People

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.

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 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Matthew Dawson is Enterprise Acceleration, Ecosystem Development at the Ethereum Foundation, a position he has held since July 2025. He appeared as Enterprise Lead at the Ethereum Foundation at a May 2026 event in London hosted by The Big Whale, where he joined Franklin Templeton and 21x for a panel discussion on rebuilding the infrastructure of global finance using public blockchain rails. The conversation centred on replacing fragmented reconciliation-heavy ledgers with a single publicly verifiable ledger, and on the conditions under which institutional adoption of tokenised assets becomes viable.

Before joining the Ethereum Foundation, Dawson was an Associate at Outlier Ventures, a Web3 accelerator, from May 2024 to July 2025. Prior to that, he worked at Illumina Capital's blockchain accelerator in a research capacity from January 2022 to March 2023. His earlier career was in financial services consulting: he spent approximately a year and a half as a Consultant in Accenture's Financial Services Strategy and Consulting division, and before that worked as a Graduate Consultant at Atos in London focused on financial services technology, from October 2019 to December 2020. No educational background is included in the available source material.

Matthias Baccino is Senior Advisor at Trade Republic, a position he has held since January 2026, focused on democratizing wealth and making investing accessible across Europe. Prior to this role, he served as Markets Group Lead from May 2023 to January 2026, managing a team of regional managers responsible for distributing Trade Republic's product across Europe. He was Country Manager France from March 2021 and Regional Manager France Benelux from October 2022, roles that overlapped before consolidating into the Group Lead position.

In his capacity as Country Manager, Baccino was the public face of Trade Republic's crypto offering launch in France. He has spoken directly on the firm's approach to digital asset custody, noting that Trade Republic developed its own custody solution after an initial partnership with BitGo, and that the custody structure was registered with Austrian authorities ahead of MiCA implementation. The crypto offering, covering 50 cryptocurrencies, was extended to France and eight other European countries under his tenure. Before Trade Republic, he served as Directeur Général of BinckBank's French subsidiary from September 2016 to March 2020, where he developed the active investor offering, educational content, and launched BinckBank's first life insurance contract. Prior to BinckBank, he held roles at BNP Paribas CIB, including Head of Sales and Marketing for Exchange Traded Solutions France from October 2014 to July 2016, and started his career in 2009 in the Global Equity and Commodity Derivatives division. He holds degrees from Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence and ESSEC. He was listed in the Institut Choiseul 100 ranking in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Matt Hougan is Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management, where he works with the investment team to analyse, evaluate and invest in cryptoassets. He has been in the role since October 2020. At Bitwise, his publicly stated focus includes index methodologies, active strategies, and institutional positioning across Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, as well as the firm's vault product developed on Morpho, which he has described as among the most significant recent developments in asset management. He has articulated Bitwise's competitive positioning as that of a deep specialist — contrasting the firm's exclusive focus on digital assets against generalist asset managers entering the crypto ETF space.

Prior to joining Bitwise in early 2018, Hougan was CEO of ETF.com (formerly IndexUniverse.com), a role he held from 2006 to 2015, during which he helped build the first institutionally oriented ETF classification and ratings system and led the sale of the business in three transactions to FactSet, BATS, and Informa. He subsequently joined Informa, where he worked on Inside ETFs, the largest ETF conference in the world. He is co-author of two CFA Institute Research Foundation publications: "A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange-Traded Funds," published in 2015, and "Cryptoassets: The Guide to Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency for Investment Professionals." He has appeared three times as a member of the Barron's ETF Roundtable. He is also a co-founder of Future Proof, a board member of QuantumStreet AI, and a strategic advisor to Blockworks and StratiFi. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Bowdoin College.

Matt Kunke is a Director and US iShares Digital Assets ETFs Product Strategist at BlackRock, a role he has held since February 2024. His mandate covers the firm's digital assets ETF business, with responsibilities spanning research, marketing, and sales support. He has been directly involved in the launch of BlackRock's iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHB), a product that reached approximately $600 million in assets within its first two months. CF Benchmarks serves as the index provider for BlackRock's IBIT, ETHA, and ETHB. Kunke holds the CFA designation.

Before joining BlackRock, Kunke was a Research Analyst at GSR, a crypto market maker and OTC trading desk, where he authored fundamental crypto research and was cited in crypto media outlets. Prior to GSR, he led the digital assets research vertical at Global X ETFs and served as a portfolio manager on the actively managed Blockchain & Bitcoin Strategy ETF. Earlier in his career, he spent four years at J.P. Morgan's Private Bank as an Associate in Manager Solutions, researching alternative investment strategies including liquid alternatives, hedge funds, volatility and options-based strategies, equity long/short, and systematic macro. Kunke graduated Summa Cum Laude from Portland State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Finance.

Max Heinzle is Founder and CEO of 21X, a Frankfurt-based regulated exchange for the trading and settlement of digital assets operating under the European Union's DLT Regime. 21X has secured a licence to operate under that framework, making it the first fully regulated exchange of its kind under EU DLT Regime rules. The platform is built on a public permissionless blockchain and is designed to enable issuance, distribution, trading, and settlement of tokenised assets. In April 2026, Heinzle spoke at a Paris Blockchain Week breakfast event on the topic of products and opportunities on onchain rails.

Heinzle's career in financial services began in 2015 when he co-founded MEZZANY (OneCrowd Securities GmbH), a crowd-investing platform in Germany that reached a transaction volume of over €100 million and more than 90,000 registered users. In March 2017, he founded 21finance AG, a digital and regulated Marketplace as a Service platform for financial institutions, headquartered in Liechtenstein. He also became a founding member of the Institute for Value-based Enterprise (IVE) in Switzerland and serves as a founder and board member of Dcrypted AG, an investment company based in Liechtenstein. He founded 21X in 2023. Heinzle holds a Master of Science in Global Banking and Finance from the European School of Economics, London.

Merlin Egalite is Co-founder of Morpho, an onchain lending protocol with more than $10 billion in total deposits, which he has helped build since September 2021. At Morpho, he serves as integration team lead, contributing to the protocol's development and strategic direction. He is also an active contributor to the codebase, with public repositories on GitHub including a universal rewards distributor and vesting contracts written in Solidity, and recent activity spanning code review and commits to Morpho's open-source repositories.

Prior to co-founding Morpho, Egalite interned at Blockpulse from August 2020 to February 2021, working on blockchain protocol development and digital equity management tools. In December 2020, he began contributing to The Commons Stack, a project focused on public goods funding mechanisms using blockchain tools. He also held roles as a full-stack engineer at AtTheSpring, a data scientist at Randstad.fr where he built a job title and skill normalization system using deep learning, and a data science intern at Paris Digital Lab developing a recommender system for BNP Paribas Asset Management. Earlier in his career, he worked as a mobile and web development consultant at Junior CentraleSupélec and as an assistant to the CEO at Octobot, a startup incubated at Schoolab in Paris. In 2021, he worked as a smart contract analyst at Kleros. He was a finalist at the ETHGlobal hackathon in late 2020 for Unite.community, a token distribution project. Egalite graduated from CentraleSupélec with a degree in engineering in 2021.

Michael Bentley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Euler Labs, the team behind the Euler Finance multi-chain lending protocol, a position he has held since founding the company in 2020. In January 2025, Bentley announced his intention to step down from the CEO role and move into an advisory and product-focused position, with Jonathan Han, previously senior vice president of business development and partnerships at The Tie, appointed as his successor. During his tenure, Bentley co-led the rebuild of Euler Finance following a March 2023 flash loan exploit that resulted in approximately $200 million in losses, growing the protocol to over $4 billion in total deposits within a year of its relaunch. Ahead of his departure, Bentley acknowledged that the fully permissionless model he and co-founder Doug Hoyte originally pursued in 2020 did not achieve strong product-market fit, and identified serving fintech and institutional participants through bespoke credit markets as the protocol's next strategic direction.

Prior to founding Euler Labs, Bentley held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Oxford, where his work focused on dynamical systems and evolutionary game theory, at UCL, where he researched evolutionary theory, bioinformatics, and machine learning, and at the University of Leeds, where his research covered cancer evolution, bioinformatics, and machine learning. He also worked as a Pricing Analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland Business. Bentley holds a PhD in Mathematical Biology from the University of Oxford, a Master's degree in Computational Biology from the University of Leeds, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Newcastle University.

Michael Gronager is Co-Founder of Chainalysis, the blockchain data analytics company he co-founded in 2014. He served as CEO from founding until December 2024, when he permanently stepped down from the role, which passed to co-founder Jonathan Levin. He retains equity in the company but is no longer on its board.

Gronager entered the cryptocurrency sector in 2011, co-founding Kraken, a digital asset exchange, where he served as COO before transitioning to an advisory role until 2015. The founding premise of Chainalysis drew directly on his prior work managing large-scale data infrastructure: he identified that blockchain transaction data could be indexed and analysed to map market activity, customer behaviour, and fund flows. Under his tenure as CEO, Chainalysis developed blockchain analytics tools used by financial institutions, government agencies, and law enforcement for compliance and transaction tracking. Its flagship product, Reactor, was built to trace wallet activity and fund origins across public blockchains. He also participated in regulatory work, including contributing to the Blockchain and Virtual Currencies Working Group that informed the 5th European Anti-Money Laundering Directive. Before cryptocurrency, Gronager managed large-scale distributed computing infrastructure, including serving as CEO of the Nordic DataGrid Facility, which operated distributed storage for Large Hadron Collider research at CERN. He holds a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering and a PhD in Quantum Mechanics, both from the Technical University of Denmark, obtained in 1995 and 1998 respectively.

Michael Saylor is Executive Chairman and founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), a position he has held since August 2022, having previously served as Chairman, CEO, and founder from the company's inception in 1989 to 2022. He also serves as Chairman of Bitcoin Treasuries. Strategy has accumulated over 500,000 bitcoin, financed through instruments including convertible bonds and preferred shares, making it a Nasdaq-listed corporate bitcoin treasury vehicle. Saylor's thesis is that bitcoin represents the first mechanism in history for transferring value—rather than merely information—through digital networks, and he has positioned the company around acquiring bitcoin as a long-term treasury strategy. As of 2025, Strategy's preferred share obligations, including the STRC series carrying an 11.5% annual yield, generate total annual financial commitments approaching $1.5 billion, a figure Saylor has acknowledged requires careful cash management and which has slowed the pace of new bitcoin purchases.

Saylor founded MicroStrategy in 1989 at age 24 alongside MIT fraternity brother Sanju Bansal and Thomas Spahr. The company's original focus was advanced data analytics, pioneering relational online analytical processing (ROLAP), and went public on Nasdaq in 1998. He is also the creator and founder of Alarm.com (Nasdaq: ALRM) and holds inventor credit on more than 48 patents spanning relational analytics, mobile analytics, cloud computing, and mobile identity. Saylor attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship, obtaining dual degrees in aeronautics and astronautics and in science, technology and society, graduating with highest honors in 1987. He subsequently joined the Air Force Reserve and worked as a consultant building computer simulation models for companies including DuPont, Dow, and Exxon before founding Strategy.

Mike Jones is Partner, Executive Talent, Crypto at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), a position he has held since June 2022. His mandate is to help a16z crypto portfolio companies build executive hiring strategies and find and retain executive leaders for their projects.

Prior to joining a16z crypto, Jones was an Executive Recruiter at Netflix from January 2019 to May 2022, where he recruited talent for Creative Content Film, Marketing, Editorial & Publishing, and Publicity teams, and built a network of studio executives to work in-house on Netflix films. Before Netflix, he was a Technical Recruiter at Facebook, based in the Bay Area. He also has prior experience at Google. Jones grew up in the Bronx and completed the Half Dome hike in Yosemite. He mentors high school students through Good City Mentors.

Mike Silagadze is Founder and CEO of ether.fi, a decentralized finance platform he founded in October 2022 and has led since January 2023. Under his direction, ether.fi has evolved from a non-custodial ETH staking protocol built on EigenLayer into what the company describes as a crypto neobank, offering staking, yield-bearing vaults, a non-custodial credit card issued in partnership with Visa, and borrowing facilities. As of early 2025, the platform held between $9 and $10 billion in total value locked, with an annualised transaction volume approaching $1 billion and approximately 60,000 active cards. Silagadze has stated that roughly one-third of company revenue is generated by the credit card product. He has also indicated plans to launch euro-denominated yield products.

Prior to ether.fi, Silagadze founded Top Hat in 2009, an education software company he led as CEO for twelve years, growing it into the market leader in student engagement software before stepping down to a board role in March 2021. From October 2021 to February 2024, he served as CEO of Gadze Finance, a crypto DeFi fund. He has concurrently held a Venture Partner position at Ripple Ventures, a Canadian B2B SaaS early-stage fund, since March 2021. Silagadze graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2007 with a BASc in Electrical Engineering and is based in George Town, Cayman Islands.

Mike Sodikoff is a Managing Director at Bank of America, based in New York. He has held this role since December 2005, giving him over 20 years of tenure at the institution within General Management at the Director level.

Sodikoff holds a degree from Lafayette College and attended NYU Stern School of Business. The source content does not specify his current mandate, the products he owns, or any specific initiatives he leads within Bank of America.

Miles Jennings is Head of Policy & General Counsel at a16z crypto, the digital asset-focused venture capital arm of Andreessen Horowitz, a position he has held since March 2025. In this role, he advises the firm and its portfolio companies on decentralization, DAOs, governance, NFTs, and state and federal securities laws. He first joined a16z crypto in August 2021 as General Counsel, Crypto, before his mandate was expanded to include policy.

Jennings' involvement in the crypto sector dates to 2017, when he began working with ConsenSys. Prior to joining a16z crypto, he was a partner at Latham & Watkins, where he co-chaired the firm's global blockchain and cryptocurrency task force. His transactional experience at Latham included venture capital financings, initial public offerings, high yield debt offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and general company representation. He was a member of both the firm's Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry Group and its Fintech Industry Group, and acted as an outside advisor to ConsenSys' Tachyon Accelerator Program. He joined Latham as an associate in November 2009, was promoted to partner in January 2020, and departed in August 2021. He received a JD, magna cum laude, from Pepperdine University School of Law, where he was a fellow in the Palmer Center for Entrepreneurship & the Law, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mohamad Zaraket is Head of Digital Assets Strategy, EMEA at BNY, a position he has held since July 2021. In this role, he leads commercial strategy and growth across the EMEA region, with responsibilities covering go-to-market planning, client partnership development, and scaling revenue across major financial hubs. His focus spans bridging fintech and traditional finance, building client adoption across institutional segments including banking, asset management, and wealth management, and developing partnerships with industry bodies, fintechs, and startups.

Prior to his current role, Zaraket held positions at BNY including Vice President for the EMEA Region and Director of EMEA Digital Strategy. He has over 15 years of experience in global banking, with career history spanning London, Brussels, New York, and Dubai. He holds an MSc in Finance and Investment from the University of Edinburgh and a Post Master's Degree in Entrepreneurship from the University of Cambridge. Outside his primary role, he produces and hosts a podcast, Lessons of Innovation, featuring conversations with innovators, academics, authors, and entrepreneurs. He has spoken at the European Blockchain Convention 2022.

Mo Shaikh is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, the company behind the Aptos Layer 1 proof-of-stake blockchain, a role he has held since co-founding the company in December 2021 alongside former Meta engineer Avery Ching. Aptos raised over $400 million in venture capital from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and Multicoin Capital. Under his leadership, Aptos forged partnerships with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, Google, Microsoft, NBCUniversal, and MoonPay. The network demonstrated the ability to process 2 billion transactions in 24 hours, exceeding the combined capacity of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Shaikh stepped down as CEO of Aptos Labs in December 2024, retaining a founding shareholder position in the company. In February 2025, he co-founded Maximum Frequency Ventures, a $50 million fund providing financial and operational support for projects in crypto infrastructure, Web3, and AI networks.

Prior to Aptos, Shaikh worked in Strategic Partnerships at Novi, Facebook's digital wallet. Before that, he served as Director of Strategy at ConsenSys, where he founded Meridio in 2017, a blockchain platform for fractional real estate ownership backed by ConsenSys; Meridio was later acquired by ConsenSys. Earlier career roles include consultant at Boston Consulting Group, Real Estate Associate at BlackRock, Senior Analyst at Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets, and Senior Associate at KPMG. He has also contributed to projects at the United Nations and U.S. Department of State. Shaikh has served on the Board of Directors at Hunter College since 2021 and as an advisor to Techstars. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum and the Milken Institute Global Conference. He holds a B.S. in Economics, Psychology, and Accounting from Hunter College and an MBA in Organization Strategy and Finance from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.

Mustafa Al-Bassam is Co-Founder at Celestia Labs, where he focuses on research and development related to scaling blockchain base layers. His academic work in this area culminated in a PhD from University College London, completed in 2021, with a thesis titled "Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers." He received a BSc in computer science from King's College London.

Prior to Celestia Labs, Al-Bassam co-founded Chainspace, a blockchain protocol using sharding to increase transaction throughput. The Chainspace team was acquired by Facebook in 2019. He also served as an advisor to Nym from October 2019 to November 2021, and previously advised Secure Trading on information security and distributed ledger technology from 2016 to 2019. Earlier in his career, he held an internship at SwiftKey, where he built and optimised systems processing application usage statistics using AWS and Apache Spark, and completed an information security analyst internship at King's College London. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam in its 30 Under 30 in technology. He was born in Baghdad, Iraq in January 1995 and moved to London at age five. At 16, he was a core member of the hacker group LulzSec, operating under the alias "tflow," and was later affiliated with Anonymous. He pleaded guilty to computer misuse in 2013 and received a 20-month suspended sentence with 320 hours of community service.

Myles Harrison is Chief Product Officer at AMINA Bank, one of the world's first FINMA-regulated crypto banks, a role he has held since January 2023. He sits on the bank's Executive Committee and leads global product and marketing strategy. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of AMINA EU, the MiCA-licensed, FMA-regulated Austrian subsidiary of AMINA Bank, a position he has held since November 2025. At AMINA, his product mandate covers crypto custody, trading, staking, lending, and everyday banking services, with the bank operating across more than 35 countries. He spoke at Paris Blockchain Week 2026 on products and opportunities on onchain rails, representing AMINA Bank alongside peers from 21x and The Big Whale.

Harrison brings 15 years of financial services experience. Prior to AMINA, he served as Chief Product Officer at London-based Globacap, a private markets technology firm, from April 2021 to December 2022, having joined as Head of Product in March 2020. Before Globacap, he held several product roles at Santander UK across retail and corporate banking. He studied at Lancaster University.

Nadia Filali is Head of Innovation and Development at Groupe Caisse des Dépôts, a position she has held since May 2023. In this role, she leads the institution's work on digital innovation, with a particular focus on blockchain and asset tokenisation. She has contributed to Revue Banque on topics covering blockchain and crypto-assets, and has spoken publicly on the need to accelerate stablecoin development in Europe, arguing that tokenisation is reaching an inflection point toward industrialisation despite the long transition ahead given entrenched financial infrastructure.

Filali's engagement with blockchain at Caisse des Dépôts dates to 2016, when the institution launched an early initiative in the space before tokenisation terminology was widely established. She sits on the board of Archipels, a Paris-based technology company, and on the board of Acsel, the French digital economy association. Since January 2021, she has been a member of the Expert Panel of the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum, a European Commission initiative focused on blockchain policy and development. She also serves on the board of the Agence du Développement Digital (ADD) in Morocco, a role she has held since December 2017. She holds a degree from Sciences Po.

Nana Murugesan is CEO and Co-Founder of Modveon, a technology company founded in 2025 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Prior to founding Modveon, he served as President of Matter Labs from January 2024 to January 2025, where he represented the company publicly on initiatives including ZKsync's Elastic Chain architecture and a partnership with Buenos Aires to deploy zero-knowledge-backed digital identity. In that role he also discussed ZKsync's expansion into Latin America, gaming, and the creator economy.

Before Matter Labs, Murugesan was Vice President of Business Development, International, and Listings at Coinbase from January 2021 to March 2024, where he led the company's international development including its push into European markets. Prior to Coinbase, he was Managing Director of International Markets and Mobile Partnerships at Snap Inc. from January 2018 to January 2022, and held a Vice President and General Manager role at Samsung Electronics covering services and new business. He has described his work at Samsung and Snap as focused on mobile payments and content creation. He holds a degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and has received the Wharton 40 Under 40 award. He serves on the board of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Naomie Halioua is listed as CEO at Kaiko in the input, however the source content does not support this. According to retrieved sources, Halioua is Co-Founder of Cleo Labs, an AI compliance monitoring tool based in Paris, and Founder of Women in Web3 (WiW3), an association she created in June 2022 to support women in the Web3 sector. Her prior connection to Kaiko is as a product manager, a role referenced in a 2023 article describing her as "currently working as a product manager at the crypto-asset data provider Kaiko." She also authored at least one article published on Kaiko's blog, covering multi-venue liquidity strategies for digital asset traders.

Halioua studied at École Polytechnique, where her GitHub profile indicates she worked on projects spanning computer vision, reinforcement learning, and neural derivative hedging. She has lectured at HEC Paris on decentralised finance topics, including an introduction to DeFi for Master's students and a session on DAOs for the MBA programme. At Cleo Labs, she focuses on AI that monitors regulatory sources across 500 channels to flag compliance risks for product teams. The sources do not confirm that she currently holds a CEO title at Kaiko; the CEO of Kaiko identified in the source content is Ambre Soubiran.

Naveen Mallela is Global Head of Payments at Standard Chartered, a role effective 4 May 2026, based in Singapore, reporting to Mahesh Kini, Global Head of Cash Management. In this position, he leads an integrated payments organisation that brings together Collections, Clearing and Payments teams into a single structure, with responsibility for designing and delivering solutions across the full payments lifecycle, covering both traditional and emerging tokenised and on-chain payment flows.

Mallela joins from JPMorgan Chase, where he served as Global Co-Head of Kinexys (formerly Onyx), the bank's permissioned blockchain business unit focused on real-time, 24/7 cross-border payments and digital asset settlement. During his eleven years at JPMorgan, he was involved in launching JPM Coin and establishing the tokenised deposit product category, and he co-founded and scaled the Onyx/Kinexys business unit from inception. He also led Solution Architecture for APAC Banking Technology, beginning in 2015. Mallela holds a Deep Learning Specialisation certification issued by Coursera in May 2018. He brings more than 25 years of experience in global transaction banking and payments.

Nicolas Bacca is Chef at zknox, a role he has held since February 2025, where he focuses on defensive technologies and decentralization within the crypto space. He also serves as Metaverse Finder at Le Centre, a company supporting cultural institutions through digital tools, a position he has held since April 2022.

Bacca co-founded Ledger in November 2014 and served there until September 2023, most recently as Co-Founder and VP Innovation. During his tenure, he played a central role in making smart card technology usable for the general public and in developing Ledger's hardware wallet line. He left Ledger after nearly a decade, citing a preference for smaller, faster-moving structures. Prior to Ledger, he created BTChip, an open-standard secure element-based hardware wallet that became the first version of the Ledger wallet. He also founded Ubinity, which developed smartcard operating systems, and co-founded Simulity, where he served as CTO from 2005 to 2012. Earlier in his career, he spent five years at Oberthur Technologies working on card systems and mobile solutions, finishing as R&D Solution Architect. He has made angel investments in companies including Morpho Labs and Bitstack. Outside his commercial roles, he coordinated the effort to freeze cryptocurrency ransoms during the kidnapping of David Balland, assembling a team of lawyers and security specialists to send freeze requests to exchanges and stablecoin issuers in real time. Bacca is a graduate engineer from ENSICAEN.

Nicolas Chéron, a graduate of EDHEC, is an independent consultant specializing in financial products, supporting companies in the sector. He regularly shares his expertise on the stock markets.

Nicolas Colin is Co-Founder & Policy Editor at Currency of Power, a research project, newsletter, and podcast tracking the emerging global monetary order. Currency of Power, which he co-founded in 2025 with Marieke Flament, analyses monetary policy, geopolitics, the evolution of banking, and how cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, and other digital assets are reshaping control over the global financial system. Colin's stated role focuses on the policy dimension of this research, while Flament covers industry. The project serves investors, policymakers, and industry leaders seeking analysis at the intersection of finance, technology, and geopolitics.

Colin also serves as Head of Research at Vsquared Ventures, a pan-European deep tech venture capital firm focused on companies embedding advanced science into energy, compute, manufacturing, and infrastructure, a position he took up in February 2026. He is additionally the founder and publisher of Drift Signal, a newsletter he launched in 2017 providing macro and markets analysis through what he describes as Late-Cycle Investment Theory. His career spans over 15 years in technology-related roles, moving from senior civil servant to entrepreneurship to co-founding a tech investment firm and into macro research. He is a former French Treasury official. His work has been published in the Financial Times, Sifted, Politico Europe, and Foreign Affairs. He has been based in Paris, London, and Munich.

Nicolas Consigny is a Privacy Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, where he focuses on integrating privacy-preserving technologies into the Ethereum base layer. He leads the development of Project Kohaku, an on-chain privacy framework. Prior to this research role, he served as Developer Coordinator at the Ethereum Foundation, a position he took up in March 2024.

Before joining the Ethereum Foundation, Consigny worked at Ledger as Developer Relations Manager from February 2022 to March 2024. He was also a core contributor and coordinator at Railgun DAO, a privacy protocol built on Ethereum that uses zk-SNARKs to allow users to conduct private transactions and interact with DeFi applications without exposing sender, receiver, or transaction amounts. In that capacity, he organised development efforts, communicated the protocol's strategic direction, and liaised with the broader Ethereum community. Consigny graduated from ESSEC Business School.

Nicolas Julia is Co-founder and CEO of Sorare, a Paris-based blockchain gaming company he founded in December 2018. His stated goal is to create the global leader in sports entertainment by enabling fans to own digital player cards, build teams, and compete in fantasy sports competitions. Sorare raised a $680 million Series B round in 2021, valuing the company at $4.3 billion, and has secured partnerships with over 400 sports organisations including the NBA, MLB, Premier League, LaLiga, and Bundesliga. The company has expanded into the US market and operates across football, basketball, and baseball.

Julia built Sorare around the use of NFTs to represent player cards, creating a model in which digital ownership is tied to real-world sports performance. Before founding Sorare, he served as VP of Operations at Stratumn, a blockchain technology company, from 2016 to 2018. Prior to that, he co-founded La Javaness in 2015, and before entering the tech sector worked as a Senior Consultant at Eurogroup Consulting France from 2010 to 2014, and earlier as an M&A analyst at Rothschild. He holds an MSc in Management from Ecole de Management de Lyon, completed an exchange semester in Economics at Hanken School of Economics in 2009, and attended Lycée Saliège for his classe préparatoire in the economic track.

Nicolas Liochon is a recognized expert in the field of blockchain technologies. Passionate about innovation and decentralization, he actively contributes to the development of secure and efficient digital ecosystems. His commitment and expertise make him a key player in digital transformation.

Nicolas Louvet is CEO of Coinhouse, a Paris-based regulated crypto investment and services platform he has led since October 2017. He is also CEO of Coinhouse Custody Services (CCS), the group's custodial subsidiary, which he has run since November 2018. Before joining Coinhouse, he spent 15 years with European venture capital funds, including Sofinnova and Serena Capital, where he made over 50 investments in and exits from companies across Europe and the United States. He is a graduate of the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay.

Under his leadership, Coinhouse became the first crypto asset service provider registered by France's Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) in March 2020, and subsequently registered by Luxembourg's CSSF in December 2021. He led a strategic fundraising round in 2022 that funded new product development and European expansion. In 2018, he oversaw the rebranding from La Maison du Bitcoin to Coinhouse and the shift toward an online, service-oriented model. Coinhouse is currently pursuing MiCA authorisation. In April 2026, Louvet participated as a panellist at The Big Whale's Corporate Breakfast in Paris, addressing how French banks, fintechs, and asset managers are engaging with digital assets. In a 2025 interview, he outlined a consolidation strategy for the European crypto market, identifying acquisition, merger, or being acquired as necessary paths forward, and referenced a banking licence as a medium-term objective.

Nico Pasquariello is a Digital Assets Specialist at Cantor Fitzgerald in New York, working within the firm's digital assets business including its Bitcoin financing operation. He is a registered broker (FINRA CRD #7052594) at the intersection of traditional financial services and institutional digital asset products.

Nikhil S. is Director, Digital at BlackRock, based in London, a role he has held since December 2025. His remit sits within the Digital function at BlackRock, focused on digital assets.

Prior to joining BlackRock, Nikhil spent nearly three years at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong, where he served as Head of Growth for Kinexys Digital Assets (formerly Onyx Digital Assets), J.P. Morgan's digital assets platform. Before that role, he held positions as Executive Director and Senior Product Manager, and Vice President and Product Manager, both within J.P. Morgan's digital assets and blockchain operations in Hong Kong. From March 2019 to October 2020, he was Vice President in the CIB Blockchain Centre of Excellence at J.P. Morgan. Earlier in his career, he worked as a Wealth Management Advisor covering alternative investments at SinoPac Securities (Asia) Limited in Hong Kong from October 2016 to February 2019. His LinkedIn profile notes prior involvement in the blockchain product and strategy team at J.P. Morgan Chase. His total professional experience spans approximately 18 years and 11 months.

Nikhil Sharma is a Director on the Digital Assets team at BlackRock, based in the UK, focused on the firm's international digital assets initiatives across cryptoassets, stablecoins and tokenized assets.

Nikola Stojanow is Partner New Ventures at Bank Frick, one of Europe's pioneering regulated blockchain banks. He co-founded the æternity blockchain and founded Meta Change Capital, a venture fund backing early-stage blockchain startups across Europe, MENA, Asia and Africa.

Nogie Udevbulu is Global Head of Research and Analytics for ETF and Index Investing (EII) at BlackRock, where she is responsible for advancing thought leadership and delivering insights through research, data science, and technology for the ETF and Index business. She holds a DACFP certification in Blockchain and Digital Assets (Financial Professional Track), issued August 2025, and has posted publicly about BlackRock's digital assets initiatives, including the launch of the BlackRock U.S. Equity Bitcoin Balanced Risk 12% Index, a product developed in partnership with Delaware Life Insurance Company designed to give policyholders exposure to digital assets within an indexed annuity structure.

Prior to BlackRock, Udevbulu was Global Head of Data & Innovation Markets Strategy at Bank of America, where she oversaw the Global Index Team, providing thought leadership to index providers and asset management firms and developing products that combined equity index and ETF knowledge with trade execution intelligence. She received the 2023 Excellence in Asset Management award from Markets Media Finance and was inducted into Diversity Woman's 2023 Elite 100. In 2020, she received the Seed of Fortune HerWallStreet Award and an Honorary Recognition from Boys Hope Girls Hope New York. She is a board member of the Forte Foundation and Graham Windham, and a certified life coach. She holds a BBA from Baruch College (City University of New York) and an MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and has completed executive education at Harvard Business School. She also holds FINRA Series 7 and Series 24 licenses.

Oleg Ivanov is Co-Founder & COO at SecondLane, a Web3-native secondary marketplace providing liquidity for VCs, angel investors, advisors, and project founders holding otherwise illiquid SAFTs, SAFEs, equity, and advisory tokens. He has held the role since November 2022, operating primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area and Dubai.

In a June 2025 interview with The Big Whale, Ivanov described how the OTC crypto secondary market has grown more granular, noting the emergence of short-term buyers who systematically hedge token purchases near unlocking dates using derivatives to target predictable returns over three-to-six-month horizons — a segment he described as representing approximately half of current secondary market activity. Beyond SecondLane, Ivanov co-founded Fluenta, an AI-powered platform that helps founders and startup advisors prepare investor-ready companies, covering pitch validation and fundraising workflows. He is also Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Weezi, a DAO asset management tool for multi-wallet, cross-chain operations in DeFi, NFT, and GameFi. He additionally co-founded Kommune.one. Ivanov has made 80+ deep tech blockchain investments across more than a dozen countries. He is also a UBI endorser and is listed as a speaker at an AI conference scheduled for Dubai in November 2026.

Oli Harris is Global Head of Kinexys at J.P. Morgan, leading the bank's blockchain division with a stated focus on expanding digital settlement infrastructure and tokenization capabilities, strengthening partnerships across public and private networks, and driving activity at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets. His appointment marks a return to JPMorgan, where he previously served as Head of Crypto Assets Strategy and Quorum from 2018 to 2020 and as Head of Strategy for the International Consumer Bank from 2019 to 2020.

Harris has argued publicly that tokenization alone does not create liquidity, a position he articulated at Consensus Toronto in 2025. He has instead emphasized the need for a unified global settlement layer capable of merging money, assets, and data onto a single software platform, and has described blockchain technology as mature enough for large institutions to replace legacy back-end infrastructure rather than run isolated experiments. Between his two stints at JPMorgan, he served as Managing Director at Goldman Sachs from July 2020 to September 2024, where he worked on blockchain and tokenization. He subsequently founded Arda Global, a New York-based startup focused on making real estate assets programmable on blockchain infrastructure, which he continues to lead concurrently as Founder and CEO.

Oliver Stalley is Product Director, Payment Tokenization at American Express, a position he has held since September 2022. In this role, his mandate centres on payment tokenization, placing him within one of the more technically complex areas of digital payments infrastructure. Prior to this, he served as Product Director for Loyalty Benefits at American Express from August 2018 to September 2022, based in the United Kingdom. Earlier positions at the company included Director of New Product and Digital Servicing Capabilities (September 2015 to August 2018), Senior Manager for Commercial Card Product Line Strategy (June 2013 to October 2015, based in New York), Product Manager for Online and Emerging Payments (January 2010 to June 2013, also in New York), and Project Manager in Global Merchant Services (September 2007 to January 2010). His career at American Express spans approximately 18 years across product management, strategy, and project delivery functions.

Before joining American Express, Stalley worked as a Sales Executive at Calibre Comms, a UK-based telecommunications company, from January 2005 to January 2006. He holds a BA (Hons) in Business Management with Marketing from the University of Brighton, where he studied from 2002 to 2006.

Oliver Yates is CEO and co-founder of Aplo, a Paris-based, EU-licensed prime broker for digital assets serving institutional investors. He is responsible for all aspects of the business's growth and strategy. Aplo offers institutional clients access to liquidity across digital assets, with capabilities spanning trading, borrowing, hedging, staking, and custody, delivered through a single platform. The firm was acquired by Coincheck.

Yates has been active in blockchain and digital assets since 2016. At Allianz Trade, he built the first blockchain-enabled insurance contract for a major French insurer. He subsequently led a research project on Ethereum security exploits at the DISC department of ISAE-SUPAERO, with a focus on 51% and GHOST attacks. He then contributed to the design of risk and trading signals for cryptocurrency funds at Merkle Data, a blockchain data firm later acquired by Anchorage. He founded Aplo in November 2019. He holds an MSc in Applied Mathematics from ISAE-SUPAERO and a joint MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship from École Polytechnique and HEC Paris, and studied at the University of California, Berkeley.

Olivier Galaud is Chief Business Officer at Everstake, based in the United States. Everstake operates as a staking and blockchain infrastructure provider, running 40,000 nodes with $7 billion staked. In December 2025, Galaud represented Everstake at a London breakfast event co-hosted with Bitwise and The Big Whale, focused on cryptocurrency adoption by institutional players, where he spoke alongside representatives from Bitwise and Zodia Custody. His public remarks at that event addressed the industrialisation of staking infrastructure, the emergence of on-chain yield as an institutional rates product, and the structuring of packaged staking products including ETPs, ETFs, vaults, and structured yield instruments.

Prior to Everstake, Galaud served as co-founder and CEO of 3i Plus and 3i Energy. Earlier career roles include Head of Marketing at BNP Paribas, eBay, and Carat. He is also listed as an advisor.