People

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

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

Florencia Raspini is Director of Post-Trade Solutions, Platforms and Channels at BMV (Grupo Bolsa Mexicana de Valores). In March 2026, Raspini was scheduled to moderate the panel "Evolution of technology platforms: Current trends" at the 28th General Assembly of ACSDA, the Americas' Central Securities Depositories Association.

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

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

Floris Lugt is Chief Financial Officer at Qivalis, the Amsterdam-based joint venture formed by ING and a consortium of European banks to launch a euro-denominated stablecoin. He took up the CFO role at the start of 2026.

Before joining Qivalis, Lugt was Lead Digital Assets, Wholesale Banking at ING, and earlier held roles in treasury and financial risk at ING and ING France. He focuses on distributed ledger technology and its applications in wholesale banking, and advocates for industry-wide standards for digital payments and financial market infrastructure across Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gabriel Nguyen is Head of Cross Asset Distribution Sales for Northern and Eastern Europe at BNP Paribas, with over 15 years of experience in finance and asset distribution.

Gabriel Rombenso works at Itaú Unibanco and was described as Head of the FX sales desk and FX products in December 2023, with a focus on foreign exchange risk management and hedging for corporate clients. In March 2025, as Superintendent of Products and Corporate Sales, Rombenso was the bank's spokesperson for the launch of instant foreign-currency international payments in the Itaú app through a partnership with Wise Platform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giovanni Terzano is Managing Director - Head of Products and Digital Channels for Corporate, Commercial and SME at Banco De Credito Del Peru.

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

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

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

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

Graham Ferguson is Head of Ecosystem at Securitize, which he joined in August 2025 to bring more institutions, protocols and partners onto its tokenization platform. He was previously Head of Growth and GTM at Omni Network. He spoke on tokenization at Consensus Hong Kong in February 2026, pointing to distribution and regulatory requirements as the main bottlenecks.

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

Grégoire Huon is a Partner at BDO Advisory, where he leads the corporate treasury consulting practice within Liquidity Management Services at BDO France. He joined the firm in 2023, when the treasury consultancy Airpaje combined with BDO France.

He began his career as a treasury transformation consultant at Redbridge, then moved in-house as head of treasury projects and information systems at Groupe Bel in 2021, before joining Airpaje in 2022. His work centres on treasury transformation and treasury management systems. He contributes to the Association Française des Trésoriers d'Entreprise, where he co-presented a technical guide on the success factors of TMS implementations. He holds a master's degree in finance and treasury from IGR-IAE Rennes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horacio Barakat is Head of Digital Innovation and General Manager of Fixed Income Platforms at Broadridge, where he leads the development of digital solutions for capital markets and co-heads the fixed income post-trade platforms. He is General Manager of Broadridge's DLT Repo platform (DLR), which he created and which has reached over $2 trillion in monthly volume. Barakat was previously Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Broadridge, responsible for the company's blockchain strategy, including principal investments and organic product development. Before Broadridge, he held investment banking roles advising financial services and fintech firms on M&A and capital raising. He holds an industrial engineering degree from Universidad de Buenos Aires and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isabel Schmidt is Executive Platform Owner, Payments Enablement Platform at BNY, and authored the firm's September 2026 paper on modernizing the payments operating model. Schmidt was previously Co-Head of Global Payments Products within BNY Mellon Treasury Services.

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

Jacqueline O'Flanagan is Head of Financial Services for the Americas within Microsoft's worldwide industry organisation. She has more than two decades of experience across global markets, with a focus on AI-driven innovation in financial services. Before Microsoft, O'Flanagan held roles at Morningstar, the London Stock Exchange Group and CGI. She was named among the Top 50 Women Leaders in Finance for 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Barker is BNY's Global Head of Payments & Trade and Depositary Receipts and Head of Europe, and a member of the firm's Executive Committee. Barker joined BNY in May 2022 as Global Head of Treasury Services and Depositary Receipts. Barker previously spent 19 years at J.P. Morgan in senior treasury services roles in the U.S. and Asia, including leading the expansion of treasury services in Singapore, after starting out in consulting at Accenture. Barker holds an MBA from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree from James Madison University, and was named one of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking in 2024 and 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jineshwar "Jinu" Kochar works on crypto and Web3 sales at Worldpay, where he is part of the payment processor's EMEA crypto team and covers fiat and stablecoin payment flows for digital-asset businesses. He has represented Worldpay at industry events including Money20/20 Europe and Dutch Blockchain Week. He co-founded Crowdbazaar, a cross-border investment platform registered in India in 2019, and writes on tokenisation, stablecoins and security tokens on his personal site and on Medium.

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 Adams is Executive, Enterprise Payments & Digital Assets at National Australia Bank (NAB), with accountability for account-to-account payments across all customer segments, from retail to institutional and financial institution clients. He has been with NAB for around ten years and has led its Enterprise Payments business for five, a period in which the bank delivered AUD clearing through the NPP and Pay by Bank for e-commerce and recurring payments. He represents NAB on the board of Australian Payments Plus. Adams has over 25 years of experience in financial services, including nearly 20 in transaction banking. In April 2026 he spoke for NAB on its participation in Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia's wholesale tokenised asset market initiative.

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

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

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

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

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

Jorge Ballesteros is Data Owner for Digital Assets at S&P Global. His earlier experience includes roles at STX Group, Outlier Ventures, Shell and Powerledger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‍

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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