, and it launched on Ethereum in November 2023.

Prior to founding Zircuit, Gorzny worked at Quantstamp, a blockchain security firm, from 2018 to 2023. He joined as a Blockchain Researcher and later became Head of L2 Scaling, focusing on infrastructure and scaling-related research. He is also a co-author of Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, a technical reference covering blockchain function, smart contract vulnerabilities, and development best practices. His academic research has covered algorithmic graph theory, fixed-parameter tractability, formal methods, and proof compression. He holds a PhD in algorithms and complexity from the University of Waterloo (2022), an MSc in algorithmic graph theory from the University of Victoria (2013–2015), an MSc in model-driven software engineering from the University of Toronto (2011–2013), and a Bachelor of Mathematics in computer science, combinatorics, and optimization from the University of Waterloo (2007–2011).

Jan-Oliver Sell is Chief Executive Officer of Qivalis, an Amsterdam-domiciled euro stablecoin issuer founded as a joint venture by a consortium of major European banks including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, Danske Bank, DekaBank, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB, and Banca Sella. Qivalis is pursuing authorization from the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) as an Electronic Money Institution under MiCAR, with a commercial launch of its euro stablecoin targeted for the second half of 2026. The company's mandate is to build a regulated interface between the euro and on-chain financial infrastructure, positioning a MiCA-compliant, fully backed euro stablecoin for use at European and international scale.

Prior to Qivalis, Sell served as Managing Director of Coinbase Germany from November 2022 to December 2024, where he secured the first crypto custody license issued by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). He subsequently held a brief role covering Coinbase Germany into early 2025, then served as COO at Universal Everything GmbH, a company supporting the LUKSO blockchain, from April to December 2025. He is currently also a Venture Partner at Angel Invest, an early-stage fund focused on European technology startups, where he invests in pre-seed and seed rounds with a focus on blockchain and Web3. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Binance and iFunded, and spent 18 years in senior positions within the asset management sector in the City of London.

Jean-Baptiste Graftieaux is Senior Country Director at Coinbase Luxembourg, appointed on 8 October 2025. In this role, he leads Coinbase's MiCA hub in Luxembourg, which serves as the company's central node for implementing the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation framework across the European Union. Coinbase obtained its MiCA licence in Luxembourg earlier in 2025, and the Luxembourg entity constitutes the American group's primary regulatory and operational base in Europe.

Prior to joining Coinbase, Graftieaux was Global CEO of Bitstamp, one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges, which he led through its sale to Robinhood, completed in 2025. During his tenure at Bitstamp, he oversaw the platform's institutional business development and obtained a MiFID licence. He also pursued expansion into derivatives and explored tokenisation. Before Bitstamp, he held senior positions at eBay Europe, where he oversaw regulatory operations and board governance, and at PayPal, where he served as Executive and EMEA Chief Compliance Officer. He is a graduate of HEC Paris. He was born on 26 September 1977 in Charleville-Mézières, France, and holds French nationality.

Jean-Christophe Liaubet is Innovation Leader and Member of the Executive Committee at EY France, a position he assumed on 1 January 2026. He also holds the role of Europe West AI Leader for Private Equity. In these capacities, he works with clients on the definition, execution, and valuation of transformation strategies through innovation, with a dual expertise spanning financial markets and technology, including AI, blockchain, digital assets, and immersive technologies.

Liaubet joined EY through the acquisition of Fabernovel, where he served as Managing Partner. Prior to that, he was a partner at Exane BNP Paribas. At EY, he has served as consulting leader for the entrepreneur market in Île-de-France. He maintains close ties with innovation communities and has been active in public discourse on technology's role in business transformation, including a contribution to VivaTech 2026 under EY's banner. He holds a degree from ESCP Business School, graduated in 1998.

Jean-Marc Stenger is Chief Executive Officer of Societe Generale - Forge, the digital asset subsidiary of Societe Generale, which he founded in 2018. SG-Forge provides institutional issuers and investors with services to issue and manage financial products on public blockchains, and is the issuer of CoinVertible (EURCV), a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin. Stenger's current focus includes expanding EURCV's distribution through partnerships with exchanges, market makers, and brokers, with Bitstamp among the active distribution partners. His stated strategy for the stablecoin is to build scale through intermediary partnerships rather than direct market entry, with efforts currently concentrated on European partners. He has identified bond and debt market tokenisation as the near-term priority use case for public blockchain deployment, distinguishing it from more illiquid asset classes such as real estate and private equity, which he views as facing too many unresolved technical and regulatory constraints in the short term.

Stenger joined Societe Generale in 2000 as a financial analyst based in Frankfurt. In 2003, he moved to Lyxor Asset Management, a Societe Generale subsidiary, where he served in portfolio management roles before being appointed Chief Investment Officer in 2013, a position he held until leaving to create SG-Forge. At Lyxor, he contributed to the firm's expansion across Europe, the US, Japan, and the Middle East, working with pension plans and sovereign wealth funds. He is a member of the consultative commission of the French Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) and of the ECB New Technologies for Wholesale Settlement Contact Group on Digital Euro. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Arts et Métiers ParisTech (ENSAM).

Jean-Marie Mognetti is Co-Founder, President and CEO of CoinShares, a digital asset manager he co-founded in 2013 and has led to become Europe's largest digital asset manager by ETP market share. CoinShares is the world's fourth-largest digital asset ETP manager, holding the number one position in Europe with approximately 34% market share. The firm launched the world's first Bitcoin ETP in 2015 and has built a suite of regulated investment products spanning ETPs, active strategies, and on-chain asset management. Mognetti's background is rooted in quantitative finance and traditional capital markets.

Under his leadership, CoinShares has operated without venture capital funding since its 2014 launch, growing instead from existing revenues. The firm has concentrated on asset management as its core activity, including a crypto ETP business, proprietary trading — which has accounted for close to 50% of revenues — and a hedge fund solutions business. In 2014, CoinShares launched a regulated private fund on Bitcoin, the Global Advisor Bitcoin Investment Fund, which was subsequently closed in 2017. Mognetti has described the firm's strategy as deliberately focused on containing expansion to what revenue growth supports. CoinShares is publicly listed on Nasdaq Stockholm under the ticker CS and on the OTCQX under the ticker CNSRF, and is regulated in Jersey, France, and the United States.

Jean Meyer is Co-Founder and CEO of Deblock, a French crypto-banking platform that combines a non-custodial crypto wallet with a traditional bank account. He co-founded the company in October 2022 and leads both product and overall strategy. Deblock has raised a total of €56 million since founding, including a €30 million Series A in November 2025 led by Speedinvest, with participation from CommerzVentures, Latitude, 20VC, Headline, Chalfen Ventures, and Kraken Ventures. The Series A will fund product development — including collateral requirements for card programs and new liquidity-dependent products — as well as marketing and geographic expansion, beginning with a planned launch in Germany and Austria in Q1 2026. Meyer has stated that Deblock built its entire technical infrastructure in-house, including KYC, core banking, and payment rails, a process that took two years of development.

Prior to founding Deblock, Meyer was Head of Crypto at Revolut, a role he held from September 2021 to April 2022. Before Revolut, he founded Wanted, a talent compensation platform that was acquired by Revolut, and Once Dating, a dating application in Europe that was acquired in December 2020. Earlier roles include VP of Engineering at Context Labs, Founder and CPO of datemyschool, and software engineering positions at BNP Paribas and AXA Group Solutions. Meyer holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Master of Engineering in Computer Science from Université de Technologie.

Jean-Michel Pailhon is a Web3 entrepreneur and co-founder of NFT Factory, an organisation focused on bringing digital art to mainstream audiences. He is also a strategic advisor at NFTPriceFloor and a professional NFT investor at Grail Capital.

Pailhon spent more than ten years in traditional finance, holding positions at Euronext (the Paris stock exchange) and the New York Stock Exchange, where his work spanned equity research, strategy, M&A, and IPO. He entered the blockchain space in 2015. In 2016 and 2017, he served as an advisor to capital market technology firms, venture capital funds, and France FinTech, the French Association of Fintech. He is a lecturer in finance at ESSEC Business School and Pantheon Assas University in France. In April 2023, he spoke at an Institut Choiseul Club Innovation event on Web3, where he described the technology as a return to the original decentralised vision of the internet.

Jenni Himberg-Wild is a Managing Director at HSBC covering the fintech sector across EMEA. With around two decades of experience in corporate and transaction banking, she previously served as Managing Director, Head of Financial Institutions & Fintech Europe at Barclays. She is a regular speaker at industry events such as Money20/20 Europe and PAY360.