People

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.

Ilja Tomilin is a Key Account Manager at Tangany, a Munich-based, BaFin-regulated fintech providing B2B digital-asset custody and wallet infrastructure for cryptocurrencies, tokenized securities and NFTs, as well as a crypto securities registry. He joined the company in 2022 and works with corporate clients adopting blockchain-based custody solutions.

Tomilin spent roughly a decade in the automotive industry before moving into fintech, holding roles at BMW and BMW M, and earlier working in sports player-tracking operations for clients across Europe. He is based in Munich.

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).

Ivan de Lastours is Blockchain & Crypto Lead at Bpifrance, driving blockchain/crypto strategy across startup financing and direct/indirect investments in crypto companies and funds, including Bpifrance's pioneering token investment strategy. A Solidity developer with a CS engineering background.

James Burrow is an Associate with experience in finance and technology sectors, currently involved in roles related to sustainable finance and energy storage research.

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 Lebbe is a digital assets and blockchain lead at ING, serving as Initiative Lead for Blockchain International Payments and an ING project lead on the USC/Fnality settlement initiative. With over a decade in corporate banking and treasury, he holds a master's in International Business Economics from KU Leuven.

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.

Jeff Wang is Senior Manager and Expert with leadership experience in finance and technology sectors, currently serving as President of New Enterprise at Cognition, driving innovation and growth in tech-driven business ventures.

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.

Jenny Johnson is President and CEO of Franklin Templeton, a global investment management firm managing ~$1.5 trillion in assets. A third-generation leader of the family-founded firm, she joined in 1988, became COO in 2010, President in 2016, and CEO in 2020. She has expanded the firm through acquisitions including Legg Mason, Lexington Partners and Putnam Investments.

Jeremy Allaire is Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Circle, where he is responsible for strategy, vision and operating execution. Circle is the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), a fully-reserved, regulated dollar-backed stablecoin. Allaire launched USDC in the United States and has overseen its growth to a market capitalisation exceeding $26 billion and more than $800 billion in cumulative transaction volume across global blockchain networks. He also led the launch of Euro Coin, a euro-pegged stablecoin released in June 2022, replicating the compliance framework developed for USDC. He has provided expert testimony on digital assets and monetary policy before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the US Senate Banking Committee, and has been named to the International Monetary Fund High-Level Advisory Group on FinTech. In 2026 he was named to the TIME100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Prior to founding Circle in 2013, Allaire founded Brightcove, a cloud-based online video platform, where he served as CEO from 2004 until 2013 following a successful IPO in early 2012. Before Brightcove, he served as a technologist and entrepreneur-in-residence at General Catalyst. Earlier, he co-founded Allaire Corporation with his brother JJ Allaire in 1995, serving as CTO; the company had an IPO in January 1999 and was acquired by Macromedia in 2001. Following the acquisition, he served as CTO of Macromedia. Allaire holds a BA in political science and philosophy with a concentration in economics from Macalester College, which he attended from 1989 to 1993.

Jérôme de Tychey is Founder & CEO of Cometh, a Paris-based company building products and infrastructure for onchain finance. He also serves as President of Ethereum France, a French non-profit supporting the Ethereum ecosystem, and is the organiser of EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference), held in Paris and Cannes. He holds an additional position as Associate Professor of Economics at Le Cnam.

Under his leadership, Cometh obtained MiCA approval from the French regulator AMF, making it, according to de Tychey, the first player authorised to bring customers onto DeFi while offering asset custody. The AMF authorisation covers the custody and administration of cryptoassets on behalf of customers; Cometh is additionally in the process of becoming an electronic money institution, which will allow it to manage fiat on-ramp directly without third-party intermediaries. Cometh previously held an enhanced PSAN (Service Provider on Digital Assets) registration and has worked with clients including LVMH, Gnosis, and Worldcoin. The company's current focus is cash flow optimisation for businesses using DeFi, offering an alternative to traditional banking instruments such as term deposits and savings accounts. De Tychey has stated that fewer than ten French companies obtained MiCA approval in France during the transition period. He is a graduate of ENS Cachan.

Jérôme Prigent serves as Managing Director and local decision-making authority for BCB Group's Europe division, appointed in 2023. He oversees regulatory compliance with French and EU regulations while driving regional growth.

Jesse Pollak is Head of Base and Coinbase Wallet at Coinbase and a member of the company's executive team, a position he assumed in October 2024. He leads two product lines: Base, a decentralized Ethereum Layer 2 network designed to provide a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly environment for building on-chain applications, and Coinbase Wallet, a non-custodial wallet product. He also holds the title of Vice President of Engineering at Coinbase.

Pollak created Base in August 2022 and led its mainnet launch in August 2023. In the second quarter of 2024, Base recorded the most transaction fees among Ethereum Layer 2 networks, collecting nearly 12,000 ETH. Pollak has stated that Base does not intend to attract developers through a governance token, citing that model as inefficient. Prior to his current role, he served as Head of Protocols at Coinbase from September 2021, leading protocol strategy and integration across the company's products. Before that, he held consumer and retail engineering leadership roles at Coinbase from 2017 through mid-2021, during which time he managed teams building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet, growing the engineering organization to approximately 200 people. He joined Coinbase in 2017 following the company's acquisition of Clef, a passwordless and two-factor authentication startup he co-founded. Earlier in his career, he held an engineering role at BuzzFeed. Pollak earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Pomona College, where he was involved in varsity soccer, Pomona Ventures, and the Hack! organization. He previously attended Sidwell Friends School.

Dr. Jez Mohideen is Co-Founder and CEO of Laser Digital, Nomura's digital-asset subsidiary. He was previously Nomura's Chief Digital Officer and Co-Head of Global Markets EMEA, and built systematic AI/ML trading at Brevan Howard over a 20+ year macro career. A founding member of custodian Komainu, he holds a PhD from Imperial College London.

Jim Dear is Digital Assets Vice President at BlackRock, a position he assumed in July 2025. Prior to moving into digital assets, he served as Derivatives Vice President at BlackRock from January 2023 to July 2025, and before that as a Derivatives Associate from June 2016 to January 2023, giving him close to nine years of derivatives experience within the firm's Finance & Accounting function.

Before joining BlackRock, Dear spent approximately four and a half years at J.P. Morgan across several roles. As an External Reporting Analyst in the Corporate & Investment Bank from January 2013 to June 2016, he managed more than 300 Regulation W transactions with an exposure of $20 billion across 24 groups, liaised with Corporate Treasury to monitor a $25 billion Regulation W allocation, and approved an estimated $500 million of trades daily for Regulation K compliance. Earlier at J.P. Morgan, he worked as a Tax Settlements Consultant monitoring interest payments on cash collateral globally, and as a Repurchase Analyst managing margin calls and collateral compliance. He is based in West Chester, Pennsylvania. No educational background is stated in the available source material.

Jim Ferraioli is Director of Digital Currencies Research and Strategy at Charles Schwab, based within the Schwab Center for Financial Research. He is primarily responsible for research related to digital asset investing, along with client education, market analysis, and reporting.

Prior to joining Schwab in 2025, Ferraioli spent more than a decade at Morgan Stanley, where he held roles as a mid-cap equity portfolio manager and cryptocurrency strategist, as well as positions focused on equity trading and financial advisory. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an MBA from Fordham University, and a B.A. from Seton Hall University. He is also a Chartered Market Technician® (CMT).

Joaquín Sastre Ibáñez is Chief Revenue Officer at Boerse Stuttgart Digital, a position he assumed on 1 January 2024 as a member of the management team. In this role, he oversees institutional business, strategic partnerships, and sales activities, with the objective of positioning Boerse Stuttgart Digital as a regulated infrastructure partner for financial institutions in Europe operating in cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Boerse Stuttgart Digital bundles business solutions across brokerage, exchange, and custody.

Before joining Boerse Stuttgart Digital, Sastre Ibáñez served as Managing Director at BitGo, where he was responsible for operating and expanding the business across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. He assisted large European financial institutions in their digital assets activities, and his contributions were a factor in several of BitGo's funding milestones. Prior to BitGo, he entered the digital asset space in 2017 at Xapo, where he was involved in establishing a regulated institutional crypto custodian and an OTC trading services provider. He was 32 years old at the time of his appointment to Boerse Stuttgart Digital.

Johann Kerbrat is Senior Vice President and General Manager, Crypto and International at Robinhood, where he is responsible for the overall strategy, product development, and business operations of the crypto unit. Since joining Robinhood in 2021, he has overseen the expansion of its digital asset offerings, including the launch of a self-custody wallet, international expansion into the European Union, the acquisition of the global exchange Bitstamp, and the introduction of products including crypto staking and tokenised stocks. In 2025, Robinhood launched a tokenised equity investment offer for its European clients, which Kerbrat has described as an effort to rebuild Robinhood's core offering on blockchain infrastructure — enabling settlement in seconds, 24-hour operability, and portability of assets across brokers. He has also stated that all financial services currently running on traditional systems will, in his view, eventually migrate to blockchain.

Prior to joining Robinhood, Kerbrat served as Vice President of Engineering at Iron Fish, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency startup, and as Head of Engineering at Uber. He held engineering and management roles at Airbnb, progressing from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager. Earlier in his career, he founded an e-commerce and payments platform company. He holds a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Oxford Brookes University and a Master of Science in Computer Science from EPITECH European Institute of Technology. His studies also included international programs at Beijing Jiaotong University and the University of Kent. Kerbrat grew up in Nice, France.

John Collison is President at Stripe, the payments technology company he co-founded in 2010 with his brother Patrick Collison. As president, Collison oversees operations, strategy, and business development, working alongside Patrick, who serves as chief executive officer. Stripe provides financial infrastructure and payments technology, and as of February 2026 carried a valuation of $159 billion.

Collison was born in August 1990 in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland. Before Stripe, he co-founded Auctomatic with his brother Patrick — a software company building tools for high-volume sellers on platforms such as eBay, which was acquired in March 2008 for approximately $5 million when Collison was seventeen. The brothers had participated in Y Combinator through their work on Auctomatic. In November 2016, following a funding round that valued Stripe at $9.2 billion, Collison became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, with a net worth estimated at $9.3 billion as of 2026 according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Stripe received early backing from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Sequoia Capital. Collison enrolled at Harvard University in September 2009 and dropped out the following year to build Stripe. He holds a Federal Aviation Administration Aircraft Flight Instructor certification and is also a pianist.

John Denza is Head of Americas, Apex Digital 3.0 at Apex Group Ltd, a position he has held since November 2025. In this role, he leads sales initiatives for tokenization and distribution, supporting $3.6 trillion in Apex customer assets. His tokenization portfolio spans real estate, infrastructure, money market funds, oil, gas, precious metals, and capital raising. He has also been an advocate for the ERC-3643 tokenization standard. He works with product and country leads to develop go-to-market strategies across institutional products.

Prior to joining Apex Group, Denza spent nearly five years at Cboe Global Markets, where he served as Chief Commercial Officer of Cboe Digital. He was one of the founding team members of ErisX, the predecessor exchange, initially joining in a business development capacity before being promoted to CCO and member of the executive team. His responsibilities there included pricing negotiations with market makers and trading groups, engagement with the FCM community around margin approval, and the launch of a financially settled futures exchange covering Bitcoin and Ethereum. He also built a business line with IRA custodians, reaching over 20 participants and $100 million in customer assets under management. Earlier in his career, he held roles at Pico, Bats Global Markets, and Nasdaq. Denza studied political science and communications at Northeastern University.

John Egan is Chief Product Officer at Polygon Labs, appointed in September 2025 as the company's inaugural CPO. Reporting directly to CEO Marc Boiron, he leads product vision and strategy with a focus on stablecoin payments adoption, unified liquidity, scalability, and interoperability. He works alongside payments hires Jamal Raees, Sam Fagin, and DiZien Low as Polygon Labs positions its blockchain as infrastructure for digital payments.

Prior to joining Polygon Labs, Egan spent approximately two years at Stripe as Head of Crypto, where he oversaw the company's cryptocurrency enablement and product solutions during a period that included the acquisitions of Bridge and Privy. Before Stripe, he founded incident management company Kintaba, which was backed by venture capital and counted Vercel, Gusto, and DoorDash among its customers. He also founded blockchain art platform Editional and YC-backed Caffeinated Mind, the latter of which was acquired by Facebook. At Facebook, he created and led Workplace by Facebook, the company's enterprise collaboration platform. Earlier in his career he worked as a Product Manager at Facebook. Egan is a Y Combinator graduate and holds a technology patent.

Jonas Krstic is Head of Business Relations at STOKR, a position he has held since December 2025. In this role, he leads issuer, partner, and investor relations, overseeing stakeholder engagement across the full lifecycle of digital security issuances and supporting issuers in tokenizing and managing financial assets on Bitcoin. Prior to this, he served as Head of Relationship Management at STOKR from December 2024 to December 2025, and as Relationship Manager from December 2023 to December 2024, both based in Berlin.

Before joining STOKR, Krstic completed a consulting internship at Porsche Consulting in Stuttgart from September to December 2022, where he supported a project in the semiconductor industry focused on supply chain management, specifically order fulfillment and sales and operations planning strategy.

Jonathan Hayes is Head of Digital Assets Development at Bank Julius Baer in Zurich, leading the bank's digital asset strategy and crypto/tokenization offering for private banking clients. He joined in 2014 after a strategy consulting role at BCG.

Jonathan Levin is Co-Founder and CEO at Chainalysis, a position he assumed in December 2024 following his appointment by the company's Board of Directors. He co-founded Chainalysis in 2014 alongside Michael Gronager and Jan Møller, and served as Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer from March 2015 until his elevation to CEO. During that period he led teams across strategy, corporate development, sales, marketing, research and development, and policy and government affairs. He continues to serve on the company's Board in his capacity as CEO.

Chainalysis builds data, software, and services that provide information and context on blockchain transactions, identifying the services behind transactions to support investigations, regulatory compliance, market intelligence, and taxation use cases. Levin began studying cryptocurrencies in 2012, focusing on the game-theoretic mechanisms securing Bitcoin, at a time when the subject was largely confined to computer science research. He has testified multiple times before the U.S. Congress on national security and blockchain technology and advises governments and large institutions on cryptocurrency risks and opportunities. Prior to Chainalysis, he co-founded Coinometrics, a cryptocurrency data company, in November 2013, serving as CEO until October 2014. He holds a Master of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Oxford, where he studied from 2012 to 2014, and a BSc from the University of Bristol. During his time at Oxford he also served as a Research Assistant at the Oxford Martin School, contributing to research on global economic megatrends and agglomeration trends in cities.

Jonathan Schemoul is the Founder of Aleph Cloud (also known as Aleph.im), a cross-blockchain layer-2 network focused on decentralised infrastructure for applications, including data storage and computing. He launched the project in February 2019 and serves as its CEO. He is also a founding member of LibertAI, an artificial intelligence application built on the Aleph network designed to allow users to interact with AI while preserving confidentiality.

At Aleph, Schemoul has led core software development in Python, using IPFS and AsyncIO, and has overseen the development of SDKs in JavaScript and MicroPython, as well as multiple decentralised applications including a network explorer and a blogging platform. Prior to founding Aleph, he spent over eleven years as a consultant at JMSI, where he provided technical leadership across projects involving Python, JavaScript frameworks, Docker, and various database technologies. He also served as a community developer at NULS Blockchain from June 2018 to February 2019, where he built a block explorer, a Python SDK, a JavaScript SDK, and several decentralised applications. Earlier in his career, he worked as a software development project manager at ALD Automotive. Schemoul holds a Deug from the University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Project Management Master 2 from IIM – Institut de l'internet et du multimédia.

Joris Delanoue is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Fairmint, an onchain equity infrastructure company registered as an SEC transfer agent, based in New York. In December 2025, he was elected General Director of the Canton Foundation by its General Members, joining its Board of Directors alongside representatives from DTCC, Euroclear, HSBC, Digital Asset, and Broadridge. In that role, he represents builders and operators working within the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled interoperability layer connecting regulated financial markets. Fairmint has processed more than $1 billion of equity value through production-ready Daml smart contracts on the Canton Network. The company contributed to open-sourcing the first Canton SDK, supported cap-table standardization on Canton, and created the Open Cap Table Protocol.

Delanoue co-founded Fairmint in 2019 alongside Thibauld Favre. Prior to Fairmint, he was instrumental in the growth of Neosoft, leading the company to over 500 employees and $30 million in revenue. He also founded Nexteem, described as one of Europe's first cloud computing companies, which he sold to Aneo in 2016. He has operated as an angel investor and advisor. He holds a Master's Degree in Business and is a graduate of Singularity University.

Joseph Chalom is Chief Executive Officer at SharpLink Gaming (Nasdaq: SBET), a role he assumed as sole CEO effective December 15, 2025, following the planned departure of Co-CEO Rob Phythian. In this capacity, he is responsible for shaping and executing SharpLink's global strategy at the intersection of public markets and Ethereum-based digital infrastructure. Since the company launched its ETH treasury business in June 2025, SharpLink has grown its Ethereum holdings to 863,424 ETH and expanded institutional ownership from low single digits to over 30%. Chalom has stated his focus is on building an institutional-grade Ethereum treasury platform and deepening related partnerships.

Prior to joining SharpLink, Chalom spent over 20 years at BlackRock, most recently as Managing Director and Head of Strategic Ecosystem Partnerships, where he was responsible globally for developing and managing BlackRock's firmwide strategy with respect to digital assets, index and data relationships, and strategic investments in the fintech and data space. He also previously served as Chief Operating Officer of BlackRock Solutions. Before BlackRock, he was a Senior Associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom from 2000 to 2004. He holds a degree from Columbia Law School.

Joseph Lubin is Founder and CEO of ConsenSys, a blockchain software company focused on building infrastructure, developer tools, and decentralized applications on the Ethereum platform. He is also co-founder of Ethereum and serves as Chairman of SharpLink. He founded ConsenSys in October 2014, establishing it as a venture production studio and blockchain software development consultancy creating decentralized applications, enterprise solutions, and developer tools, with a primary focus on Ethereum. Through ConsenSys, he has worked on incubating projects and expanding the Ethereum platform since 2015. He also serves on the governing board of Hyperledger, the Linux Foundation-led blockchain consortium.

Lubin co-founded Ethereum in early 2014 and served as Chief Operating Officer of Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse), where he was involved in extending blockchain technology to support smart contracts and decentralized applications. He was also involved in the creation of the Ethereum Foundation. Prior to his blockchain work, Lubin held the position of VP of Technology in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs, served as Director of the New York office of Blacksmith Software Consulting, and worked with eMagine on the Identrus cryptographic payments and trade finance network project. He has publicly stated that ConsenSys faced significant legal costs defending against SEC enforcement actions during 2022–2024, and has expressed that regulatory normalisation under the post-Gensler SEC environment will allow the industry to accelerate. Lubin graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he also worked in the Princeton Robotics Lab. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1964.

Joseph Vietri is a B2B Order Support Coordinator with over 17 years of experience in customer service, currently working at Agilent Technologies.

Julie Bader is a specialist in legal and regulatory strategy within the FinTech and tech sectors. She joined De Gaulle Fleurance in April 2023 to help develop the firm’s on-chain finance practice.
Julie Bader’s expertise enables her clients to comply with the regulatory framework applicable to their activities. In particular, she advises companies on matters related to digital finance (investment platforms, crowdfunding, crypto-assets, etc.) and digital technologies applied in the banking and financial sector (blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc.).
She assists companies and financial entities in complying with the recent MiCA Regulations, Pilot Regime, and DORA.
Julie Bader has also developed expertise in drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts in the digital and IT fields and assists companies with GDPR compliance.

‍

Julien Clausse is Head of AssetFoundry (Digital Assets & Tokenization) at BNP Paribas CIB, a position he has held since September 2022. AssetFoundry is BNP Paribas CIB's digital assets tokenization platform. Publicly documented initiatives include the tokenization of money market fund shares on the public Ethereum blockchain in a permissioned access model, and work on tokenizing financing on the unlisted bond market, specifically targeting transactions below €20 million not typically covered by the bank. He also sits on the Board of Directors of Manaos, a sustainable investment services platform, a role he has held since July 2019.

Prior to leading AssetFoundry, Clausse held two successive roles at BNP Paribas CIB: Head of 021 Exploration Engineering (January 2020 to September 2022) and Head of IT Digital Accelerator (February 2018 to January 2020). Before joining BNP Paribas, he was at Amadeus IT Group, where he served as Head of Open Innovation from May 2015 and subsequently as Head of Moonshot Innovation from November 2016 to January 2018. He also taught creativity for business at SKEMA Business School between October 2016 and October 2018. Earlier career positions include marketing and software roles at companies including Intelligent Systems, Altran, Siemens, and Insignia Solutions, with his career in the sector dating back to 1998. He holds a degree from CentraleSupélec and is based in Paris.

Julien Liniger is the CEO and co-founder of Relai, a Swiss fintech specializing in Bitcoin. A graduate of the University of Bern, he is recognized for his expertise in crypto finance.

Julien Maldonato is a Partner at Deloitte France, where he leads the Strategy & Business Design practice for the financial services industry and has served as the firm's Digital Trust Leader. He advises banks, insurers and fintechs on organisational design and the application of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and blockchain, to financial services.

Maldonato joined Deloitte in 2006 to build its innovation and digital transformation consulting offering for financial institutions, and previously held the role of Partner for Innovation and Business Transformation. He is a frequent author and speaker on radical innovation, organisational resilience and digital trust.

Justin Chapman is Group Head of Digital Assets and Financial Markets at Northern Trust, leading a global team integrating traditional and digital market functions. Named Global Custodian Person of the Year 2017 and inducted into GC Legends in 2019.

Justine Destobbeleire is Managing Director, Digital Assets and AI at Sia Partners, a position she assumed in March 2025 focused on digital assets, artificial intelligence, and financial market infrastructures. Prior to this appointment, she served as Senior Manager and Lead for Crypto-Assets, Blockchain, AI, and GenAI at Sia Partners from August 2018 to March 2025. In parallel, since March 2020, she has led the Digital Assets, Decentralised Finance, and Blockchain module at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, where she is responsible for the blockchain and crypto-assets curriculum.

Before joining Sia Partners, Destobbeleire spent five years at Accenture from April 2013 to August 2018, working as a digital and new technologies consultant. Earlier in her career, she completed a supply chain project assistant internship at TotalEnergies and worked as a private mathematics and physics tutor. She is a graduate of the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne. Her total professional experience spans over 17 years.

Karm S. is Senior Vice President, Digital Assets – Product & Innovation at BNY, a role he has held since October 2025. He owns product across digital asset custody, asset onboarding and evaluation, and compliance infrastructure for BNY's institutional digital asset platform.

Prior to BNY, Karm spent over a decade at Moody's Corporation, most recently as Director Manager, Product Strategy – Innovation from January 2022 to January 2025. In that role he led a global team of product managers building early-stage fintech products, including a blockchain analytics KYC platform developed in partnership with Elliptic, an investigations and enhanced due diligence tool, a sanctions extension product, and a shell company indicator. He expanded Moody's supply chain risk market through a co-developed sub-tier supplier risk solution and secured $20M in influenced revenue by embedding risk solutions into Salesforce and Coupa via GTM partnerships. His total professional experience spans approximately 14 years. He is based in New York.

Kean Gilbert is Head of Institutional Relations at Lido and a board director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. In his role at Lido, he focuses on institutional engagement, and has spoken publicly on topics including staked ETH, ETPs and yield.

Prior to Lido, Gilbert held a sales role at ConsenSys, where he worked across products including Infura, MetaMask Institutional, and Codefi Assets and Staking. Before that, he was a member of the Strategy and Operations team at Deloitte's EMEA Blockchain Lab in Dublin. He subsequently joined Nuant as a Sales Director, focusing on its Portfolio Management Solution and working with crypto funds and institutions on portfolio risk and exposure management. Gilbert holds an MSc in Management Consultancy from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, a Bachelor's Degree in Business Management and Administration from Dundalk Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor's Degree (Hons) in Business Studies from the same institution. He was awarded the UCD Aspire Scholarship in 2016, which is granted to nine master's students per year.

Ken Moore is Chief Innovation Officer at Mastercard and a member of the Management Committee, leading Mastercard Foundry (R&D, Digital Futures, Product Lifecycle Management). He joined Mastercard in 2016 as EVP of Mastercard Labs and previously held senior roles at Citi, Accenture and Misys.

Helpdesk Technician and Data Analyst at Tours Métropole Val de Loire, Konohime (Maxime Laglasse) has solid experience in IT support and data analysis in France.

Konstantin Richter is CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon, a blockchain infrastructure company he established in 2017 to provide institutional-grade infrastructure to blockchain protocols, crypto-native firms, and traditional financial institutions. Blockdaemon operates across three core product areas: blockchain nodes and APIs, white-label staking solutions for institutions, and a wallet and custody stack designed to enable any company to offer crypto buying, selling, custody, and remuneration services. Clients include HashKey Capital and Bitcoin Suisse, and the company counts 70% of the top 500 global companies offering crypto services among its customers. Richter has led Blockdaemon through three major funding rounds, raising $400M in total, including a Series C of $207M at a $3.25B valuation led by Sapphire and Tiger Global, with participation from SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, and Citi Ventures.

Before founding Blockdaemon, Richter held executive roles at Deutsche Telekom, where he focused on network strategy and commercial models across cell networks, and subsequently at Nokia. He then built and exited several SaaS and marketplace platforms, including Audiotube, Lookbooks, and Wiredrive, with his last exit occurring in 2017. He has been active in the blockchain space as an advisor since 2015, working with projects including Gem, Po.et, and MadHive, where he also serves on the advisory board. He additionally serves as Managing Director of Santiago Advisory and as an advisory board member at DNAstack. Richter graduated within the top 10% of his class at European Business School, with terms in Germany, France, and the UK, and is fluent in four languages.

Lamine Brahimi is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Taurus SA, which he co-founded in 2018. In that capacity, he has been involved in building Taurus's position as a regulated digital assets infrastructure provider, covering custody, tokenisation, and exchange technology. Taurus has been shortlisted at the Future of Finance 2026 Awards across five categories, including Best Digital Asset Custody Technology Provider, Best Tokenisation Platform, and Best Digital Asset Exchange Technology Vendor.

Prior to co-founding Taurus, Brahimi served as Deputy-COO and Chief Digital Officer at Lombard Odier, where he led the design and development of the firm's wealth management digital strategy and pushed the first blockchain prototype tested at a private bank, covering clearing and settlement of structured products with the Swiss Stock Exchange. Between 2016 and 2018, he represented Swiss private banks at the Fintech Commission of the Swiss Bankers Association and was a founding member and board member of Swiss Fintech Innovations. He began his career as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he worked across financial services, energy, materials, and government. He also held a Non-Executive Board Member role at Instimatch Global from May 2018 to March 2019. Brahimi holds an MSc in Communication Systems Engineering from EPFL, an MBA with distinction from INSEAD, and is a CFA charterholder.

Laszlo Szabo is Co-Founder and CEO of Kiln, an enterprise-grade staking and digital asset yield platform he has led since 2018. Kiln operates validators across major proof-of-stake blockchains and counts over 200 enterprise customers across three continents, including exchanges, custodians, asset managers, and fintechs. The platform manages over $4 billion in stake and runs on a multi-cloud, multi-region infrastructure, with clients including Fireblocks, BinanceUS, and SwissBorg.

Szabo's current focus is the rollout of Railnet, a decentralised yielding protocol for institutional curators that functions as an orchestration layer connecting DeFi yields and tokenised real-world assets — such as Treasury bills and private credit — within a single compliance framework. Railnet addresses three operational problems: bridging DeFi and tokenised RWA yield sources, standardising the investment lifecycle across liquidity profiles ranging from instant DeFi redemptions to T+1 or T+30 traditional asset cycles, and providing auditable compliance reporting for institutions operating under regulations such as MiFID and MiCA. A specific technical contribution is the handling of NAV calculation during redemption delays, where tokens leave a wallet before corresponding cash settles. Szabo has stated that he intends Railnet to become the default standard for capital moving on-chain. His background is in tech recruitment: he co-founded a tech recruitment company in 2015 before entering the blockchain space. He first encountered Bitcoin in Hong Kong and was introduced to Ethereum through a contact at Consensys. His first blockchain venture placed CVs on-chain before the company pivoted through several iterations, arriving at staking infrastructure in 2020.

Laurence Arnold is Global Head of Innovation at AXA Investment Managers, leading innovation strategy since 2019 including blockchain and tokenization efforts such as AXA IM's first stablecoin and blockchain-registered transactions with Société Générale. She holds a master's in Finance from Paris-Dauphine.

Lewis Sun is HSBC's Global Head of Digital Money and Global Head of Domestic & Emerging Payments within Global Payments Solutions, based in Hong Kong. He joined HSBC in 2002 as a Product Manager in mainland China and has held senior payments roles including Head of GPS for HSBC China and Regional Head of Product Management for Asia Pacific. He is a frequent speaker on digital money, CBDCs and tokenized deposits at Sibos and the Singapore FinTech Festival.

Lidia Kurt is Chief Executive Officer at Seturion and CEO of its subsidiary BX Digital, both part of Boerse Stuttgart Group. At BX Digital, she has played a key role in developing a digital market infrastructure for tokenized securities. BX Digital operates as a trading and settlement platform for digital assets with peer-to-peer settlement, designed to eliminate central financial intermediaries such as CSDs and CCPs, and is integrated into fiat payment systems. In March 2025, BX Digital became the first Swiss financial infrastructure to receive authorisation from FINMA. Seturion, where Kurt assumed the CEO role in September 2025, is positioned as the first pan-European settlement platform for tokenized assets, aiming to unify the fragmented settlement landscape across Europe and enable settlement against central bank money or on-chain cash across all asset classes.

Prior to these roles, Kurt co-founded vision&, through which she supported digital asset and DLT projects for financial institutions. Her earlier career included positions at J.P. Morgan and Swiss Re, with roles based in Zurich, London, and Hong Kong. She also co-founded Swiss Stablecoin AG. She holds a doctorate in finance from the University of St. Gallen and is the author of the book Digitale Assets und Tokenisierung (Digital Assets and Tokenization).

Lorris Beziers is a Digital Assets Research Analyst at The Big Whale, a Paris-based crypto media company, a position he has held since January 2024. His published research covers a range of digital asset topics including DeFi lending markets, layer 2 blockchain architecture, MEV mechanics, on-chain derivatives platforms, and institutional blockchain infrastructure. Alongside this role, he has been an Associate at White Loop Capital, a French private investment firm focused on crypto-assets, since October 2024.

Prior to joining The Big Whale, Beziers worked as a DeFi Analyst at Mon Livret C from June to August 2023, where he analyzed Web3 projects across blockchains, stablecoins, and protocols, assessed yield opportunities on decentralized finance protocols, and designed a risk assessment framework for layer 2 blockchains. He holds a degree from NEOMA Business School and completed a classe préparatoire ECS at Lycée Masséna. He holds certifications from IBM and Bocconi and has competencies in Web3, finance, and data.

Louis Tellier is Lead Institutional Research at Blockstories, where he focuses on developing the institutional offering for digital assets. He joined Blockstories in April 2025. Blockstories was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in Berlin, with presence in France and Switzerland.

Prior to joining Blockstories, Tellier worked as a crypto journalist at The Big Whale from August 2023 to January 2025, covering crypto and blockchain topics. Before that, he was a journalist at L'AGEFI from May 2022 to July 2023, specialising in cryptocurrencies. Earlier in his career, he worked as a web and video journalist at BFM Business and as a video journalist at Le Figaro. He also taught journalism at IICP in Paris for three and a half years, with a focus on web video journalism. Tellier is a graduate of Sciences Po Grenoble and the University of Lille.

Luca Schnetzler, also known as Luca Netz, is CEO of Pudgy Penguins, an NFT project and physical toy brand based in Los Angeles. He acquired Pudgy Penguins in April 2022 for 750 ETH (approximately $2.5 million at the time), following a public bidding war, and subsequently became CEO. Under his leadership, Pudgy Penguins completed a $9 million fundraise in May 2023 and launched a line of physical plush toys, Pudgy Toys, which reached 2,000 Walmart stores in the US by September 2023 and Canadian Toys R Us locations by November 2023. The toys include QR code access to the Pudgy World platform on the zkSync Era blockchain. Each toy corresponds to a licensing arrangement with individual NFT holders, who receive royalties in perpetuity. He also founded Abstract, an Ethereum Layer 2 network built on the ZK Stack, designed for consumer-facing blockchain applications with low fees and fast transaction speeds.

Schnetzler's earlier career included roles as CEO of La Gold Cartel (2016–2018), CEO of Manners Holdings, CMO at Von Dutch (from 2019), CEO of LPT Technologies, and CMO of Gel Blaster. He began his working life at Ring Doorbell in 2015 as part of a warehouse team. He dropped out of high school around the 10th grade and has no recorded formal higher education. He also runs Netz Capital, an angel investment vehicle focused on technology startups.

Luc Falempin is Head of Product – Apex Digital at Apex Group Ltd, a position he assumed in July 2025. In this role, he leads product for Apex Digital 3.0, a solution designed to bridge traditional and blockchain-based markets and facilitate the transition to digital asset classes and distribution. He holds this position alongside his ongoing role as CEO of Tokeny, which Apex Group acquired and which operates as an onchain finance platform providing financial institutions with tools to issue, manage, and distribute securities on the blockchain.

Falempin founded Tokeny in 2017 and has led it as CEO since inception. Prior to the Apex Digital appointment, he served as Head of Technology for Apex Digital 3.0. He has been involved in blockchain since 2011 and has founded and sold two technology companies over a career spanning more than ten years in enterprise-grade technology. He also serves as a Board Member of ERC3643.org, an open-source protocol association for permissioned token issuance, a role he has held since April 2023. His educational background includes a Bachelor in Business Administration in Marketing from HEC Montréal (2007–2010), an MBA in Marketing and Internet Commerce from Institut Léonard de Vinci (2011–2012), and an Advanced Web Analytics Certificate from the University of San Francisco (2011).

Lucie Pra is Senior Product Manager – Enterprise Payments at American Express, a position she has held since May 2025. Her stated focus is on delivering payment solutions involving stablecoins and blockchain technology, with an explicit mandate around making new payment infrastructure usable for everyday users.

Prior to this role, she spent approximately 18 months as Digital Currencies Product Manager at R3, a provider of digital currency and digital asset solutions to financial institutions, where she worked between October 2023 and May 2025. Before R3, she held a Senior Project Manager role within American Express's International Strategic Initiatives function from September 2019 to February 2022, coordinating multi-workstream projects covering pricing, training, regulatory compliance, and communication to support product launches across international markets. Her self-described areas of expertise include payments, retail banking, stablecoins, and CBDCs. She is also a certified yoga teacher.

Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad is CEO of Bitpanda, Europe's most regulated investment platform for digital assets, a position he has held since August 2025. In this role he is responsible for the company's strategic vision, product development, and international growth across both retail and institutional markets. Bitpanda's platform covers crypto, stocks, indices, precious metals, and commodities, offering 24/7 trading to retail users while also providing B2B infrastructure through Bitpanda Technology Solutions (BTS).

Enzersdorfer-Konrad joined Bitpanda in 2019 and has held a series of progressively senior roles. He served as Deputy CEO from July 2022 to August 2025, and concurrently as CEO of Bitpanda Technology Solutions from January 2023 to August 2025, leading the company's B2B infrastructure business, which provides white-label trading and custody solutions to financial institutions. He also serves as Managing Director of Bitpanda Asset Management GmbH. Prior to Bitpanda, he held positions at Erste Bank and Raiffeisenlandesbank, giving him direct banking experience. He is also active as an angel investor. He holds an MSc in Banking and Finance.

Lukas Helminger is Co-founder and CEO at TACEO, a research and software company focused on bringing post-quantum and privacy-preserving cryptography to market, headquartered in Graz, Austria. He co-founded the company in July 2022 and has led it to a $5.5M Seed round, raised to build what TACEO describes as a network for verifiable encrypted compute — referred to internally as private shared state — enabling collaboration on data without exposing the underlying data itself. In April 2026, he participated as a speaker at a Paris Blockchain Week breakfast event organised by The Big Whale, where he appeared alongside representatives from Boerse Stuttgart Digital, Spiko, 21x, and AMINA Bank to discuss onchain exposure for financial institutions.

Prior to founding TACEO, Helminger worked as a researcher at Know-Center GmbH in Graz from January 2019 to June 2022, where his work spanned privacy-preserving techniques, secure multiparty computation, and applied cryptography. His published research includes co-authorship on PASTA, a paper on hybrid homomorphic encryption published in IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, as well as work on multi-party computation in the context of GDPR, privacy-preserving disease analytics, and decentralised identity revocation. Earlier in his career he held software engineering roles at Raiffeisen Salzburg and Eurolyser Diagnostica GmbH, and completed a six-month administrative internship with the Austrian Armed Forces. He holds a Master of Science in Mathematics from Technische Universität Graz, completed between 2016 and 2019.

Lukas Schor is Co-Founder and President of the Board at the Safe Foundation, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, which he co-founded alongside Richard Meissner in March 2022. Safe is a smart contract platform for securing digital assets on Ethereum. In December 2024, Schor announced the launch of Safenet, a decentralised payment network positioned as an open infrastructure alternative to traditional payment rails such as Visa and Mastercard. His stated objective is to move the global economy on-chain onto blockchain-based settlement infrastructure. Safe processes approximately 10% of transfer volume on Ethereum, representing around $150 billion annually. In July 2022, the Safe Ecosystem Foundation raised $100 million in a round led by 1kx, with participation from Tiger Global, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Lightspeed, and approximately 50 other investors.

Prior to founding Safe, Schor served as Project Lead at Gnosis from January 2019 to April 2022, where he led the development of Gnosis Safe — the product that later rebranded as Safe — which grew to manage over $100 billion worth of digital assets on Ethereum. Before Gnosis, he worked as Marketing Manager at The Argon Group, a cryptocurrency-focused investment bank, from 2017 to 2018, and held an organizing committee role at Tech Open Air in Berlin in 2017. Earlier in his career, he was a global product platform manager at Bosch Switzerland from August 2014 and held product management roles at Jodel and Tech Open Air in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Schor is a graduate of the University of St. Gallen.

Lynette Levanger is Vice President, Product Enterprise Integrations at bswift, a benefits administration technology firm headquartered in Chicago. She concurrently holds the role of Vice President, Virtual Payments Platform Tokenization at American Express, a position she has held since December 2021, based in Sandy, Utah.

Her professional background is grounded in financial services, with a focus on B2B and C2B2B payments, remittances, and product development. She has built products from the ground up and delivered solutions using agile methodologies, with additional experience in career mentoring and relationship management. Her stated areas of skill include virtual payments, enterprise integrations, remittance processing, and financial services product development. She studied Sociology at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah.

Manuel Costescu is a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, where he co-heads the EMEA Innovation Economy team and serves as a Global Fintech Champion. In this role he advises the region's fastest-growing fintech, SaaS and e-commerce companies across a range of corporate and investment banking solutions.

Costescu began his career as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York, and earlier worked as a banker at J.P. Morgan covering European public sector clients before returning to the firm. He is a regular speaker at industry events on innovation, fintech and digital finance.

Manuel Villegas is a Fund Manager specializing in NextGen Equity, focusing on innovative investment strategies in the finance sector.

Marc Menasé is Founding Partner at Founders Future, a transatlantic investment platform he founded in 2018 focused on backing AI-first and category-defining founders. The firm manages approximately €400M in assets and supports more than 140 portfolio companies across Europe and the United States. Headquartered in Paris and San Francisco, Founders Future operates across early stage and growth, with a stated focus on AI-native innovation, digital transformation, and climate. Through Founders Future Growth US, the platform backs U.S. seed to growth-stage founders building global companies.

Menasé co-founded Nextedia in 2005, a digital marketing agency that grew from 4 to 350 employees before being acquired by Groupe Lagardère in 2007. He was also co-founder of Mensquare SAS and its associated investment vehicle Meninvest, active from 2010 to 2016. He co-founded Epicery in 2016 and Epycure in 2019. From October 2013 to May 2015, he served as co-president of France Digitale. Earlier in his career, he joined Kelkoo at the end of 2001, remaining for three years until the company was sold to Yahoo, where he subsequently held a business development and marketing role at the European level. He was named French E-commerce Personality of the Year in 2012 by Ecommerce Mag. He holds a degree from HEC Paris.

Marco A. Infuso is Head Digital Assets Sales at Apex Group Ltd, a position he has held since December 2024 and is based in Zurich, Switzerland. His mandate covers sales across Apex's digital assets offering, which includes tokenization of money market funds, shares, bonds, real-world assets and exotic instruments, stablecoin as a service, transfer agency and fund administration services, and SPV setup globally.

Prior to joining Apex, Infuso served as Chief Sales Officer at Valour, a provider of regulated exchange traded products providing access to digital assets, from July 2022 to November 2024. In that role he led the sales and marketing department, with responsibility for customer retention, market penetration, advertising campaigns, and new digital product development. Before Valour, he held the position of Managing Director, Business Development for the DACH region at 21Shares from January 2021. His total professional experience spans 27 years.

Marek Socha is Managing Director, Global Markets at 21X, Europe's first ESMA-regulated DLT exchange, a role he has held since March 2026. He holds overall responsibility for Business Development, Sales, Customer Success, Marketing and Communications. At 21X, he has spoken publicly on the case for public blockchains in capital markets infrastructure and atomic settlement for tokenized equities, representing the firm at industry events including The Big Whale's Future of Finance in April 2026 and a London panel with Franklin Templeton and the Ethereum Foundation in May 2026.

Prior to joining 21X, Socha spent approximately five years at SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) as Head of Corporate Development and a member of the Extended Executive Committee, where he held full responsibility for acquisitions, strategic investments, joint ventures and partnerships around the regulated financial market infrastructure. He also served as Chairman of a VC investment fund and as a Shareholder Representative at AsiaNext, a MAS-regulated crypto exchange in Singapore. Across his career he has worked directly with executive boards, boards of directors, shareholders, institutional clients, regulators and investors in financial market infrastructure, digital securities, and fintech, with additional earlier experience in life sciences. No educational background is stated in the available source content.

Margaret Harwood-Jones is Global Head of Financing & Securities Services at Standard Chartered, on the CIB management team. With three decades in securities services (BNP Paribas, HSBC), she is a director of Zodia Custody and Chair of ISSA, and won Global Custodian's Industry Person of the Year 2025.

Margaux Frisque is a Founding Partner at d&a partners, where she leads the Litigation and Contract practice. Her work focuses on advising and litigating for regulated crypto-asset and fintech platforms, drafting commercial agreements and platform terms and conditions, and supporting clients through AMF and ACPR supervisory reviews and investigations covering market abuse, AML/CFT and CASP compliance. She handles complex civil, commercial and criminal proceedings and arbitration in France and internationally, with a practice that spans business law, corporate disputes, post-M&A litigation, directors' liability, and blockchain-related matters. She obtained the first AMF visa for an ICO in France and has delivered talks on the legal challenges surrounding blockchain technology at institutions including the Paris Bar School, the European Judicial Training Network, and the Catholic University of Lille. She is recognised by Legal 500, Leaders League, and Chambers for her expertise in litigation, particularly in the tech sector and in cross-border disputes.

Before co-founding d&a partners in 2022, Frisque practised as an associate at PwC Société d'Avocats (2019–2021) and UGGC Avocats (2017–2019), and completed trainee positions at HFW and CMA CGM. She holds a Master's degree in International Business Law from the Institut de Droit des Affaires of Aix-en-Provence, a Master's in International Business Law from the School of Law Rotterdam, and the DJCE qualification. She attended the University of California, Berkeley School of Law as an auditor in 2010–2011. Since January 2025, she has also served as Administrator of the Lawyers' Pecuniary Payment Fund at the Barreau de Marseille.

Marguerite de Tavernost is Investment Director, EU Crypto at Cathay Innovation, based in Paris. She manages the Cathay Ledger Capital fund, a €100M early-stage venture fund focused on Web3, established in partnership with Ledger, a digital asset custody company. The fund invests globally at Seed and Series A stages. She joined Cathay Innovation in August 2022 and holds a dual role, operating across both Cathay Innovation and Ledger in connection with the fund.

Prior to joining Cathay Innovation, she spent approximately four years at Berlin-based venture capital firms Cherry Ventures and Headline, investing in early-stage startups across Germany, France, and the UK. Before that, she worked as a digital transformation consultant at Founders Intelligence, advising CEOs and CDOs on innovation strategy for clients including Fannie Mae, L'Oréal, and Unilever. She also served as an independent board member for Artefact, a publicly listed French company specialising in consulting for digital transformation and digital marketing. Earlier in her career, she was an analyst at eVenture Capital Partners. Immediately before joining Cathay Innovation, she worked as a professional photographer and launched an NFT collection, an experience she has cited as part of her practical grounding in Web3. She holds a BA in International Studies from King's College London and an MSc in International Business and Management (CEMS) from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Maricarmen A. is Digital Assets Growth Partner at Towerbank International Inc., a role she has held since August 2025. In this capacity, she works on integrating crypto and digital asset products into traditional financial services, connecting private banking with digital finance. She operates at partner level within the consulting function.

Prior to this role, she spent over nine years at Towerbank as a Senior Private Banking Officer, focused on managing relationships with high-net-worth clients and designing personalized financial solutions. Before joining Towerbank, she worked as an Analista Comercial e Inversiones at Inteligo Group from April 2015 to April 2016, providing financial advisory and asset management services. From January 2013 to April 2015, she served as Ejecutiva de Banca Privada at Global Bank. She began her career as a Funds Analyst at Safra from January 2012 to January 2013. Her total professional experience spans approximately 14 years.

Marieke Flament is Co-Founder of Currency of Power, an advisory firm and newsletter co-founded with Nicolas Colin, former French Treasury official. The project tracks the intersection of monetary policy, geopolitics, stablecoins, and digital assets, delivering analysis for executives navigating the evolving global financial order. Flament describes the current moment as an "unspoken Bretton Woods Moment."

Alongside Currency of Power, Flament serves as Independent Board Director at Qivalis, a euro-denominated stablecoin initiative governed by a consortium of eleven major European banks including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, and SEB. She also serves as a Non-Executive Director at IG Group, a FTSE 250 company listed on the London Stock Exchange, a position she has held since July 2024. She is a Senior Strategic Advisor at Gold Token SA, an MKS PAMP company focused on gold stablecoins, and an investor in Project Europe. Her earlier executive roles include CEO of NEAR Foundation, the Swiss non-profit overseeing the NEAR blockchain, where she was appointed effective January 2022; CEO of Mettle by NatWest, an SME banking application she launched and scaled from 50 to 250 employees; and Managing Director of Europe at Circle, where she built a user base from zero to two million users and contributed to the launch of USDC. Prior to those roles she held positions at Hotels.com, where she ran the Europe, Middle East and Africa division, as well as at Boston Consulting Group and LVMH. She trained as a computer engineer and holds a degree from London Business School.

Marina Baudéan was a non-executive director at MTS S.p.A. (2017-2021), a bond trading and analytics platform, and has professional proficiency in English and French.

Mario Stephan is Director of Philanthropic Partnerships at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), based in Geneva, a position he has held since January 2026. Prior to this appointment, he served as Head of Philanthropy Diversification and Impact at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), where he led MSF's Web3 strategy from Geneva. In that role, he developed MSF's approach to blockchain philanthropy, encompassing crypto, NFTs, and digital art. He was directly responsible for launching Stake2Care, MSF's first liquid staking program on Ethereum, which allows donors to stake cryptocurrency and direct a portion of the generated rewards to MSF while retaining their capital. He was also preparing a subsequent initiative called Art4Care, focused on digital art. He previously served as Executive Director of MSF's UAE regional office from 2018 to 2022, and before that founded Arabian Perspectives, a consultancy providing expertise on the Arab World to the relief and development sectors.

Stephan brings over 20 years of experience in the aid and relief sector, with field and leadership roles across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Egypt, the UAE, and Switzerland. He has held regional responsibilities covering eastern and southern Africa, the MENA region, and the Gulf. Since 2013, he has taken on governance roles across various organisations, including serving as a trustee on the board of Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa. He speaks Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. He holds a Master's degree in Management and Business Administration from KEDGE Business School (Bordeaux, France), a professional trainer accreditation from the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (London), and a Senior Practitioner-level mentor accreditation from the European Mentoring and Coaching Council.

Mark Garabedian, CFA, is Director of Digital Assets and Tokenization Strategy at Wellington Management, leading the firm's tokenized investment product efforts. Based in Boston, he was previously MD and Director of Trading Data and Analytics, and holds an M.S. in Finance from Bentley.

Mark Jennings is Head of Europe at Gemini, a position he has held since December 2024. He joined alongside a broader buildout of Gemini's European senior management team and has authored public commentary on the company's regulatory milestones in the region, including Gemini's MiCA licence, its MiFID II licence, and the selection of Malta as its MiCA hub.

Prior to Gemini, Jennings served as CEO of Crypto Facilities, the FCA-authorised crypto derivatives platform operating as a subsidiary of Kraken, where he led strategy development and execution for the platform's global client base. Before that, he was Chief Operating Officer for Kraken's European operations, with responsibility for establishing the company's regional presence. He has also held senior roles at TP ICAP, Credit Suisse, and Citi. His professional background spans trading systems, risk management, hedge funds, and derivatives. He holds a degree from Dublin City University, a Financial Risk Manager certification from GARP, and PCF-1 and PCF-42 accreditations from the Central Bank of Ireland.

Mark Kepeneghian is CEO and founder of Lise, a French regulated market infrastructure authorised by the ACPR under the EU Pilot Regime, integrating both a multilateral trading facility (MTF) and a central securities depository (CSD) within a single blockchain-based platform. Lise operates 24/7 with instant delivery-versus-payment settlement, with no T+2 cycle, no clearing house, and no dependency on traditional intermediation chains. Its stated focus is broadening equity financing access for SMEs and mid-caps. On 9 April 2025, Lise executed what it described as the first-ever on-chain IPO, listing ST Group, an aerospace and defence SME based near Toulouse, on its natively tokenised infrastructure. Investors participated via tokenised deposits, with a minimum ticket of one share and no subscription or custody fees. Lise counts BNP Paribas, CACEIS (Crédit Agricole Group), and Bpifrance among its shareholders.

Kepeneghian founded Kriptown in October 2017, the technology company that designs the trading and post-trade architecture underpinning Lise's tokenised instruments. Kriptown raised €4.2 million from BNP Paribas and Bpifrance, a round that coincided with the application for CSD and stock exchange approval. Alongside his operational roles, he is Vice-President and Chair of the Tokenization Committee at ADAN, a board member at France FinTech, and a member of the AMF's "Market Organisation and Functioning" Consultative Commission. Prior to Kriptown, he co-founded Aspix between January 2015 and July 2017. He holds a degree from ESCP, dated 2014.

Mark Williamson is Chief Commercial Officer at ClearToken, appointed in February 2026. In this role he leads Product Management, Sales & Marketing, and Strategy, with the mandate to deliver institutional-grade digital market infrastructure. ClearToken is building clearing and settlement services for digital assets, with the stated goal of unifying traditional finance and digital assets systems.

Prior to joining ClearToken, Williamson spent over six years at HSBC as Global Head of FX & Precious Metals, Digital Assets & Currencies, preceded by three years as HSBC's COO of FX Trading and Risk Management. During his time at HSBC he was responsible for the FX Everywhere initiative, a DLT solution for post-FX trade payment versus payment, and engaged with multiple central banks on CBDC and FX matters. Before HSBC, he spent more than six years at BNP Paribas, latterly as Global COO for FX & Local Markets. He also held a role at J.P. Morgan as eCommerce Programme Manager, overseeing the MorganDirect Single Dealer Platform across FX, FX Options and Interest Rate Derivatives. Additional roles included three years as COO of Gresham Computing and three years at Deutsche Bank as a Project Manager and Business Analyst. His career in banking and finance spans 35 years.

Martin Bruncko is Founder and CEO at Schuman Financial, a French-licensed Electronic Money Institution and stablecoin issuer headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, which he founded in February 2024. He leads the company's mandate to bring European and euro-denominated financial services on-chain. Schuman Financial's core product is EURØP, a euro-denominated stablecoin custodied by major European banks including Societe Generale. Bruncko also serves concurrently as Founder and Managing Partner of Steam Ventures, a blockchain and crypto venture vehicle he established in June 2023.

Prior to founding Schuman Financial, Bruncko served as Executive Vice President for Europe at Binance from October 2021 to March 2023, based across London and Paris. Earlier roles include Senior Advisor to the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation (2017–2019), Head of Europe at the World Economic Forum (2012–2013), Special Advisor to the President of the UN General Assembly (2012–2013), Board Member of the European Stability Mechanism (2011–2012), and Chief Economic Adviser at the Slovak Ministry of Finance (2003–2006). He also served as an Advisor to the Government of Dubai (2019–2021) and as a Member of the Investment Committee at the European Innovation Council Fund (2020–2023). His earlier entrepreneurial roles include Founder and Executive Chairman of Neulogy (2007–2010), Board Member and CFO/CSO at AeroMobil (2013–2017), and Founding Advisor at GA Drilling (2009–2017). The Schuman Financial about page references his role as Innovation Minister and Deputy Finance Minister of Slovakia, reflecting the public sector background he brings to the company's regulatory positioning in European finance.

Martin Köppelmann is CEO and co-founder of Gnosis, a decentralized blockchain and development group he has led since March 2017. Gnosis operates across multiple product lines including Gnosis Chain, Gnosis Pay, Safe, and CoW Swap. Köppelmann's current focus includes Circles v2, a community-owned money experiment that combines Metri wallet, Safe, CoW Swap, and Gnosis Chain into a single consumer application. The core mechanism of Circles allows anyone to create a "circle" that automatically mints one token per hour per member, with token value determined by community use.

Köppelmann co-founded Gnosis in January 2015 as part of ConsenSys, the blockchain development group led by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. Gnosis was initially built as a prediction market platform on Ethereum. The project subsequently expanded into blockchain infrastructure, acquiring and merging with xDAI to create a privacy-focused side-chain for Ethereum. Gnosis Pay, a non-custodial payment card product, is currently available in Europe and Brazil, enabling users to spend cryptocurrencies via EURe, a euro-denominated stablecoin from Monerium, with USDC integration in development. Prior to Gnosis, Köppelmann built Fairlay, a Bitcoin-based prediction market, which he later sold. His interest in blockchain originated following the 2008 financial crisis and engagement with the German Pirate Party's "liquid democracy" concept. He studied IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, completing a Bachelor's degree from 2007 to 2010 and an advanced degree from 2010 to 2013.

Matej Zak is Chief Executive Officer at Trezor, a Prague-based hardware wallet company, a position he has held since January 2023. In this role he directs the company's product vision, user experience, and global market expansion. Trezor produces open-source hardware wallets and an accompanying software application for mobile and desktop, with a focus on offline storage of private keys and protection of digital assets from online threats.

Zak joined Trezor in May 2019 as Product Manager and progressed through successive roles: Head of Trezor Suite from March to October 2020, Chief Product Officer from October 2020 to January 2023, before being appointed CEO. A stated priority under his leadership has been open-source security architecture. In relation to the Trezor Safe 7, he cited the inclusion of two secure elements — one of them auditable, with its code, SDK, and documentation publicly available on GitHub — as a significant departure from prior practice, where chips were supplied under NDA. He identified this as the rationale behind the development of TROPIC01, an open-architecture secure element. Prior to Trezor, Zak served as Digital Project Lead at U.plus from November 2018 to April 2019, and founded What The Hill, a Prague-based venture, from August 2017 to October 2018. His background spans product management, business development, and strategic planning within the technology and startup sector. He is a Czech native fluent in English. No educational credentials are stated in the available source content.

Mathew McDermott is Managing Director, Global Head of Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs, a position he has held since February 2020. In this role, he is responsible for leading the firm's cross-divisional digital assets strategy, which includes client-led tokenisation activities, crypto-linked product offerings, and blockchain investments. He also serves on the Goldman Sachs International Asset and Liability Committee and the Goldman Sachs International Bank Management Committee.

McDermott joined Goldman Sachs in 2005 as a vice president in the European Special Situations Group in London and was named managing director in 2010. Prior to his current mandate, he served as global head of Cross Asset Financing. Before joining Goldman Sachs, he worked at Morgan Stanley in the Securitized Products Group, focusing on structuring, financing, and risk management. He sits on the boards of Coin Metrics and HQLAx, is a board member of Elwood Technologies, a board member of Digital Asset, and serves on the board of the International Securities Lending Association. McDermott earned a BA (Hons) in Accounting and Finance at Nottingham and has been a member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants since 1999.

Mathilde Michels is an Analyst at The Big Whale, where she covers tokenomics and blockchain. Her published articles for the outlet include analyses of Binance listings and their impact on token prices, Ethereum's layer-2 business model, Aptos (APT), Usual (USUAL) stablecoins, the Farcaster protocol, and SocialFi.

In parallel, she is the founder of Tokenomics Data & Learning, a data infrastructure and analytics company she launched in January 2024, through which she also publishes educational content on token economics. She has been a Tokenomics Analyst Researcher at Chainforce, a tokenomics consultancy headquartered in the Netherlands, since December 2023, and has operated as a Tokenomics Designer since November 2023. Since January 2025, she has served as a jury member at Alyra, the blockchain and AI school, for the RS6675 certification in decentralized finance applications on blockchain, participating in the Hamilton, Galilée, and Berners-Lee defense sessions.

Mathis Egonneau is an Analyst at The Big Whale, with over five years of experience in decentralized finance and blockchain. He is active at Lagoon, a general-purpose vault infrastructure for institutional on-chain yield products, where he holds a Marketing Sales role focused on tokenizing corporate bonds. He is also involved in the DeFi France and Ethereum France communities.

His prior experience includes a role as Rédacteur Analyste at Cryptoast, a French cryptocurrency media outlet, which he joined in May 2023 and where he continues to contribute. Before that, he worked as Assistant Marketing at Meria (formerly Just Mining), a blockchain and cryptocurrency firm based in Metz, from September 2021 to August 2022. In that position, his responsibilities included social media management, technology and regulatory monitoring, processing staking deposit requests across multiple assets including ADA, SOL, DOT, and ETH, client support, and blog article writing.