People

Matt Blumenfeld is the Global and US Digital Assets Lead at PwC, leading the firm's Web3 and digital-asset practice advising institutions on strategy at the TradFi/on-chain intersection. 15+ years in financial services; MBA Chicago Booth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Coniglio is Head of Institutional Research at The Big Whale, an independent market intelligence platform on digital assets founded in 2022 and headquartered in Paris. In this role he sits within the firm's research and analyst team, which produces editorial coverage, briefings, and research serving the platform's institutional client base.

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

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

Maximilian Bruckner is Sales Director for Germany at Zodia Custody, the institution-first digital-asset custodian backed by Standard Chartered in association with Northern Trust and SBI Holdings, where he focuses on institutional clients in the German market.

Before joining Zodia Custody, Bruckner was Business Development Manager for Digital Assets at WM Gruppe (WM Datenservice), working on token classification and data. Earlier he served as Head of Sales at 21e6 Capital AG, a Swiss crypto investment advisor, and as Executive Director of the International Token Standardization Association, where he led a research team building a large token-classification database. He speaks regularly at industry events such as the Crypto Assets Conference and the European Blockchain Convention.

May Zabaneh is VP and GM of Crypto at PayPal, leading product strategy for blockchain, crypto and digital currencies including the PYUSD stablecoin. At PayPal since 2007, focused on digital currencies and cross-border remittances since 2021.

Meghan Joumas is Director of External Communications at Fidelity Investments, leading corporate affairs and external communication strategies in the finance sector.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael O'Reilly is President of Fidelity Digital Assets since 2023, overseeing custody, execution, technology and client services for the institutional crypto platform. Previously COO of the division, he has spent 25+ years at Fidelity and has led its Bitcoin/Ether custody and Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD) stablecoin launch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicolas Jaïs is Head of Fintech & Digital Lending at Eiffel Investment Group, a French alternative asset manager (~EUR 6bn AUM). He leads the firm's asset-based lending and digital lending strategies, financing fintech and digital-asset originators.

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

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

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

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

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

Nicole Parina is a Principal at Apollo Global Management, specializing in finance and technology program management with a background in corporate law and finance.

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

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

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

Noé Giglio leads Strategic Partnerships and Private Events at The Big Whale, a market intelligence platform on digital assets founded in 2022 and headquartered in Paris. He is based in London and has been active in the digital assets sector since 2019, building expertise across onchain finance and investment strategies and a network spanning financial institutions, corporates, and digital asset companies across Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olivier Jaillon is Chairman of the Board at Wakam, a European B2B2C embedded insurance platform. He previously served as CEO of Wakam from 2018, having acquired the company — then known as La Parisienne Assurances, founded in 1829 — in 2000 and transformed it from a traditional insurer into a digital insurance platform. In 2020, La Parisienne Assurances was rebranded as Wakam, which became a société à mission in April 2021.

Jaillon created his first company at age 19 and launched Assurdiscount.com, the first online insurance site in France, in the late 1990s. He also founded Protegys Group, a brokerage firm designing and distributing insurance products, including via the internet. He has served on the board of Groupe Barrière and was a board member of the Tezos Foundation between 2021 and 2022. As of mid-2025, he holds the role of Vice Chairman at Fondation FondaMental and is President of Off The Grid SRL, a consulting firm based in Milan. He is the author of Patrimoine éphémère (Débats Publics, 2020), which examines the shift toward fractional usage and the decline of ownership and its implications for the insurance sector. He also contributed to Ose ! Tout le monde peut devenir entrepreneur by Alexandre Mars (Flammarion, 2020). Jaillon holds a Master's in Economics and Management from EM Lyon (1992) and completed a leadership and organisational change programme at INSEAD in 2018 under Professor Manfred Kets de Vries.

Omar Shakeeb is CEO and Co-Founder of SecondLane, a Web3 private markets fintech company focused on digital asset private markets. He was appointed Chief Executive Officer in April 2025, having previously served as Chief Business Development Officer, where he led client base expansion, institutional relationship development, and commercial strategy. His appointment was described by SecondLane as reflecting the company's emphasis on client-facing leadership and the operational scale required to support continued growth.

SecondLane operates in OTC and secondary markets for digital assets, offering services including capital raising, asset management, and advisory. The company's portfolio includes positions in Anthropic, OpenAI, Fireblocks, SpaceX, Kalshi, and LayerZero, among others. Active in digital assets since 2016, Shakeeb operates at the intersection of institutional adoption, capital formation, and regulatory matters in private markets. He is a limited partner in venture funds including ParaFi, Alliance DAO, and Topology Ventures, and has backed companies including Figure AI and Apptronik. Alongside his role at SecondLane, he served until recently as a Partner at Henckel & Zahir Architects in the Netherlands, where he spent over a decade leading capital-intensive projects in regulated planning environments.

Oscar Dumant is CEO and Co-founder of Dowgo, a European tokenization platform focused on green bonds on the blockchain, which he co-founded in October 2021. Dowgo is headquartered in Paris and offers investor and issuer onboarding services for tokenized green bonds. Dumant has a GitHub presence under the organization, with a public repository in JavaScript related to ERC1155, a token standard used in blockchain asset management.

Prior to founding Dowgo, Dumant worked as an Investment Analyst at Catella, a European specialist in property investments and fund management, in a capital markets capacity from September to January 2021. Before that, he spent over a year as a Fund Manager at HSBC in Paris, focused on multi-asset management. Earlier in his career, he worked as a VC Analyst at A Plus Finance, a Paris-based venture capital and private equity firm, from August to January 2018. He studied at SKEMA Business School and is based in Paris.

Oya Celiktemur is Sales Director EMEA at Ondo Finance, a role she has held since September 2024. At Ondo, her work spans tokenized treasuries, tokenized stocks, and ETFs. She has spoken publicly on the institutional adoption of tokenized equities, including at The Big Whale's Future of Finance event in April 2026 and Paris Blockchain Week 2026, where she addressed the progression from tokenized Treasuries to tokenized stocks and ETFs, and the next phase of derivatives including perpetuals.

Before joining Ondo, Celiktemur was Sales Director at Jacobi Asset Management, where she was part of the core team involved in launching Europe's first Bitcoin ETF. Prior to that, she held a Business Development Director role at Copper, an institutional crypto custodian. Her background in traditional finance spans 15 years, beginning at Lehman Brothers in Structured Credit Derivatives, followed by Prime Brokerage roles at Jefferies and subsequently Morgan Stanley. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Cornell University and an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the London School of Economics, where her dissertation focused on cryptography.

Paolo Ardoino is the CEO of Tether, appointed to the role in December 2023. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer of Bitfinex. Under his leadership, Tether's stablecoin USDT has become the largest US dollar-backed stablecoin by market capitalisation. Tether has expanded beyond USDT to issue stablecoins pegged to other currencies, including the euro, the Mexican peso, the offshore Chinese yuan, and the UAE dirham, as well as Tether Gold. Ardoino has stated that stablecoins are most effective when used outside the country whose national currency they replicate, citing high inflation and limited banking access as key drivers of USDT adoption. Tether has invested approximately $2.5 billion in sustainable energy and technology sectors, around $1 billion in AI infrastructure company Northern Data, and $200 million in Blackrock Neurotech, with Ardoino stating these investments are funded from Tether's profits.

Ardoino joined Bitfinex in 2014 as a software engineer, working on the exchange's trading engine and backend infrastructure. He became CTO of Bitfinex in 2016 and CTO of Tether in 2017, a position he held until becoming CEO in December 2023. Earlier in his career, he worked as a researcher at the University of Genoa on cybersecurity and cryptography projects for military applications, then at a hedge fund developing trading algorithms. In 2013, he founded Fincluster, a London-based technology startup building cloud-based financial service applications for fund managers. In 2022, he co-founded Holepunch, an open-source platform for building peer-to-peer products. That same year, he worked with the mayor of Lugano, Switzerland, to enable the city to accept Tether and other cryptocurrencies for municipal payments. Ardoino was born in Cisano sul Neva, Italy, in 1984 and holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Genoa.

Pascal Gauthier is Chairman and CEO of Ledger, a Paris-headquartered manufacturer of hardware cryptocurrency wallets. He became CEO in January 2019, succeeding co-founder Eric Larchevêque, and was appointed Chairman in December 2020. He had previously joined Ledger as a seed investor and board member in 2014, and served as President from 2017 before assuming the CEO role. Under his leadership, Ledger expanded its product line to include Ledger Live, a digital asset management application, and Ledger Stax, a consumer hardware device. He has publicly advocated for self-custody of crypto assets, arguing that centralised platforms should be used to buy and sell cryptocurrencies rather than to hold them.

Gauthier co-founded Kaiko, a financial data platform focused on Bitcoin and digital asset market data, in 2014. He serves as a board member at Komainu, a regulated digital asset custody solution established as a joint venture between Nomura, Ledger, and CoinShares. Earlier in his career, he was COO at Criteo, the advertising technology company, where he contributed to the company's expansion to a EUR 2.17 billion market capitalisation. Prior to Criteo, he was involved with Kelkoo, a price comparison service sold to Yahoo for EUR 475 million. Before joining Ledger as President in 2017, he worked as a Venture Partner at Mosaic Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm focused on Series A investments.

Patrick Azzopardi is CEO and co-founder of Dowsers, a platform focused on automated formal verification of smart contracts for on-chain finance. Formal verification is a mathematical discipline that proves software cannot produce a defined set of catastrophic outcomes, as distinct from conventional testing, which can detect bugs but cannot prove their absence. In the context of on-chain finance, Azzopardi identifies three properties Dowsers formally verifies: that a digital asset cannot be withdrawn without its owner's consent, that an asset cannot be locked without the user's knowledge, and that a protocol's rules cannot be changed without the user's knowledge.

The founding team at Dowsers draws its formal verification expertise from work on the automated metro lines in Paris, where they mathematically proved that software carrying 500 million passengers a year, comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of code, could not produce a collision. Azzopardi's own background is in investment banking, with prior experience as an M&A advisor. He has been involved with blockchain since 2014, and the original foundation idea for Dowsers was to apply formal verification expertise to secure the team's own crypto and NFT investments through reliable smart contract analysis.

Patrick Collison is CEO and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds programmable financial services, including API-based online payment processing for businesses ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises such as Ford and Amazon. He co-founded Stripe with his brother John Collison in 2010, with the goal of making it simpler to accept payments on the internet.

Before Stripe, Collison co-founded Auctomatic in 2007 with his brother John, an auction and marketplace management system that was acquired by Canadian company Live Current Media in 2008 for $5 million. In 2021, he co-founded Arc Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research organization focused on curiosity-driven science, operating in partnership with Stanford, UCSF, and UC Berkeley. In 2020, he co-founded Fast Grants with economist Tyler Cowen to fund COVID-19-related science. Collison was born in Limerick, Ireland on 9 September 1988 and grew up in Dromineer, County Tipperary. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology before dropping out in 2009. Prior to university, he won the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at age sixteen, with a project involving the creation of Croma, a LISP-type programming language.

Patrick Mollard is Co-Founder & CEO of Fipto, a European fintech providing stablecoin payment infrastructure for businesses, which he co-founded in 2022. Fipto operates as modern infrastructure for B2B payments and treasury, enabling companies to send, receive, and manage funds using stablecoins, with settlement available 24/7. The company holds a Payment Institution license with the ACPR in France and a MiCA CASP license with the AMF in France. Fipto's platform is accessible via API, web platform, or Treasury Management Systems.

Mollard founded Fipto after identifying three structural problems in international B2B payments: the failure of legacy correspondent banking and messaging technology to meet corporate expectations on speed, cost, and transparency; the existence of blockchain-based tools capable of addressing these gaps; and the practical barriers preventing corporate adoption of those tools, including wallet setup, security, and compliance. Prior to founding Fipto, he held fintech roles where he developed direct exposure to these payment infrastructure gaps. Under his leadership, Fipto raised $16 million in funding, launched stablecoin Payment Links enabling businesses to accept stablecoin payments and receive euros automatically without direct crypto exposure, and secured a strategic partnership with Worldline to develop stablecoin-based payment and settlement use cases in Europe and APAC. Mollard has publicly commented on consolidation dynamics in the stablecoin payments sector, including Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK, characterising independent regulated infrastructure players as structurally differentiated from platforms absorbed into single financial institution ecosystems.

Paul-Adrien Hyppolite is Co-Founder and CEO of Spiko, a Paris-based fintech founded in June 2023 and licensed by French authorities (ACPR and AMF) as a MiFID investment firm. He co-founded the company to build financial infrastructure for the issuance, transfer, and distribution of financial instruments, with an initial focus on tokenised money market funds. Spiko launched two tokenised money market funds in mid-2024 — a euro-denominated fund (EUTBL) and a dollar-denominated fund (USTBL) — and subsequently added a sterling fund. As of the most recent available figures, Spiko manages just over $815 million in assets across its products, with the euro fund exceeding €500 million, which the company describes as the largest tokenised cash equivalent in euros. Total assets under management across all funds place Spiko among the leading global providers of tokenised money market funds, behind BlackRock's BUIDL and on a trajectory to surpass Franklin Templeton's BENJI.

Prior to founding Spiko, Hyppolite served as Deputy Head of the Financial Markets Division at the Direction générale du Trésor (French Treasury), where he was responsible for the regulation of financial instruments markets. Before that, he held a position as Seconded National Expert at the European Commission from 2019 to 2021, and earlier worked as a Private Equity Analyst at Antin Infrastructure Partners in London. He holds a degree in Economics and Finance from École normale supérieure and École polytechnique.

Paul Brody is Global Blockchain Leader at EY, a position he has held since July 2016. He is responsible for EY's global blockchain business across tax, audit, and consulting, covering strategy, engineering, research, and operational management. He leads development of EY's Nightfall and Starlight platforms, and built the firm's first smart contract testing platform and first on-chain audit platform, EY Blockchain Analyzer. He also developed EY's first global SaaS platform, Blockchain.EY.com. EY was the first Big Four firm to embrace public blockchains including Ethereum and Bitcoin under his leadership.

Brody is also Chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a role he assumed in January 2024 having previously served as a board member from September 2022. He is the author of Ethereum for Business and describes himself as a public blockchain supporter and privacy advocate. He was introduced to Ethereum in 2014. In a notable transaction, EY became the first company to receive a B2B payment in the stablecoin PYUSD from PayPal, executed through a fully automated process involving SAP and Coinbase, eliminating the need for manual intervention by EY's accounting department. Prior to his blockchain role, Brody served as Americas Strategy Leader for the Technology Sector at EY from April 2015 to January 2017.

Paul Bureau is Directeur Offre Actifs Numériques (Head of Digital Assets) at Banque Delubac & Cie, a role he has held since October 2024. He is responsible for the digital assets product offering at the bank. In April 2026, he participated as a speaker at The Big Whale's Corporate Breakfast in Paris, alongside executives from Hexarq (BPCE), Coinhouse, and The Big Whale, at an event focused on how French banks, fintechs, and asset managers are advancing into DeFi, stablecoins, asset tokenisation, and onchain financial infrastructure.

Prior to joining Delubac, Bureau spent four years and four months as Head of Sales and Business Development at Manaos, a sustainable investment services platform for institutional investors and asset managers. Before that, he held a digital strategy role at OneWealthPlace from 2017 to 2020. Earlier in his career, he worked at Lyxor Asset Management, where he served as Manager of the Robo Advisor Program and, separately, as Head of Digital Data. His background spans corporate and investment banking, asset management, and wealth management, with a total of approximately 17 years of experience in finance.

Paul Frambot is Co-founder and CEO of Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol operating on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. He co-founded Morpho in 2021 while completing his master's degree at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. The protocol launched its first version, Morpho V0, introducing a peer-to-peer matching model for decentralized lending that reached over $1 billion in deposits within 18 months. In 2024, Morpho launched a second protocol version introducing curated lending vaults and a permissionless market design, surpassing $12 billion in deposits within 18 months of launch.

Frambot secured $2 million in seed funding in 2021 while still a student, followed by an $18 million raise in 2022 from investors including a16z and Variant. In 2024, he led a $50 million strategic funding round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Pantera, Brevan Howard, BlockTower, and Kraken Ventures. That same year, US asset manager Apollo agreed to acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens over four years, representing approximately 9% of total supply in circulation. Frambot has authored articles on decentralized finance covering protocol design, token economics, and risk management, with work featured in Fortune and CoinDesk. In 2023, he introduced the concept of "Asset Curators" through blog posts addressing risk management in DeFi. He holds a Master's in Parallel and Distributed Systems from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, completed in 2022, with studies concentrated on distributed and consensus algorithms and their applications in blockchain technology.

Paul Grewal is Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary at Coinbase, a position he has held since September 2020. He is responsible for Coinbase's legal, compliance, global intelligence, risk management, and government relations functions. In that capacity, he leads the exchange's engagement with financial services regulators and contributes to the development and rollout of regulated products and services. He also authors public-facing content on consumer protection matters, including Coinbase's work with law enforcement on cases involving digital asset theft.

Prior to Coinbase, Grewal served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook from 2016 to 2020, where he grew the legal team to more than 200 people and oversaw regulatory affairs, litigation, and commercial matters. Before that, he served as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California from December 2010 to June 2016. Earlier in his career, he was a partner at Howrey LLP, where his practice concentrated on intellectual property and patent litigation in federal courts. He also held judicial clerkships with Judge Arthur J. Gajarsa of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Judge Sam H. Bell of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. He currently serves as an Independent Board Director at Epiq and as a Director on the Nomination and Governance Committee of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. Grewal holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Paul Gurzal is Co‑Head of Fixed Income and Head of Quantitative Investment at La Française AM.

Peter Johnson is a Partner and Co-Head of Venture/Private Investments at BH Digital (Brevan Howard), co-leading crypto and fintech venture investing. Previously nine years at Jump Capital/Jump Crypto as first employee. MBA Chicago Booth, CFA, Kauffman Fellow.

Philippe Meyer is Head of Digital and Blockchain Solutions at BBVA Switzerland, a position he has held since June 2023. In this role, he leads the bank's digital assets activity, which includes crypto services such as bitcoin and ether trading as well as asset tokenisation. He has spoken publicly on BBVA Switzerland's positioning in digital assets, describing the current phase as operational rather than exploratory: the question, in his view, is no longer whether institutions should engage with blockchain-based products but how to execute that engagement. He identifies two distinct market segments — cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, ether and related assets) and digital assets built around token infrastructure — and regards the approval of spot bitcoin and ether ETFs by the SEC as a structural shift in institutional legitimacy for the asset class. He has also highlighted blockchain's utility in payments and transaction settlement as an area of practical application for banks.

Before joining BBVA, Meyer spent four years at Avaloq, where he served successively as Managing Director, Head of Innovation, and Head of Blockchain Solutions between 2016 and 2023. Earlier career experience includes roles at UniCredit and Crédit Agricole CIB. He has operated in parallel as an independent blockchain consultant since 2015. He holds an MSc and an MBA, and is based in Zurich. He is a recurring speaker at industry forums, including the NextGen Payments & RegTech Forum in Zurich.

Philippe Rodriguez is Founding Partner at Avolta Partners, a Paris-based tech-focused investment banking firm he co-founded in 2013, where he leads mergers and acquisitions and fundraising mandates for technology companies, with sector focus on sustainability and Web3 and gaming. He is a leading figure in the European blockchain and crypto space, having served as president of Bitcoin France for three years, and has authored two books published by Dunod: La Révolution Blockchain (2017) and La Révolution Métavers.

Before co-founding Avolta, Rodriguez founded Mixcommerce, an e-commerce delegation solutions provider for brands, which was acquired by Groupe La Poste in 2012. He spent eight years at Microsoft France, where he held roles including Startup and VC Lead and Director of the Server and Tools Business division. In 1998, he co-founded the Electronic Business Group, a think tank for digital professionals in France. Earlier in his career, he founded Oxalys, a software publishing company, in 1987, which he sold in 1990, and subsequently joined Sybase as France marketing manager before founding the French subsidiary of e-commerce software publisher Intershop. He holds a degree from EISTI and an MBA from ESCP Europe.

Pierre Castronovo is Fintech Lead - Netherlands at Visa, a position he has held since February 2024. His stated mandate is to foster partnership and collaboration with the Dutch fintech ecosystem. He also holds a concurrent role focused on Stablecoins GTM, as indicated by his profile headline. In his first year, he secured new business contributing to growth in average annual net revenue, established partnerships with three fintech scale-ups operating in issuance, open banking, and Tap-To-Pay, and organised a Visa fintech event with over 130 attendees. He has promoted Visa products including FlexCredentials and A2A at these engagements, and has mentored fintech founders through Startupbootcamp.

Prior to Visa, Castronovo spent six years at Accenture as Manager, Strategy & Consulting, based primarily in Dublin and Amsterdam. His project work there included defining digital retail banking and commercial strategy for a large Dutch retail bank, supporting the market entry of a Dutch digital insurer into Spain, and leading business development for the international expansion of a digital insurance platform from the Netherlands to Toronto. He is also co-founder of BuurBox, a peer-to-peer storage platform founded in 2025. His earlier career was in architecture, having worked as an architecture engineer at several Belgian practices between 2004 and 2009. He holds a Master's degree in Civil Engineering and Architecture from the University of Liège, where he studied from 1996 to 2004.

Pierre d'Ormesson is a Partner at DLA Piper in Paris, where he focuses on financial services and fintech regulatory matters. He advises French and foreign banks, financial institutions, payment institutions, asset managers, funds, fintechs, and corporates on French and EU financial regulatory aspects applicable to their deals and activities in France. His areas of practice include licensing and change of control procedures for regulated entities, regulatory exemption procedures, payment and investment services, prudential and resolution issues, AML-CTF, ESG, outsourcing, and crypto and digital assets services matters.

On digital assets specifically, d'Ormesson has advised a cryptocurrency platform on its launch in France and its expansion into the European market, and has spoken on the regulation of digital assets at the France & Compliance Conference, addressing topics including MiCA, DAC8, and AMLR at the Palais Brongniart in Paris. He contributed to the Haut Comité Juridique de la Place financière de Paris (HCJP) report on Decentralised Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Prior to joining DLA Piper in October 2024, d'Ormesson spent approximately eight years at Clifford Chance in Paris, where he worked in banking and financial regulation and later as a senior associate in financial regulations and fintech, with a six-month secondment to the international financial regulation team in London. He previously served as President of the Legal Committee and member of the board at Adan, the French and European web3 industry association, from October 2023 to October 2024. He holds an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master 2 in Financial Law from Université Paris XI and ESCP Europe, an MS in Law and International Management from ESCP Europe, and a Master in International Business Law from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is admitted to the Paris Bar.

Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel is CEO and Co-founder of Arianee, a Paris-based blockchain company that provides digital product passports and digital membership cards to brands, built on the Arianee Protocol. In this role, he has led Arianee to work with over 50 global brands including Breitling, Moncler, Mugler, IWC, Lacoste, YSL Beauty, and Richemont Group labels such as Panerai, Vacheron Constantin, and Jaeger-LeCoultre. The company has raised $28 million in venture capital from investors including Tiger Global, Commerce Ventures, BPI France, and ISAI, with over 2.2 million physical products tokenized on-chain via the protocol.

Prior to Arianee, Hurstel founded ReMode and was a partner and co-founder of strategy consulting firm Blue Change, as well as curator of the Foundashion online community. He is a permanent board member of NFT Paris and speaks regularly at events including Web Summit, NFT NYC, EthCC, and BoF VOICES. He is an active investor and advisor in several tech companies. Hurstel is an alumnus of Toulouse Business School.

Pierre Noizat is the CEO and co-founder of Paymium, the first bitcoin/euro exchange platform, which he founded in Paris in 2011 under the name Bitcoin-Central. Paymium holds Digital Asset Service Provider (PSAN) status granted by the Autorité des Marchés Financiers since 2021 and is a founding member of the Labchain consortium, coordinated by Caisse des Dépôts. The platform is backed by investment funds Newfund and Kima Ventures.

Noizat encountered the Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, which led directly to the founding of Paymium. He has authored two books on the subject: "Bitcoin, monnaie libre" (2015) and "L'énergie, face cachée de la monnaie" (2024). His written work applies thermodynamic principles to monetary theory, examining the relationship between energy and money and distinguishing between what he terms proof-of-work currency and debt-based currency. Before founding Paymium, Noizat built expertise in telecommunications and digital broadcasting, contributing to the launch of DirecTV in the United States in 1994 and to the development of TPS, a French digital channel package, in 1996. This background provided him with applied knowledge in cryptography and secure distribution systems. He holds degrees from École Polytechnique and Columbia University.

Pierre Person is CEO of Usual, a Paris-based stablecoin project he has led since July 2022. At Usual, he oversees the development of USD0, a stablecoin backed by tokenised real-world assets including US Treasuries, and USD0++, a liquid staking token representing a four-year staking commitment of USD0 that generates daily USUAL token rewards. In January 2025, Usual introduced a floor price of $0.87 for USD0++ and ended a fixed 1:1 parity with USD0, a decision Person attributed to a sequencing error in implementing the protocol's redemption and floor-price mechanisms. Since January 2023, he has also held an Associate Professor position at Sciences Po.

Person served as Member of the National Assembly for Paris's 6th constituency from June 2017 to June 2022, representing La République En Marche. During that period he was Secretary of the Finance Committee from 2017 to 2019, serving as rapporteur on the Ministry of Culture's budget, and subsequently joined the Committee on Legal Affairs. He was co-rapporteur of a parliamentary mission on crypto assets, whose conclusions were published in January 2019 and contributed to the adoption of France's PSAN regulatory approvals framework. He also served as Deputy General of LREM from December 2018 to September 2020, a position he resigned from over disagreements on party direction. Prior to his parliamentary career, he worked as a lawyer and as a junior public-sector consultant at CGI Business Consulting. He holds law degrees from the University of Poitiers, the University of Lorraine, and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Priscilla Person is VP Art Buyer, Digital Assets & Media Management COE at Bank of America, based in Greater Philadelphia, with extensive experience in art buying and digital media management.

Priscille Baiget is Chief Technology Officer at STOKR, a Luxembourg-based fintech company focused on the tokenization of real-world financial assets. She assumed the CTO role in December 2025, having previously served as Head of Product at the same firm from January 2022. In her product capacity, she worked across STOKR's full tokenization stack, which covers investment structuring, smart contract management, AML/KYC verification, payment rails in both crypto and fiat, and the lifecycle management of digital securities.

Prior to STOKR, Baiget was Senior Product Manager at Aragon, a DAO platform based in Zug, Switzerland, where she defined product features, managed the roadmap, and coordinated across marketing, UX/UI, and engineering teams. Before that, she held a Blockchain Product Manager role at The Blockchain Xdev in Paris, where she was product manager for an asset tokenization platform and product owner for an OTC derivatives reconciliation platform, also contributing to schedule computation module development in Kotlin. She holds a degree from Ecole Centrale Paris.

Pyrs Carvolth is a Partner and Business Development Lead at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), where he has been part of the go-to-market team since April 2022. His stated mandate covers growing the a16z corporate network and supporting a16z crypto portfolio companies across go-to-market motions, with a specific emphasis on business development. He has authored and co-authored published pieces on topics including blockchains for traditional finance, go-to-market messaging, and building business development and growth teams.

Prior to joining a16z crypto, Carvolth served as Director of Business Development at DraftKings, where he led web3 business development and contributed to the launch of the company's NFT Marketplace and related partnerships. Before DraftKings, he held a Senior Manager of Business Development role at TuneIn, where he built programmatic advertising sales for streaming audio, and an Account Executive position at LinkedIn. He began his career at Jefferies in equity derivatives sales and trading and equity sales, and earlier worked at Bloomberg LP as a Fixed Income Advanced Specialist. He is also a member of The Seed Project, an angel platform focused on funding seed-stage technology companies, a role he has held since January 2020. Carvolth holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.

Quentin de Beauchesne is Head of Blockchain and Co-Founder at Ownest, a Paris-based SaaS supply chain tracking company he co-founded in December 2017. Ownest applies NFT and blockchain technology to trace goods ownership and responsibility across B2B and B2B2C logistics networks, with the platform in field use since 2018. He has written on the application of NFTs to supply chain operations and on the broader history of NFTs, publishing under the Ownest publication on Medium.

Prior to his work at Ownest, de Beauchesne founded CryptoFR in July 2014, a community forum dedicated to discussion of blockchains and cryptocurrencies in French, aimed at spreading awareness of the technology across French-speaking countries. He has been active in open-source blockchain development, with GitHub contributions spanning projects related to Bitcoin infrastructure, wallet tooling, and governance models. His GitHub profile lists his current company as Fairmints, with a listed location of Tokyo.

Rahul Moharir is Vice President at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, specializing in investment strategies and portfolio management within the finance sector.

Raj Dhamodharan is EVP of Blockchain & Digital Asset Products and Digital Partnerships at Mastercard, leading strategy and products across blockchain, digital assets and stablecoins. At Mastercard since 2010, previously at Visa; MBAs from UC Berkeley and Columbia plus an MS in computer science.

Rand Hindi is Co-founder and CEO of Zama, an open source cryptography company building Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain. Zama's core product, the Confidential Blockchain Protocol, enables confidential smart contracts on any L1 or L2, allowing transaction amounts and on-chain balances to be encrypted while validators continue to execute smart contracts without accessing the underlying data. Hindi's thesis is that the absence of transaction confidentiality is the primary remaining barrier to large-scale institutional use of public blockchains, and that the correct architectural answer is public blockchains with a privacy layer rather than permissioned ledgers. Zama's stated target is to serve as the confidentiality layer for onchain payment volumes, with identified use cases including stablecoin payments, onchain salary settlements, and tokenisation. Hindi has positioned FHE as capable of reaching hundreds of transactions per second today and projecting 100,000+ TPS on dedicated ASICs.

Hindi also serves as a General Partner at Unit Ventures, where he has invested in over 70 companies across cryptography, AI, blockchain, and biotech. Earlier in his career he founded Snips, an edge-based private voice solution for OEMs, which was acquired by Sonos and now powers the voice assistant in over 20 million devices. He was previously a member of the French Digital Council, where he focused on AI and privacy issues, and has served as a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London, along with graduate degrees from Singularity University and THNK Amsterdam. He has been named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 and Forbes 30 Under 30.

Rani Jabban is Deputy CEO / Head of Treasury, Financial Institutions, Digital Assets & Marketing at Arab Bank (Switzerland), where he sits on the Executive Committee. He leads the bank's digital assets activities, which he initiated, alongside its treasury, financial institutions, and marketing functions. He drove the bank's entry into crypto from 2018, positioning it as a provider of digital asset custody, trading, and staking services. The bank selected Taurus as its custody partner, signing in December 2018 with the solution live in 2019. Jabban also serves as a Board Member at Taurus.

He joined Arab Bank Switzerland in 2009 as Head of Treasury and was appointed to the Executive Committee in 2014. Prior to that, he spent nine years at Credit Agricole (Suisse) SA as Senior Manager in Forex Private Banking, and before that held a Forex Treasury Sales role at Banque Française de l'Orient, part of the Credit Agricole Indosuez group, from 1995 to 2000. He holds two Master of Science degrees: one from the Magistère Banque Finance and one in DESS Techniques Financières et Bancaires from Paris-Panthéon-Assas University. He completed the High Performance Leadership executive program at IMD in 2016.

Raphaël Bloch is CEO and co-founder of The Big Whale, an independent market intelligence platform on digital assets serving financial market participants through editorial coverage, research, a weekly briefing, and in-person events. He co-founded The Big Whale in April 2022. At the platform, he moderates and hosts institutional events bringing together banks, asset managers, custodians, and infrastructure providers on topics including staking, on-chain yield, stablecoins, DeFi lending, and tokenisation. He has moderated panels at events hosted in partnership with Bitwise, Everstake, Gemini, Morpho, Hexarq, Coinhouse, Delubac, Franklin Templeton, and the Ethereum Foundation, held in London and Paris between late 2025 and mid-2026.

Before founding The Big Whale, Bloch worked as a reporter at Les Echos from December 2016 to March 2020, then at L'Express from March 2020 to March 2022. He also previously worked at Reuters. Since September 2022, he has held a concurrent role as Business Analyst at BFM Business. He has been active in crypto journalism since 2016. He holds degrees from emlyon and the CFJ.

Ray Dillet is Head of Financial Institutions – Europe at Bitwise, a role he has held since July 2024 and is based in London. In this capacity, he focuses on institutional client coverage across Europe, with an emphasis on digital asset products including ETFs, passive and active strategies, and on-chain solutions. He speaks regularly on institutional panels and has presented at venues including the House of Lords and Mansion House. Bitwise serves as CFA UK's digital asset partner, supporting education for its members, as well as the CISI's membership base, with Dillet's team central to that institutional outreach.

In December 2025, Dillet participated as a speaker at a breakfast event in London co-hosted by Bitwise and Everstake, addressing the evolution of cryptocurrency adoption among institutional players, with discussion covering on-chain yield, staking infrastructure, and the structuring of yield-bearing ETP and ETF products. Separately, Dillet is Co-Founder and CEO of Bridge Partners, a boutique asset management and advisory firm focused on liquid digital assets, which he founded in August 2022. He is also an angel investor in Nscale, an AI cloud platform, and a limited partner at Kestrel0x1, an early-stage technology investment fund. Prior to Bitwise, his career spans roughly 20 years across ETFs, alternatives, and digital assets. He holds a degree from Loughborough University.

Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary is Managing Director, Head of Product and Research at Grayscale Investments, leading product strategy and research in the crypto asset space. She has extensive experience in investment management and product development.

Réda Berrehili is Co-Founder & CEO of Klub by Ki, a private investment platform for high-earning individuals focused on capital deployment into startups through off-market deals, which he co-founded in October 2020. He simultaneously serves as Founder and CEO of Ki Foundation, established in 2018, which advocates for stakeholder capitalism and the development of a value-sharing currency. He has been a Member of the Investment Committee at 212 Founders since November 2019, a CDG Invest-backed programme aimed at attracting Moroccan talent to entrepreneurship and launching startups from Morocco.

Berrehili holds investor positions in several companies including Estaly, Tranché, The Big Whale, Userguest, Kiln, Labellevie.com, and Lum Network. He also served as a board member at Kiln from May 2021 to October 2022. His earlier career includes founding Squarebreak, a vacation property management platform that raised €3 million and was acquired by Accor Hotels for €25 million. Prior to that, he launched MixoTV, a personalised social TV guide that attracted over 60,000 users and raised €400,000. He also co-founded Tumbup in 2010, a social search engine developed during his studies, and subsequently worked with TF1 and Canal+ developing recommendation tools for VOD services. He has co-founded the Gemstone investment fund with Javier Cedillo-Espin, directed at supporting Moroccan entrepreneurs globally. He holds a Master's degree in Engineering with a focus on Computer Science from INSA Lyon.

Renzo Anfossi is Head of Global OTC Trading at Kraken, a position he has held since January 2025. His mandate covers strategy, risk, and execution across OTC spot and derivatives markets in the US, Europe, and Asia, with a focus on scaling client-driven trading solutions and driving profitable growth across global markets.

Prior to joining Kraken, Anfossi served as Senior Vice President of Trading at Arca Funds, a digital asset management firm, from January 2022 to March 2023. Before his move into digital assets in 2021, he built his career trading and structuring emerging markets rates and FX derivatives at Citi and Credit Suisse. He holds a degree from Columbia Business School and the FINRA Series 7 and Series 63 certifications. He has spoken on derivatives, risk management, and structured finance at NYU and Carnegie Mellon.

Ricardo A. is Digital Assets Trading (Executive Director) at BTG Pactual, a position he has held since January 2022. In this role, he focuses on digital assets trading technology strategy, manages a trading portfolio spanning spot, derivatives, and DeFi, and builds analytical tools drawing on on-chain and off-chain data. He is also involved in scaling BTG Pactual's crypto exchange, Mynt, alongside liquidity and working capital optimization and strategic analytics.

Prior to his current role, Ricardo served as IT International Director at BTG Pactual from August 2017 to January 2022, acting as CTO for BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group and BTG Pactual Broker Dealer US. During that period he coordinated technology budgets between the US and Brazil, managed Azure cloud infrastructure migration, and drove digital assets strategies focused on cryptocurrency mining. Before that, from January 2013 to August 2017, he led the Financial Platforms team as Head of Cross Assets Platforms, overseeing teams in the UK and Brazil, managing a Calypso Front-to-Back implementation, and directing post-trading platform integration with BM&FBovespa. He joined BTG Pactual in 2003 and held senior analyst and IT project manager roles before progressing to Associate Director. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (2007), an MBA in Business Management from Ibmec (2008–2010), and a Certificate of Business Excellence in Blockchain: Technologies and Applications for Business from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business (2020). He also holds Certified DeFi Expert™ and Certified Cryptocurrency Trader certifications from the Blockchain Council (2023).

Riccardo Donega is Head of DLT and Digital Assets Products at Banca Sella, a position he has held since June 2025. In this role, he is responsible for defining the vision, roadmap, and delivery of use cases in the digital assets and DLT domain, with a mandate to ensure alignment with regulatory frameworks and institutional standards. He works with cross-functional teams and engages with regulators, industry groups, and European initiatives as part of the bank's positioning in digital finance.

Donega's focus on digital assets at Banca Sella began earlier in his tenure. Prior to his current title, he served as Product Lead for DLT and Digital Assets from March 2023 to October 2025, and briefly as Digital Product Manager in Retail Banking from August 2022 to February 2023. Before joining Banca Sella, he worked at UniCredit as a Program Manager from October 2021 to July 2022, where he led a portfolio of projects within the Italian and German Corporate Banking area, with a focus on cross-country development and integration of CRM tools including Salesforce and Palantir. His total professional experience spans approximately six years and ten months. No educational background is included in the available source content.

Richard Majid is Vice President – Digital Assets at BNY Mellon, based in Manchester, United Kingdom, a position he has held since 2022. The source does not detail his specific internal mandate, products, or initiatives within the digital assets function.

Prior to joining BNY Mellon, Majid spent two years at Global Reach Group as Senior Strategist in FX Options (2020–2022), and before that held a Senior Currency Consultant role focused on FX Options at Lumon (2018–2020). Earlier positions include Sales Director and Shareholder at Claydon Partners Limited (2017–2018), Senior Currency Consultant at Currencies Direct (2015–2016), and Business Development Manager for Corporate and Institutional Treasury at Investec (2013–2014). He also held currency consultant roles at Currencies Direct covering corporate FX in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the North West between 2012 and 2013. Earlier in his career he worked at STM Group PLC, serving as Senior Business Development Manager for Trust and Company (2009–2010) and Group Business Development and Marketing Manager (2010). Majid holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from The University of Manchester, awarded in 2003.

Robert Materazzi is the CEO of Lukka, a blockchain-native technology company that provides middle and back office enterprise data and software solutions for the crypto asset industry. Lukka serves both traditional and crypto-native businesses, delivering institutional-grade data products designed to support the integration of crypto into business processes. The company bridges traditional finance and the crypto world, working with financial institutions on that transition, and offers tools including tax reporting software, portfolio management tools, and educational databases for retail investors and traders. Lukka's infrastructure operates within a SOC 1 Type 2 environment.

Prior to Lukka, Materazzi served as a Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers within Financial Services Advisory, leading large-scale risk, regulatory, cybersecurity, and technology implementations for traditional financial institutions and foreign banking organizations. He also led the PwC Advisory Veterans Recruiting and Mentorship Initiative. Before PwC, Materazzi served nine years in the United States Marine Corps as an Officer and AH-1W Super Cobra Pilot.

Robert Mitchnick, also known as Robbie Mitchnick, is Managing Director and Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock. He is responsible for driving BlackRock's digital assets strategy, working with internal business units to develop and execute strategic initiatives involving distributed ledger technology and digital assets. He serves on the Corp Exec-COO Executive team. He leads the firm's global strategy, product development, and business operations for its digital asset offerings, including the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT). In March 2026, he was involved in the launch of BlackRock's ETHB staked ether ETF. He is a co-author of BlackRock's whitepaper "Bitcoin: A Unique Diversifier," alongside Samara Cohen and Russell Brownback.

Prior to BlackRock, Mitchnick worked at CPP Investment Board in Public Markets and Private Investments, and at Ripple, where he co-authored "A Fundamental Valuation Framework for Cryptoassets" with economist Susan Athey, winner of the John Bates Clark medal. Earlier in his career, he worked in management consulting at Monitor Deloitte. Mitchnick holds BA and BCom degrees from Queen's University and an MBA from Stanford, where he graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar and received the Robichek Award in Finance. He also holds a Blockchain Technologies Certification from MIT Sloan and is a CFA Charterholder.

Rok Kopp is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at ether.fi, a decentralized non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Ethereum. At ether.fi, he is responsible for scaling growth, defining go-to-market strategy, and identifying revenue opportunities. He co-founded the company in April 2022 alongside Mike Silagadze. The two first met at Top Hat, a higher education software company, where Kopp held director of sales and later VP of enterprise sales roles from October 2012 to January 2018, during which time he led the company from $1 million to $30 million in annual revenue. Prior to ether.fi, Kopp served as Chief Revenue Officer at Apto, a commercial real estate CRM software company, from January 2018 to October 2019, and subsequently as Chief Revenue Officer at Obsidian HR, a professional employer organization, from November 2019 to January 2022. Earlier in his career, he was an early employee at Groupon, where he held roles including account executive and city CEO, and worked at CaptainU, an online recruiting platform connecting high school athletes with college coaches. He also became a limited partner at GTMfund, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on B2B SaaS. As an angel investor, his portfolio includes positions in RedStone, Morph, Derive, Fragmetric, Tenor Finance, Drosera Network, LAYER, Term Finance, Mitosis, and Agora. Kopp attended the University of Notre Dame, where he interned at the investment office and worked as a sports director.

Romain Millon is an Analyst at The Big Whale, where he has authored analyses on salaries in the web3 sector. He is also an expert in management and transformation of the finance function at EDF. He is a graduate of IAE Paris.

Brett Royer, CFA, is Head of Finance for Enterprise Technology at Fidelity Investments, with extensive experience in finance leadership roles within capital markets and digital assets.

Rune Christensen is the co-founder and CEO of MakerDAO, the protocol that issues DAI, described as the first stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain. Since founding MakerDAO in March 2015, he has focused on establishing the organizational structure of the Maker Decentralized Autonomous Organization and the economic foundations of the DAI stablecoin. In August 2024, the Maker protocol rebranded to Sky and launched a new stablecoin, USDS, designed to attract a wider audience by providing access to returns from both decentralised and centralised finance. Sky introduced Sky token rewards for USDS holders and a "stars" system of sub-protocols, with Spark as the first. Christensen has continued to lead governance activity under the Sky brand, publishing a proposal in April 2025 to move the protocol out of its bootstrap funding phase and restructure the Treasury Management Function from a five-step to a four-step revenue waterfall following the completion of Genesis Capital deployments.

Prior to MakerDAO, Christensen co-founded Try China, an international recruiting business focused on placing English teachers from Western countries in China, which he operated from 2011 to 2014. His initial engagement with cryptocurrency began in 2011 with Bitcoin; the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014 directed his focus toward stablecoins. He also co-founded Raw Power Games, a games development company, in July 2022. Christensen studied International Business at Copenhagen Business School between 2011 and 2013 and Biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen from 2013 to 2014.

Rupert Poland is Head of EMEA Digital Asset Practice at Aon, appointed to the role in June 2025 and based in London. He reports to Tom Davis, Executive Director of the EMEA Financial Services Group. In this capacity, Poland works with a team of more than 60 professionals to expand Aon's digital asset practice, developing risk solutions and specialist insurance offerings for the sector. Aon's current digital asset work includes insurance covering theft, loss and destruction of digital assets, staking insurance, and risk transfer solutions spanning captives and credit facility development, serving both crypto-native and traditional financial institutions. Poland is also a speaker in Aon's webinar series on digital assets aimed at risk, treasury and finance leaders at financial institutions, covering stablecoins, tokenised assets and practical risk considerations.

Before joining Aon, Poland spent approximately six years at Marsh McLennan. He joined through a graduate development programme in September 2019, progressing through financial institutions insurance broking roles before becoming Assistant Vice President in October 2021. He was promoted to Vice President in August 2022 and served as Digital Asset Leader for UK FINPRO from October 2023 until his move to Aon in June 2025. During his time at Marsh, he was a member of the global Digital Asset Risk Transfer team and developed market-recognised insurance solutions and risk quantification frameworks for digital asset companies. Earlier in his career, he shadowed a senior underwriter at MS Amlin in Lloyd's of London in June 2018. Poland holds a First Class Bachelor of Science with Honours in Biological Sciences from the University of Exeter, awarded with the Dean's commendation.

Salomon is a professional at The Big Whale. Detailed information about his role, background, and achievements is not available.