People

Sami Chlagou is CEO and Co-Founder of Cross The Ages, a Marseille-based cross-media project combining a blockchain-powered trading card game with novels, comics, and planned TV and film productions, which he co-founded in October 2020 alongside Richard Esteve. Cross The Ages uses NFT-based cards as the primary vehicle for navigating its fictional universe, with Chlagou identifying the card game format as the most suitable application for blockchain technology. The project has raised $15.5M across two funding rounds and has minted five million tokens.

Prior to Cross The Ages, Chlagou spent approximately eight years in film production before transitioning to the video games industry, where he has worked for over eleven years. During that period, he founded or co-founded several companies based in the Marseille region, including Rushongame, a private video game sales platform founded in 2013; Pixelheart, an independent games distributor, where he holds an Associate Founder role from 2019; and Storybird, a video game production company focused on next-generation consoles, where he serves as General Manager from 2018. He states he has founded six international development studios since 2015 and launched more than 50 video games. He has also made two angel and seed-stage investments, including a 2024 angel investment in InterCellar. He holds a degree from KEDGE Business School and has spoken at TEDx. He has been listed in Le Point's Inventeurs selection and Choiseul 2025, and serves as a Board Member of FrenchTech. He is scheduled to speak at CartoonNext 2026 on the subject of Cross The Ages and its cross-media approach.

Sam Johnston is a Senior Technical Solution Manager specializing in sustainable technology solutions, with experience in business development and a focus on integrating tech innovations in finance and supply chain sectors.

Sam Newman is Digital Assets Head of Broking at TP ICAP, a position he has held since February 2020. TP ICAP operates as a liquidity and data solutions provider connecting clients in wholesale markets globally.

Prior to joining TP ICAP, Newman spent nearly eight years at PVM Oil Associates as an Oil Options Broker, from February 2012 to January 2020. His skills include options trading, broking, and digital assets. He holds a Chainalysis Cryptocurrency Fundamentals Certification (CCFC), issued in April 2021, as well as a Series 3 qualification from the National Futures Association and a UK Rules and Regulations certification from the Financial Conduct Authority. His total professional experience spans approximately 14 years. He attended Mill Hill between 2006 and 2009 and JFS between 2009 and 2011.

Sandy Peng is Co-Founder of Scroll, a zkEVM-based Layer 2 blockchain designed to scale Ethereum, where she has focused on non-technical areas including business building and scaling since co-founding the company in January 2021. Scroll operates on a zk rollup architecture capable of scaling to up to 10,000 TPS, with bytecode-level EVM compatibility and integrations with services including AWS and Chainlink. Prior to Scroll, she was a Partner at Fission Capital from August 2016 to January 2021, where she worked in Web3 project investment. Before moving into venture capital, she served as a Management Associate at the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission from 2010 to 2013. Earlier in her career, she was CEO of Ucan Group, a mobile games company operating under Hong Kong-listed Culturecom Limited, where she also led the launch of a Bitcoin mobile games platform called UcanBit.

Peng holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge (2005–2008) and an MSc in Law, Anthropology and Society from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2009–2010). She has also been cited as having worked at the UN early in her career, prior to her role at the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

Sarah Curran is Executive Director – Head Emerging Technology Legal EMEA at UBS, a position she has held since March 2026. Prior to this, she served as Director – Head Emerging Technology Legal EMEA from September 2025, and before that as Director – Head Digital Assets Legal EMEA from October 2023, a role she held for approximately two years. Both positions sit within UBS's Legal department. Her work on digital assets and emerging technology at UBS represents her most recent area of focus within the firm's legal function.

Curran joined UBS in October 2014 as Associate Director in the Lending, High Yield and Restructuring Global Banking Legal team, advancing to Director in that practice in March 2017, a position she held until moving to the digital assets mandate in October 2023. Before joining UBS, she completed a five-month secondment as a Treasury Legal specialist at Santander UK. Prior to that, she was an Associate at Slaughter and May from September 2011 to October 2014, where she worked across general banking, acquisition finance, debt capital markets, derivatives and ISDA documentation, project finance, and energy. She trained at Slaughter and May from September 2009 to September 2011, completing seats in financing, corporate, tax, dispute resolution, and real estate. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Jurisprudence, First Class, from the University of Oxford, and completed the Legal Practice Course with Distinction at BPP Law School in 2009.

Sarah Hammer is Managing Director, Head of Trading, Digital Assets, and Artificial Intelligence Compliance at Charles Schwab. Her mandate spans trading, digital assets, and AI compliance. She brings over 25 years of experience across government, academia, and financial institutions.

Prior to Charles Schwab, Hammer served as Executive Director at the Wharton School and Chair of Wharton Future of Finance. She was also CEO of Wharton Cypher Accelerator, overseeing pre-seed to late-stage AI, blockchain, and quantum computing companies, and held roles as Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Academic Director of Penn Law Programs on AI and Digital Assets. She quarterbacked Penn's first digital asset, a unique 3D intellectual property memorializing a Nobel Prize-winning scientific invention. Earlier, she served as Acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities, leading the agency through the 2023 banking crisis; the Department regulates approximately 290,000 bank and non-bank financial entities totaling $3.5 trillion in AUM. She was also Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Treasury, where she led the Office of Financial Institutions, the Federal Insurance Office including the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program, and the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy. She served on the Securities Investor Protection Corporation board and five years on the board of the International Telecommunications Union. Earlier financial services roles included positions at Vanguard Group, PIMCO, JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock, and Tudor Investments, spanning general management, portfolio management, trading, marketing, research, and analytics. She is Co-Chair of the International Expert Consortium on AI, a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and has advised the World Economic Forum and the Dubai International Finance Centre. Hammer holds a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, an MBA from the Wharton School, and a Master of Studies from Oxford University.

Scott James is Senior Vice President, Digital Assets Technology at BNY, a position he has held since June 2022. In this role, his stated mandate centers on engineering leadership and secure digital asset infrastructure for institutional custody.

Prior to joining BNY, James spent approximately five years at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado, progressing from Software Engineer to Staff Software Engineer. His work there included developing commanding and telemetry ground software for NASA's Orion spacecraft, implementing object-oriented C++ in a Red Hat Linux environment to receive, decommutate, distribute, and archive high-rate telemetry data. He also managed the building and packaging of software releases using GNU Autotools, Jenkins, and RPM. Earlier in his tenure at Lockheed Martin, he worked on embedded software in C for the RFSE (Re-Entry Field Support Equipment) program, contributing to a team responsible for software design, coding, and testing across a console containing nine microcontrollers. Before Lockheed Martin, James held roles as a Mobile Software Developer during his time at Penn State University, and as a College Student Tech Sr. and Tech Spec, where he developed calibration and measurement software. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Penn State University.

Scott Moskowitz is Head of Digital Asset Lab at BlackRock, a position he has held since January 2022. In this role, he is responsible for Aladdin's digital asset product and engineering functions, executing on the firm's highest digital asset initiatives.

Moskowitz has spent his entire career at BlackRock, joining in August 2010 as an Aladdin Client Services Analyst. He subsequently moved into implementation management, where he spent nearly six years overseeing Aladdin deployments and supporting pre-sales across the Americas, including 3.5 years focused specifically on Latin America. From 2019 to 2020, he relocated to London to lead the Aladdin implementation for a $200 billion global asset manager operating across nine countries. In 2021, he served as Head of Product for Aladdin Studio APIs, responsible for building out that product's API suite. His current role leading the Digital Asset Lab followed in January 2022. Aladdin is BlackRock's investment management platform, supporting risk analytics, portfolio management, trading, and operations. Moskowitz holds a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, where he studied from 2006 to 2010.

Sean Mullins is Global Head of Digital Assets Product, Securities Services at HSBC, appointed to the role in February 2026. Based in London, he reports to Chris Adams, Global Head of Product Solutions, Securities Services. In this capacity, he leads the strategic vision, development and commercialisation of digital assets capabilities across global markets, with a focus on building regulatory-aligned solutions spanning tokenisation, custody and distributed ledger technologies for institutional clients.

Prior to joining HSBC, Mullins spent 19 years at Northern Trust across a range of transformation and product roles. His most recent position there was Global Head of Digital Assets Product Execution within the Digital Assets and Financial Markets group, a function formed in 2022, where he led a team responsible for product management and delivery of digital assets and innovation opportunities. Earlier in his career at Northern Trust he worked across change management and product management initiatives before moving into market advocacy, innovation research and emerging technologies. He holds the BCS Business Analysis International Diploma, a Six Sigma Green Belt certification, and is a certified Scrum Master and Scrum Product Owner.

Sebastian Veitengruber is Team Lead Listing & Member Services – Structured Products & Digital Assets at Boerse Stuttgart Group, a position he has held since January 2025. In this role he leads the listing and member services function covering both structured products and digital assets. His current mandate explicitly spans digital assets alongside securitized derivatives, reflecting the scope of the team he oversees.

Veitengruber has been at Boerse Stuttgart Group since January 2014. Prior to his current leadership role, he served as Senior Analyst from July 2021 to January 2025, with responsibilities that included securitized derivative listings, regulatory data reporting, project tasks, and financial organization, operating within the Research department. Before that, he held a Listing Specialist position in the Sales department from January 2014 to June 2021. Earlier in his career, he worked in an investment services capacity at W&W-Gruppe from January 2009 to January 2011. He holds an M.Sc. from the University of Hohenheim, completed between 2019 and 2021.

Sébastien Borget is Co-Founder and Global Ambassador of The Sandbox, a role he has held since August 2025, representing the platform at conferences and events worldwide. Prior to this, he served as Co-Founder and COO of The Sandbox, a virtual world where players can create, own, and monetize gaming experiences using NFTs and SAND, the platform's utility token. He is also a member of The Sandbox's DAO council, a five-person body that oversees the decentralisation of the platform's governance, with the stated aim of progressively transferring control to the community of land and SAND holders.

Borget has been President of the Blockchain Game Alliance since 2020, a non-profit organisation with 300 members advocating for NFTs and blockchain in games. In 2024, he co-founded ArtVerse, a digital art gallery and cultural space located in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, focused on bridging digital and physical art through exhibitions, events, and workshops. CoinTelegraph ranked him fourth in its Top 100 Most Influential People in Crypto for 2022. He holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Télécom SudParis. He has approximately 14 years of experience in startups, spanning mobile gaming and blockchain.

Sébastien Dérivaux is CEO of Steakhouse Financial, a firm that provides financial expertise to DAOs and businesses, with a specialism in Real World Assets (RWAs). He is co-founder of Steakhouse Financial and an active member of the MakerDAO community. He also serves as one of the main curators of the lending and borrowing protocol Morpho.

Dérivaux's work focuses on the application of decentralised finance to institutional-grade financial tooling. He has noted that DeFi democratises access to instruments such as swaps, which were previously reserved for institutional participants in traditional finance, extending those options to retail investors.

Sébastien Lalevée is Managing Director at Financière Arbevel, an entrepreneurial asset management company he co-founded in early 2009 alongside his partner Jean-Baptiste Delabare. Under his leadership, the firm grew from approximately twenty million euros in assets under management to over one billion seven hundred million euros. Originally focused on listed equities and SMEs, Financière Arbevel has since expanded into thematic strategies covering technological breakthroughs and biotechnology, private equity in technology, bonds, and private debt.

Lalevée managed Pluvalca France Small Caps, a value investing strategy using fundamental analysis benchmarked against the MSCI Europe Micro index. Prior to founding Financière Arbevel, he worked as a small-caps financial analyst for ten years at CPR, HSBC/CCF, and Citigroup. He holds a Master's degree in Management Sciences from Lyon III University and an MBA from the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota. He also teaches a course in finance at Sciences Po. There is no mention in the source content of specific involvement in digital assets, tokenisation, or blockchain.

Serge Baudrillart is Founder of Altscale, a growth marketing agency focused on B2B clients, launched in June 2025 and based in the Lausanne metropolitan area. Concurrently, he serves as Business Partner and Co-CMO at PropertyGRID, a real estate company applying blockchain technology to real-world asset tokenisation, a role he has held since August 2024. He also holds a Growth and Ambassador role at Chainlink Labs, which he began in July 2024, operating fully remotely.

Prior to founding Altscale, Baudrillart worked as a Growth Marketer at Welcome to the Jungle France from June 2023 to July 2024, where he built SEO-oriented landing page structures across a site of over 600 pages and increased retention time by 40%. His earlier role at PropertyGRID, from January to August 2024, was Head of Content and Co-CMO before transitioning to his current business partner position. He has written on blockchain topics, including a 2022 analysis of Ethereum's energy consumption published in Block Magnates, examining the network's transition away from Proof-of-Work. He is also affiliated with the Switech and SwissTech communities in Lausanne.

Shayne Coplan is the Founder and CEO of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market he founded in June 2020 and has led since. His remit spans product, market policy, and partnerships, including market wording and resolution standards, integrity controls, and institutional data distribution. Polymarket operates via blockchain-based smart contracts, with trades and payouts settled on the Polygon (Ethereum) network, allowing users to bet on the outcomes of real-world events using cryptocurrency.

Coplan was born in 1998 and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He attended public schools in Hell's Kitchen and studied computer science at New York University, leaving during his freshman year to pursue blockchain technology and prediction markets. In 2014, at age 16, he participated in the initial coin offering of Ethereum, acquiring tokens at approximately $0.30 each. He has cited economist Friedrich Hayek's theories on decentralized information and professor Robin Hanson's concept of futarchy as intellectual foundations for Polymarket. Prior to founding Polymarket, he interned at Chronicled, where he worked on product interactions with the Ethereum blockchain, and at Genius, where he contributed to the platform's collaboration with Spotify on its "Behind The Lyrics" feature. He founded Polymarket in his Lower East Side apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic, having previously worked on a decentralized finance project called Union Market. By 2024, Polymarket had raised approximately $70 million from investors including Vitalik Buterin and Peter Thiel. In October 2025, following an investment by Intercontinental Exchange, Bloomberg reported his net worth at approximately $1.0 billion, making him, at age 27, the youngest self-made billionaire on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at that time.

Sheraz Ahmed is Managing Partner at STORM Partners, a blockchain and fintech consulting firm headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, which he has led since September 2020. At STORM Partners, he oversees strategy, compliance, and growth services for clients across the blockchain space, with mandates spanning marketing and growth, legal and compliance, finance and fundraising, and digital transformation. Clients have included Algorand, Aave, Cardano, Polygon, MultiversX, SingularityNet, Galaxy Digital, Swissborg, and Vodafone, among others.

Ahmed's work in digital assets extends to structuring and launching tokenized products, including tokenized intellectual property, carbon credits, creator tokens, and private securities, using blockchain infrastructure, legal wrappers, and AI-linked systems. His innovation lab, Lightningbox, has run pilots with Hublot, UNICEF, and Maerki Baumann. He also supported a $7.2 billion merger through a structured token strategy. In April 2026, he spoke at a breakfast event in Paris organised by The Big Whale ahead of Paris Blockchain Week, alongside representatives from Boerse Stuttgart Digital, Spiko, TACEO, 21x, and AMINA Bank, on the subject of institutional onchain exposure. Beyond STORM Partners, he is Founder of Decentral House and serves as Ecosystem Director at the Crypto Valley Association. He holds a dual Bachelor of Business Administration from Lancaster University and Universidad Pontificia Comillas ICADE. He was born in England and has spent much of his life in Switzerland, with heritage tracing to India, Pakistan, and Kenya.

Shivam Bajpayi is Senior Blockchain Engineer at BlackRock, a position he has held since January 2025, leading engineering for the firm's tokenization initiatives. He joined BlackRock's Digital Assets Lab at its inception in February 2021 and spent the intervening years as a Blockchain Developer directly responsible for implementing BlackRock's digital assets strategies and blockchain research.

Prior to his current role, Bajpayi conducted blockchain research at Purdue University, where he worked on a supply chain application for the automobile industry using Hyperledger Fabric and researched confidentiality and integrity of data within Fabric-based applications. He holds a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics from Purdue University, graduating in May 2020, with specializations in security, programming languages, and machine intelligence. His research focus has included blockchain systems, multi-party computation frameworks, and applied cryptography.

Shreya Adiraju is Global Strategy, Policy, and Product Lead for AI, Digital Assets, and Index Investing Technologies at BlackRock, a position she has held since February 2021. Her mandate covers digital assets — including tokenization, stablecoins, and crypto asset products — AI applications in asset management, and index investing technologies. Her work spans internal strategy development and execution, as well as external engagement with policymakers, trade associations, institutions, and academics to influence industry standards and shape adoption of new technologies in capital markets.

Before moving into her current role, Adiraju served as Strategic Advisor and Chief of Staff to BlackRock's Global Head of ETF and Index Investments from March 2019 to February 2021, and prior to that worked in Institutional Sales within the iShares business from September 2017 to March 2019. Earlier in her career, she held a role as Director of Data, Strategy, and Grants at Aim for Seva, a nonprofit focused on education access in rural India. She holds an MBA with concentrations in International Business Diplomacy and Entrepreneurship from Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, a BBA with concentrations in Finance and Data and Decision Sciences from Emory University, and studied Finance at Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.

Sid Singh is Managing Director at Strategic Investments, specializing in finance with a focus on strategic investment management and growth initiatives.

Simone Cortese is Chief Product Officer at Fnality International, the firm building a regulated distributed-ledger-based wholesale payment system that settles in a digital representation of central bank money. He leads the product roadmap for the banks and market participants that use Fnality's infrastructure.

Cortese has more than a decade of experience across fintech, capital markets and academic research. He joined the company to explore the use of blockchain in regulated environments and was closely involved in the formation of Fnality, drawing on both technical and business expertise to shape products for traditional and digital capital markets. He is a frequent commentator on regulated digital market infrastructure, stablecoins and tokenised deposits.

Simon Letort is Head of Strategic Initiatives at Digital Asset, where he leads efforts around the Canton Network, with a current focus on blockchain governance and digital cash. Canton Network is Digital Asset's blockchain infrastructure connecting regulated financial institutions, with its largest use case being interbank repo operated by Broadridge at approximately $400 billion nominal per day across 8,000 to 10,000 daily transactions. Tokenised Treasuries on Canton are being used as collateral by institutions including Citadel and DRW. Letort has described the network's near-term ambition as moving from hundreds of billions toward trillions in daily transaction volume, in line with the scale of existing platforms such as Tradeweb.

Prior to joining Digital Asset in September 2022, Letort spent approximately 20 years at Société Générale across a range of senior roles. He served as Managing Director and Chief Digital Officer and Head of Innovation for the Americas from 2017 to 2022, overseeing a technology strategy covering around 200 engineers and a $100 million budget. Before that he was Managing Director and Head of Financial Engineering for the Americas from 2015 to 2017, leading a team of 50 financial engineers covering product design, legal and tax structuring, and trade idea generation. Earlier in his career he served as Co-head of Global Markets Brazil at Banco Société Générale Brasil, where he managed a 15-person sales and trading team. He holds an M.Sc. in financial mathematics from École Centrale Paris and has pursued executive education at Harvard Business School Online.

Sitansu Sahoo is Global Blockchain & Digital Assets Lead, CIB ITO at BNP Paribas, based in London. In this role, he leads blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) digital transformation for the Corporate and Institutional Banking division. He has established the strategic vision and global positioning for blockchain at BNP Paribas and set up organisation-wide governance for DLT.

Prior to BNP Paribas, Sahoo held a role at Northern Trust where he led digital transformation and launched what he describes as the first commercial Private Equity blockchain product. Earlier in his career he held positions at Citi, where he conducted due diligence for the acquisition of ABN Custody and delivered the subsequent business and technology integration, and also managed integration following the acquisition of Bank Handlowy. He has also held roles at NBAD, where he established an operational risk framework described as five pillars. Across his career he has implemented custody products across 20 markets globally and has managed stakeholders at CXO level, including Presidents and Chief Digital Officers. His stated areas of specialism include blockchain, AI/ML, cloud-based digital transformation, programme and project management, regulatory compliance across EMEA and the US, and post-merger integration. He has over 28 years of experience in financial services, general management, and technology.

Souad Dous is Co-Founder and Partner at SPHERE The Swiss Financial Arena, a Swiss media and events platform focused on wealth management and professional investors. She co-founded SPHERE in 2016 and has since overseen its development into a platform serving the Swiss financial community through a weekly newsletter, a website, a magazine, and events held in Zurich, Geneva and Lugano, covering topics in both French and German. Her role sits within general management.

Under her leadership, SPHERE has extended its activity beyond media into professional development. In partnership with the ISFB, she initiated a continuing education programme designed specifically for independent asset managers, combining SPHERE's community and media platform with ISFB's academic expertise. She has described the programme's objective as establishing a structured, high-level training curriculum that serves as a sector reference for external asset managers. In May 2026, Dous announced a strategic partnership between SPHERE and finews, combining SPHERE's event formats and positioning in wealth management with finews's editorial reach and multilingual offering. The stated aim is to develop new event formats for the Swiss wealth and asset management industry and to build a B2C media and event platform alongside the existing B2B offering. In public statements relating to the finews partnership, she holds the title of Director of SPHERE. SPHERE connects independent wealth managers, private banks, family offices and institutional players through its magazine, digital publications and curated event formats. Dous is based in Geneva.

Sreeram Kannan is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eigen Labs, the Seattle-based company behind EigenLayer, a protocol that allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum's security through a mechanism called restaking. He has held the CEO role since July 2021. EigenLayer enables ETH stakers to make their capital available to secure additional blockchains and protocols, earning supplementary rewards in return. The protocol attracted over $10 billion in assets under management within its early months of operation and has been cited as a factor in revitalising decentralised finance on Ethereum. Kannan has also described a broader initiative called EigenCloud, positioned as verifiable cloud infrastructure for what he terms the agentic era, backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Concurrently, Kannan holds an Associate Professor position at the University of Washington, where he has been based since November 2014, conducting research in information sciences with applications spanning blockchains, AI, wireless systems, and computational biology. Prior to joining UW, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley from October 2012 to October 2015, focusing on information-theoretic methods in computational biology, specifically RNA sequencing assembly. Before that, he completed graduate research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Master of Science in Mathematics in 2011 and a PhD in information theory and wireless networks in 2012. His doctoral work centred on network information theory. He grew up in Chennai, India, completed his undergraduate degree at the College of Engineering, Guindy, and moved to the United States in 2008.

Stani Kulechov is the Founder and CEO of Aave Labs, the organisation behind Aave, a decentralised peer-to-peer lending protocol originally launched on Ethereum. He is also CEO of Avara, the parent entity overseeing Aave, Lens (a decentralised social networking protocol), and GHO (Aave's decentralised stablecoin). He founded ETHLend in 2017, one of the first widely used DeFi applications, which was subsequently renamed Aave in 2018. Aave allows users to supply crypto assets and earn rewards, or borrow against crypto collateral, with transactions executed automatically via smart contracts.

Kulechov is an active seed investor in DeFi, having backed projects including Lido, Maple, Slingshot, Swivel, and PoolTogether. He speaks regularly at fintech and blockchain conferences, with a focus on Ethereum smart contracts. He has been featured in Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Blockworks, and CoinMarketCap, and was named on CoinDesk's Most Influential list from 2021 to 2023 and Cointelegraph's Top 100 in 2021. Aave Labs received SOC 2 Type II attestation in 2024, covering Security, Availability, and Confidentiality criteria across its software and operations. Kulechov was born in Finland and began coding at age 12. He left high school temporarily at 15 to work on a commercial coding project before returning to complete his degree. He holds a Master's degree in Law from the University of Helsinki, awarded in 2020, where his thesis examined the use of technology to make commercial agreements more efficient. He obtained a TRM Crypto Compliance Specialist certification from TRM Labs in August 2024.

Stanislas Barthelemi is Exec To Custody Digital Assets Lead at CACEIS, a position he took up in February 2026. Prior to joining CACEIS, he spent nearly five years at KPMG France as Senior Manager for Cryptos and Web3, from March 2021 to February 2026, based in Paris.

Beyond his institutional roles, Barthelemi has been active in French Web3 industry representation. He has served as an Administrator at Adan, the French and European Web3 industry association, since June 2023, and became its President in May 2025. He also holds a public mandate as Adjoint aux Finances at the municipality of Méry-sur-Oise, having previously served the same municipality as Conseiller Délégué aux Subventions et aux Nouvelles Technologies for twelve years. No educational background is stated in the available source content.

Stefan Brinaru is Head of Digital Assets at BNP Paribas Asset Management, a position he has held since June 2024. Prior to this role, he served at the same firm as Digital Strategy Investment Lead for Blockchain and AI from August 2021 to June 2024, giving him close to four years of accumulated focus on digital asset strategy and blockchain within the organisation.

Before joining BNP Paribas Asset Management, Brinaru worked at BNP Paribas as a Financial Inspector within Inspection Générale from September 2018 to August 2021. Earlier in his career, he spent approximately four years at EY in Paris as an auditor and consultant within the Financial Services practice, working with clients including Crédit Agricole CIB, Crédit Agricole Indosuez Wealth, Covéa, and BNP Paribas. He began his career as a junior consultant at CGI Business Consulting, with assignments at AXA IM and Assurances du Crédit Mutuel. Brinaru holds a Master in Management from ESCP Business School, completed an exchange programme in Corporate Finance at City St George's, University of London, and holds a Bachelor's degree in Management from Université Paris Dauphine - PSL. He also holds certifications in blockchain and sustainability for business.

Stéphane Distinguin is Associé en charge de l'innovation at EY France, a position he has held since 2024, in which he sits on the EY France executive committee. He previously served as EY's partner responsible for artificial intelligence activities across the Western Europe zone. His presence at EY follows the 2022 acquisition of Fabernovel, the digital transformation consultancy he founded in 2003, which he built to fifty million euros in revenue and five hundred employees before the transaction. At EY Fabernovel, he has advised large companies on Web3 applications, including decentralised autonomous organisation models, NFT-based CRM tools, and blockchain-enabled traceability and reporting for environmental accountability.

Prior to the EY acquisition, Distinguin founded and invested in several start-ups including Digitick, KissKissBankBank, and Bureaux à Partager. From 2004 to 2010, he was president of Silicon Sentier, later renamed Numa, where he initiated La Cantine, described as the first European coworking space, and Le Camping, one of the first start-up accelerators. He served as president of Cap Digital, the French digital competitiveness cluster, from 2013 to 2019. In 2015, he was appointed by Prime Minister Manuel Valls to co-author the founding report for La Grande École du Numérique, which he subsequently chaired. From 2013 to 2016, he was a member of France's Conseil National du Numérique. In 2018, he was tasked with a mission on innovation funding for ministers Bruno Le Maire and Frédérique Vidal. In 2021, he was appointed to represent France in the selection process for the design of future euro banknotes. He is the author of Et si on vendait la Joconde ?, published by Éditions JC Lattès in 2022. He holds a degree from ESCP Europe, obtained in 1997.

Stéphanie Cabossioras is Chief Strategy & Global Policy Officer at Societe Generale - FORGE, a position she has held since November 2025 as a member of the executive committee. In this role she is responsible for strategy and international public affairs. Prior to this, from July 2024, she served as General Secretary at SG-Forge, overseeing corporate functions including regulatory, legal, compliance, and financial affairs, with a focus on ensuring that SG-Forge's products and services comply with applicable legal and regulatory rules. She was recognised in the Top 50 Women in Web3 & AI 2025.

Before joining SG-Forge, Cabossioras served as Managing Director of Binance France from November 2022 to November 2023, during which time Binance invested €100 million in France and established a presence at Station F. She then held a position as Senior Financial Auditor at the Cour des comptes from December 2023 to July 2024. Earlier in her career, she spent five years at the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), where she served as Head of European Affairs and then Deputy General Counsel, and also held a role as a payment expert at the Banque de France. She currently serves as a board member of Adan, the professional association representing cryptoasset and Web3 service providers in France and Europe. She is a graduate of the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), Sciences Po, and the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.

Stéphanie Lheureux is Head of the Digital Asset Competence Centre at Euroclear, an expert in tokenization and interoperability of digital assets in the financial sector.

Software Engineer with expertise in software development, focusing on building and deploying technology solutions. Experienced in tech roles with a background in software engineering.

Subhankar Sinha serves as Senior Advisor at STOKR, working directly with the company's leadership team on fund tokenization, with particular focus on money market fund tokenization, and on expanding STOKR's institutional presence in the U.S. market.

Sinha is a New York-based digital assets executive with experience across blockchain infrastructure, capital markets, and institutional business development. He previously served as Head of Blockchain at BNY, the world's largest custody and asset servicing business. Earlier in his career, he was a Director at PwC, where he co-founded and co-led the firm's blockchain consulting practice in the U.S. In recent years, he has advised stablecoin companies, tokenization platforms, blockchain networks, and wealth management firms on growth strategy, partnerships, and market development. His work has spanned sectors including banking, asset and wealth management, entertainment, energy, and transportation, across both startups and established corporations. His track record includes negotiating strategic partnerships, driving revenue expansion, and guiding digital transformation initiatives across emerging and established market participants.

Sunil Sachdev is SVP and Head of Embedded Finance & Digital Assets at Fiserv, leading the embedded finance business and the 2025 launch of the Fiserv Digital Asset Platform and FIUSD stablecoin. A global fintech exec with prior roles at American Express and Pershing.

Sveinn Valfells is Co-founder and Chair of Monerium, the Icelandic company that issues regulated euro e-money on blockchain (EURe) and was the first to obtain a license to issue on-chain e-money across the EEA. He previously served as the company's Chief Executive Officer.

As CEO, Valfells led the team that issued the first on-chain euros, dollars, sterling and Icelandic króna, and delivered the first integration of a major payment system (SEPA) with web3, enabling direct transfers of euros between bank accounts and on-chain wallets. He holds a PhD in Physics from Boston University, an MS in Economic Systems from Stanford University, and a BS in Applied Physics from Columbia University.

Sydney Abelow is Vice President, Digital Assets Product at BNY Mellon, a position she has held since March 2024. In this role, she is responsible for building client-centric and resilient solutions that use technology to meet evolving client needs and expectations, working across internal and external stakeholders to address complex problems and deliver near- and long-term value.

Abelow has been at BNY Mellon since 2020. Prior to her current role, she served as Senior Associate in Digital Asset Custody Commercial Product from August 2021 to March 2024, where her focus was on the commercial product side of the firm's digital asset custody offering. Before that, she completed the firm's Emerging Leaders Program as an Analyst in Asset Servicing from August 2020 to August 2021, and previously interned at BNY Mellon as a Finance Summer Analyst in 2019. Earlier experience includes serving as President of Alpha Epsilon Phi from January 2018 to January 2019, and as a Campus Engagement Intern at Hillel International from February 2017 to April 2018. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a focus on Finance from The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.

Teddy Pornprinya is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Plume Network, an Ethereum layer 2 blockchain dedicated to real-world assets (RWAs). He co-founded Plume in January 2024 alongside Chris and Eugene to build a blockchain infrastructure specifically designed for RWA tokenisation, addressing a gap he identified between RWA projects' needs and the capabilities of generalist blockchain platforms. Plume has raised $30 million from investors including Binance Labs, Han Ventures, Galaxy Digital, SuperScript, and Hashkey, among other institutional investors.

Before founding Plume, Pornprinya served as Business Development Lead at Binance from February to September 2023, where he focused on onboarding RWA projects to BNB Chain. Prior to Binance, he was Head of Business Development at Swim Protocol from September 2021 to February 2023, and before that held a Corporate Development role at Coinbase from March to September 2021. His career began in traditional finance, where he worked in investment banking at DC Advisory in San Francisco from July 2018 to March 2021. He holds a degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Thanasis Noulas is Vice President of Engineering at Bitvavo, a Amsterdam-based platform for buying, selling, and storing digital assets, a position he has held since September 2023. In this role, he leads the Trading and Data domains within the Engineering organisation.

Prior to Bitvavo, Noulas held a Vice President of Engineering role at Trade Republic, where he worked on building engineering teams across software engineering, site reliability, data science, and data engineering. His broader career spans people management and hands-on technical roles at Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Booking.com, and Source Capital. He has applied Machine Learning, Causal Inference, and Mechanism Design across problem areas including trading, content, travel data, and peer-to-peer marketplaces. His technical work has involved Python, C++, R, Airflow, Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Presto, Vertica, and Snowflake. Alongside his full-time roles, since January 2023 he has operated as a strategic advisor to Series A+ startups, focusing on marketplace dynamics, pricing, monetisation, and data platform initiatives. His total professional experience spans approximately 20 years.

The Big Whale is an independent market intelligence platform focused on digital assets, co-founded in Paris in 2022 by Raphaël Bloch and Grégory Raymond. The platform serves over 150 financial institutions, providing institutional-grade research, editorial coverage, weekly briefings, curated events, and an intelligence hub with thematic dashboards. Its stated mandate is to bridge traditional finance and onchain finance, offering decision-makers strategic and actionable intelligence on digital assets.

The platform's coverage spans markets, technology, and regulation, with a stated client base that includes banks, asset managers, advisory firms, and public institutions. Its editorial and research output is positioned as independent, with a focus on filtering signal from noise in the digital asset space. Raphaël Bloch, who leads the company as CEO, previously reported on crypto for Les Echos and L'Express from 2016 onward. Grégory Raymond serves as Head of Research and co-founder, having covered crypto at Capital Magazine since 2017. The team includes analysts based across multiple geographies, including Paris, London, and Lagos. The Big Whale operates a membership model and hosts monthly in-person events across Europe aimed at C-level and senior decision-makers in finance.

Theo Chapman is based in Madrid and works at Lombard Finance. He has international experience in the technology and innovation sector, with an extensive network in the crypto ecosystem.

Thomas P. Brophy is a Director at Deutsche Bank, contributing leadership and expertise in the finance sector.

Thomas Campione is Director and Digital Asset Accelerator Centre Lead at Deloitte Luxembourg, a position he has held since joining the firm in 2025. He leads the Digital Asset Accelerator Centre (DA2C), launched in November 2025, which is structured around defining a European vision for digital assets and DLT, serving as an activation hub within the Luxembourg financial ecosystem, and supporting clients in the digital transformation of their operations in line with applicable regulatory frameworks. His stated mandate covers advising clients on strategy, regulation, risk, and technology as they transition toward DLT and digital asset-based models.

Thomas has five years of specialisation in digital assets, with service areas that include strategy, market entry assessment, target operating model definition, regulatory considerations, crypto-fund setup, asset tokenisation, crypto-asset valuation, and accounting. Prior to joining Deloitte, he spent six years at PwC Luxembourg as Director and Blockchain Crypto-assets Leader. He has served since September 2020 as Co-chair of the Blockchain Finance Working Group at INATBA (International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications) and previously served as a Board Member of LëtzBlock, the Luxembourg Blockchain and DLT Association, from September 2020 to July 2025. He holds a master's degree in finance (Engineering), is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder since 2015, and completed the MIT Executive programme in Blockchain technologies. He is fluent in French and English.

Thomas Chevallier is Director, Digital Assets at BlackRock, a position he has held since July 2025, based in New York. His role sits within the Product department.

Prior to joining BlackRock, Chevallier spent approximately six years at McKinsey & Company, where he progressed from Engagement Manager to Associate Partner before departing in September 2024. At McKinsey, his work spanned commercial transformations, go-to-market strategy, product strategy for financial institutions, data strategy in insurance, and GenAI application development. He also completed a summer MBA internship at Amazon in Seattle in 2017. He holds a degree from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thomas CMF is an independent insurance agent, Medicare specialist, and cryptocurrency investor based in the Chicago area. He is also a founder and is recognized for his expertise and commitment to clients.

Tim McCourt is Senior MD and Global Head of Equities, FX and Alternative Products at CME Group, leading its equity index, FX, cryptocurrency and alternative product strategies. Before CME (2013) he ran the Americas index and Delta One book at RBS and spent a decade at JPMorgan. BA Boston College, MBA Wharton.

Tizian Rotermund is Jr. Relationship Manager at STOKR, an alternative investment marketplace focused on tokenisation of alternative assets, a role he has held since January 2025 and is based in Berlin. STOKR is headquartered in Luxembourg and operates as a regulated financial services platform.

Prior to joining STOKR, Rotermund worked as a Research Associate at i-unit group, a business consulting firm specialising in corporate finance, M&A, and strategy, for two months in mid-2023. He also held operational roles at Beets&Roots GmbH in Berlin between July 2022 and January 2023. He studied International Management across campuses in Berlin, Barcelona, and New York through the International School of Management, Germany. His bachelor thesis examined crypto tokens as financing instruments for startups in the context of venture capital. He is fluent in German and English.

TN Lee is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Pendle, a DeFi protocol deployed on Ethereum in June 2021 that enables users to tokenize and trade future yield. He has held a director-level role at Pendle since September 2020. Prior to Pendle, he worked at Kyber Network. He is based in Hong Kong and is fluent in English, Chinese, and Malay.

Under his leadership, Pendle grew its total value locked from approximately $250 million to a peak of $6.7 billion in June 2024, driven by demand for yield and airdrop point exposure across protocols including EtherFi and EigenLayer, before settling at around $2.7 billion by end of August 2024. The protocol experienced a 40% TVL decline at end of June 2024, attributed to the maturity of several liquidity pools. Lee has outlined a plan for the protocol covering the next two to three years, with Bitcoin restaking identified as a priority area, citing the Babylon protocol as a driver of new yield sources for Bitcoin holders. Pendle intends to offer exposure to Bitcoin-based airdrop points and stablecoin yields in this context. In 2025, Lee represented Pendle alongside Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Anchorage Digital in a meeting with Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister in New York, where he made the case for asset tokenization in the context of Vietnam's International Financial Center.

Tobias Seidl is CEO of STOKR, a Luxembourg-based digital securities platform he co-founded in 2018. STOKR focuses on tokenized investments for institutional clients, with cumulative digital securities issuances of $1.9 billion on Bitcoin's Liquid Network. The platform has been registered with Luxembourg's CSSF as a Virtual Asset Service Provider since 2022, making it one of the first VASP-registered digital securities platforms in the EU, and holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification for information security management. STOKR raised a total of $12.6 million across two funding rounds, including an $8 million Series A in October 2024 led by Fulgur Ventures.

A defining milestone in STOKR's trajectory was the 2021 launch of the Blockstream Mining Notes (BMN), a securitised hashrate product developed with Adam Back and Samson Mow at Blockstream. Seidl identifies this as one of the first genuinely tokenised real-world assets and credits it with establishing STOKR's track record among Bitcoin-native investors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. His stated thesis is that Bitcoin functions as both a store of value and a high-performance settlement layer, and that this combination constitutes the foundational infrastructure for institutional-grade digital capital markets. Prior to founding STOKR, Seidl practiced as an attorney-at-law at Hogan Lovells. He has been active in digital asset regulation through ThinkBlockTank in Luxembourg and INATBA at the European level.

Todd Sudak is Head of Digital Lending and Alternative Assets at Broadridge, a position he has held since February 2025. In this role, he leads executive product responsibilities across Digital Lending — covering Securities Based Lending, Commercial and Margin — as well as Alternative Assets and Data Aggregation capabilities within Broadridge Wealth Management.

Sudak joined Broadridge in March 2022 as GM, Head of Product and Program Management for Rockall, a Securities Based Lending SaaS platform and Broadridge subsidiary acquired in 2019. In that position, he held responsibility for product management, engineering, and client implementation teams across North America, EMEA, and APAC, and was accountable for segment acquisition strategies, client retention, and the strategic product roadmap. Prior to Broadridge, he spent nearly four years at Morningstar as Global Head of Product Management for Enterprise Solutions, where he was responsible for Morningstar's Advisor Workstation and Enterprise Components platforms, covering product strategy, roadmap, revenue growth, and client retention for the firm's global advisor user base. Before that role, he served as Head of Product Management for the Morningstar Direct Platform from 2011 to 2018. He holds a master's degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor's degree in industrial technology from Illinois State University.

Tomas Calatayud Guidi is Product Director, Executive Director – Kinexys at J.P. Morgan, a position he has held since February 2025. In this role he works on product development for Kinexys Digital Payments, with a focus on payments, blockchain, distributed ledger technology, and FX.

Calatayud Guidi has been part of J.P. Morgan's Kinexys unit since August 2022, when he joined as Product Manager Vice President, covering the same product areas before being promoted to his current title. Prior to that, from February 2021 to August 2022, he held a Vice President role in FX Product Management at J.P. Morgan in the United States, focused on FX payments new product development. He joined J.P. Morgan in October 2014 as an FX Operations Analyst in Argentina, progressing through senior analyst and operations manager roles before moving into product management as an Associate in New York in September 2018. Before J.P. Morgan, he worked as a Treasury Analyst at Noble Group in Argentina from May 2012 to September 2014, where his responsibilities included FX spot and futures operations, money market activity, financial planning, and foreign trade regulatory compliance. His total experience across these roles spans approximately thirteen years.

Thomas Patrick Sullivan is Director of Data Management at DTCC, specializing in overseeing data governance and strategy within the financial services industry.

Tony Ashraf is Managing Director at BlackRock, holding two concurrent roles: Global Head of Digital Asset Transformation, a position he has held since January 2023, and Head of Technology & Operations Middle East & Africa, which he assumed in May 2025. Both roles are based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

In his digital asset mandate, Ashraf works across BlackRock internally and with external industry partners to apply blockchain and distributed ledger technology to traditional operating models, with a focus on partnerships, scale creation, and product development. His responsibilities include DLT-based market infrastructure, tokenisation, and the development of institutional-grade crypto asset solutions. BlackRock's digital asset initiatives during his tenure include IBIT, a Bitcoin ETF that reached $25.4B AUM, and BUIDL, an on-chain institutional money market fund that exceeded $1.95B in total value locked. Ashraf has publicly stated that a core strategic focus has been targeting crypto-native participants already operating on-chain, rather than traditional finance converts, to reduce the barrier to entry for institutional digital asset products. Prior to BlackRock, he held roles at Morgan Stanley and Barclays, spanning operations, technology, project management, business management, and client service functions across the UK, Japan, China, Singapore, and Hungary.

Tugdual Chevalier is a Vice President in HSBC's Institutional Client Group within Corporate and Institutional Banking at HSBC Continental Europe, based in Paris. He works in the Financial Institutions Group coverage team serving institutional clients across banks, asset managers and fintechs.

Vaibhav Chellani is Founder & CEO at Socket, a protocol that enables developers to build chain-abstracted applications that can compose with any app across chains, currently within the EVM ecosystem. Socket was founded in 2021 and raised $5 million in September 2023. The protocol allows exchange platforms and DeFi protocols to design solutions that enable users to move between blockchains without friction. As of the time of reporting, more than 400 entities were building on Socket's technical stack.

Prior to founding Socket, Chellani served as Protocol Head at Matic Network (later Polygon) from July 2018 to February 2020. He has also participated in Google Summer of Code through the Python Hydra project. Earlier in his career, he worked as a blockchain developer at Toshblocks and Karachain. He has been recognised by teams at Gnosis, Zcash, and Consensys for blockchain applications, and won multiple national hackathons in blockchain and fintech. In addition to his operating role, Chellani is an angel investor with at least three recorded seed investments, including a participation in OneBalance's $5 million seed round in August 2024, as well as investments in Superform and Derive. He graduated from Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering in New Delhi.

Valentin Demé is Co-founder and CEO at Cube Network, a Web3 and tech startup incubator and accelerator based in Angers, France, which he co-founded in May 2023. Cube selects approximately ten startups per year from over 300 applications, providing structural support, financing, and mentorship. The incubation phase runs around six months for early-stage companies with no revenues yet, followed by a twelve-month acceleration phase for projects facing regulatory or financial scaling challenges. Cube has facilitated €7 million raised across its portfolio over two years. Mentors and advisers associated with the programme include Faustine Fleuret from Adan, Owen Simonin from Meria, and Ivan de Lastours from Bpifrance.

Demé is also co-founder and producer at 8s Productions, a media production company operating studios under the REDBOX brand in Angers, producing content for YouTube, television, and cinema. He co-founded Cryptoast, a media outlet focused on crypto and Web3. He sits on the board of directors of Adan, the French association representing the Web3 sector, a position he has held since June 2023. He is the author of Bitcoin et autres cryptomonnaies, bien comprendre avant d'investir, published by Larousse, with 30,000 copies sold. In 2025, Cube launched Spotlight, a competition and YouTube programme designed to identify and select entrepreneurs for its third intake, co-produced with content creator Amixem and judged by a panel including Éric Larchevêque and Nicolas Louvet.

Valerio Cicco is Deputy Director, Digital Banking at Banca Sella, a role he has held since March 2026. In this position he oversees HYPE (www.hype.it) and all Group digital touchpoints across online and omnichannel banking, with focus on the banking value proposition and the end-to-end product lifecycle of both Banca Sella Digital and HYPE. He also supervises the Group's digital assets and blockchain strategy in his capacity as a co-founder of that team. Immediately prior, from March 2025 to March 2026, he served as Head of AI Strategy, DLT & Digital Assets at the same institution.

His involvement in digital assets at Banca Sella dates to November 2022, when he co-founded the Digital Assets team from scratch, building it to approximately ten staff by 2025. As Co-Head, DLT & Digital Assets, he set strategy and led its execution within the Sella Group. His work in this period included participation in Banca d'Italia's Call for Proposals on DLT with a test stablecoin project described as the first of its kind in Italy, and leading the Group's exploration of an EU Stablecoin consortium opportunity, which he presented to the Board of Directors. He conducted more than 20 meetings with the national regulator. He also led the integration of HYPE S.p.A. into Banca Sella as Project Lead, including the definition of the 2026 Product Roadmap. Before moving into the Digital Assets mandate, he served as Executive Assistant to the Group Chief Executive Officer at Sella from November 2018 to October 2022. Earlier in his career he held roles at Axerve, including Special Project Manager and Strategic Planning Assistant, with responsibilities covering product launches and mergers and acquisitions scouting. Cicco holds a Bachelor's degree in Management and Business Administration from Università Commerciale 'Luigi Bocconi', graduating with 108/110, and completed a Double Degree in International Management with Fudan University, achieving 110 cum Laude.

Varun Paul is Senior Director, Financial Markets at Fireblocks, where his mandate covers Central Bank Digital Currencies, Financial Market Infrastructures, and blockchains. In this role he supports central banks and financial market infrastructures in their digital asset programmes. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London, focused on the application of digital asset custody technology to CBDCs and tokenised settlement at financial market infrastructures. At Fireblocks, he has authored technical research on tokenised money, including a paper modelling free convertibility between CBDCs, tokenised deposits, and stablecoins using smart contracts.

Paul joined Fireblocks in April 2022 as CBDC and Market Infrastructure Director, before moving into his current Senior Director role in October 2023. Prior to Fireblocks, he spent over 14 years at the Bank of England, where he held a series of roles across financial stability and fintech. His positions there included Senior Economist for Financial Stability, Head of Projects and Fintech within Financial Stability, Senior Manager for Future of Finance, and, most recently, Head of the Fintech Hub, where he focused on the future of money and the digital economy. He also served as Private Secretary to the Executive Director for Financial Stability. He studied Economics at the University of Cambridge and holds a Masters in Economics from University College London.

Victor Charpiat is Head of Legal & Compliance at Spiko, a Paris-based financial services firm that provides daily-paying interest products on cash. He has held this role since January 2025. Spiko was founded in 2023 and has raised $25.8M in total funding.

Prior to joining Spiko, Charpiat spent over six years at the Paris office of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, where he worked as an associate specializing in fintech, cryptocurrencies, and PSAN (Prestataire de Services sur Actifs Numériques) matters. Between January 2022 and January 2023, he founded Kolat, a financial services company based in the Paris area. Before Kramer Levin, he worked at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in Paris from April 2017 to October 2018 in the corporate general practice group, having completed a final internship there earlier that year. He also held a legal tech internship at 11.100.34 Avocats Associés in late 2016. He holds law degrees from Sciences Po Paris and Université Paris II-Panthéon Assas.

Viktoria Klich is co-founder of w3.group in Berlin, an expert in Web3, entrepreneurship, and content marketing. She invests in Web3 startups and leads community and educational initiatives.

Vinay Singh is Director, Non-Payment Crypto Solutions at American Express, a position he has held since March 2019 and is based in Phoenix, Arizona. His stated areas of specialization are crypto, blockchain, and cloud, and he also operates as an angel investor.

Prior to joining American Express, Singh served as Director of Software Development at REPAY - Realtime Electronic Payments from December 2017 to March 2019, based in Tempe, Arizona. Before that, he spent approximately a decade at Apriva in Scottsdale, Arizona, progressing from Senior Software Engineer (2007–2013) to Principal Engineer (2013–2015) and then Engineering Manager (2015–2017). Earlier in his career, he worked as a Software Developer at Qualcomm in the San Diego area for one year and briefly as a Mobile Application Solution Developer at SmartReply. His total professional experience spans approximately 23 years, the majority of which has been in engineering and technical roles before moving into general management and director-level positions.

Vincent Martin is Managing Director, Cross-Border Tax M&A at Deloitte Luxembourg, a position he has held since September 2017. He joined Deloitte Luxembourg in October 2008 as a junior in the Cross-Border Tax M&A department, where he has remained throughout his career, progressing from Junior to Senior Manager before reaching his current role.

His work focuses on tax structuring for alternative asset managers, covering private equity and real estate clients across domestic and international mandates, including merger and acquisition transactions, global tax optimisation, and tax due diligence. He has a specific focus on the African market, both inbound and outbound. He has published analysis on VAT treatment of security tokens in the EU and on accounting for crypto assets in Luxembourg, co-authored with colleagues at Deloitte Luxembourg. Prior to joining Deloitte, he worked as a legal adviser at two French law firms: Cabinet Paul Denizot Avocats from January 2007 to September 2008, and SCP Baur & Associés from June to December 2006, where he handled agreement drafting, company structuring, and legal and tax advisory work. He holds a qualification in Tax Law with an additional specialisation in Business Administration, and completed further studies at IAE France in Paris between 2007 and 2008.

Vivek Raman is Co-Founder and CEO of Etherealize, a New York-based company he founded in August 2024 with backing from the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin. Etherealize functions as the institutional marketing and product arm for the Ethereum blockchain, focused on bridging traditional finance with Ethereum infrastructure. Raman leads a team across product, research, business development, and marketing, with responsibilities spanning the development of institutional-grade products, blockchain education initiatives, and strategic partnerships with banks, asset managers, and hedge funds. He has represented Ethereum in Washington, engaging with the Treasury, SEC, Congress, and the White House, and has testified before the U.S. Congress to advocate for clear regulatory frameworks for digital assets. Etherealize raised $40 million in funding, announced in September 2025.

Prior to founding Etherealize, Raman served as Managing Director of Crypto and AI Investment Banking at BitOoda, where he led capital raises for Bitcoin miners, data centers, and AI companies, and built an Ethereum tokenization vertical. Before that, he held the role of Head of Proof-of-Stake Product Development at BitOoda, focusing on the ETH and Layer 2 space, including tokenization and institutional ETH staking. Earlier, he was Senior DeFi Researcher at Celsius Network, conducting diligence on DeFi protocols across the EVM blockchain and building institutional partnerships with Ethereum Layer 2 networks. His traditional finance career spanned over a decade, with Vice President and Director-level roles in high-yield and distressed credit trading at Nomura, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Morgan Stanley. He holds a B.A. in Economics, completed between 2007 and 2010.

Waqar Chaudry is Executive Director, Digital Assets at Standard Chartered, based in London. He leads within the bank's Financing and Securities Services division, which sits under Corporate and Investment Banking. He is also listed as a speaker at FinTech Connect 2026 in this capacity.

Chaudry's stated areas of expertise include distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, product strategy, market design, and transformation planning. His LinkedIn profile describes him as a markets practitioner and executive leader, with skills spanning post-merger integration, empirical research, and decision making.

INSUFFICIENT_DATA — the source content provides fewer than 3 independently verifiable biographical facts (career history, education, specific initiatives, tenure dates) beyond his current title and employer. A padded biography constructed from skill tags and partial descriptions would not meet the accuracy standard required.---*Note: The above reflects the constraint accurately. If a shorter but fully accurate output is preferred, the following can be used instead:*

Waqar Chaudry is Executive Director, Digital Assets at Standard Chartered, sitting within the bank's Financing and Securities Services division under Corporate and Investment Banking, and based in London. He is listed as a speaker at FinTech Connect 2026 in this role.

His stated areas of expertise include distributed ledger technology, product strategy, market design, transformation planning, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. His LinkedIn profile characterises him as a markets practitioner and executive leader. No further verifiable career history, tenure dates, or educational background are available in the source content.

William Bailey is Co-Founder and CEO of Bolero, a Paris-based financial services company he co-founded in 2021 that enables individuals and institutions to invest in tokenized music rights. Bolero's platform facilitates the buying and selling of publishing and master rights in the form of Song Shares and Catalog Shares, with the stated goal of creating a liquid, transparent asset class from music rights. Bailey has described the core problem as one of untradeable rights: artists and publishers hold rights tied to the commercial distribution of works — a market representing $41.5 billion annually — but those rights have historically lacked liquidity or tradability. Bolero's infrastructure uses blockchain to address this, allowing artists to monetize their catalogs without surrendering creative control.

Bailey's path to Bolero began during the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, when contact with friends in the music industry who lost income overnight prompted him to examine the structure of music rights. He co-founded Bolero with Arthur Amon, whom he met at a Le Wagon coding bootcamp. Prior to Bolero, Bailey worked as a Product Manager at Smartly.ai, a conversational AI SaaS company, from 2017 to 2020. Earlier roles include a production assistant position at Filmworks Group in Dubai and a corporate services role at Endemol Shine Group. He holds a Master's degree in Innovation Management — Technologies and Entrepreneurship from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2025, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in the Entertainment category, and in 2026 to the Entrepreneur Choiseul 200 list in Economy and Business.

William O'Rorke is a Partner at ORWL Avocats, where he leads the regulatory practice, focusing on crypto-asset regulation. He has advised clients in the crypto-finance sector for nearly a decade, with a practice centred on MiCA, MiFID, and DORA. His client base includes crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), payment and e-money institutions issuing stablecoins, banks, asset managers, and technology providers such as SaaS platforms, custodians-as-a-service, DeFi protocols, and layer-1/2 foundations. He co-founded ORWL Avocats, which was established in 2018.

O'Rorke co-authored Droit des crypto-actifs, published by LexisNexis, described as the reference textbook in the field. He lectures at the Paris Bar School (EFB) and at several master's programmes, and has taught at institutions including La Sorbonne, Assas, HEC, and Polytechnique. His team has been ranked "Highly Recommended" by Leaders League for four consecutive years and is listed in Chambers & Partners' FinTech rankings at Band 4. Separately, he serves as Board Member and Secretary of ADAN, a nonprofit representing Web3 actors in France and Europe, where he contributes to EU-level discussions on crypto regulation. He has also participated in working groups with Medef, France Stratégie, and Finance Innovation. He studied at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Yanis Mekhfi is a Research Analyst at The Big Whale, a European media outlet covering crypto and blockchain, a position he has held since November 2024. His published work at The Big Whale covers topics including Bitcoin treasury strategies, ICO financing models, the XRP/Ripple ecosystem, and crypto AI agents.

Prior to joining The Big Whale, Mekhfi spent nearly two years as an Investment Analyst at PyratzLabs, a Web3-focused investment fund and accelerator based in Levallois-Perret, France, where he worked within the finance and accounting function. Before that, he contributed as a Web Content Editor at Start in Blockchain, writing explainer articles on stablecoins, decentralized applications, cryptography, and Web3 social networks. He also briefly held a Founder Associate role at Kolat, a DeFi-oriented project. Mekhfi holds a degree from KEDGE Business School and a data science certification from Le Wagon.

Yaniv Gidron is a Co-Founder of Monee Financial Technologies, a fintech company incorporated in London in 2025 that works on digital securities and has participated in the Bank of England and FCA Digital Securities Sandbox. He serves as Co-Chief Executive alongside co-founder Vinay Anupindi and leads asset strategy and operations.

Gidron brings around 14 years of experience in private banking and wealth management, including time as a private banker focused on private wealth management at Scotiabank, before co-founding Monee.

Yat Siu is Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, a blockchain and gaming company dedicated to establishing digital property rights for virtual assets. He also serves as a member of the Task Force on Promoting Web3 Development established by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, a position he has held since July 2023. At Animoca Brands, he has led the company's strategic direction into NFTs, blockchain gaming, and the open metaverse, overseeing an investment portfolio that has grown to more than 300 Web3 and crypto start-ups. He serves on the BAFTA advisory board and on the board of directors of the Asian Youth Orchestra, and is a director at the Dalton Foundation, the sponsoring body of the Dalton School Hong Kong.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1973, Siu began his career at Atari Germany before moving to Hong Kong in 1996, where he founded Cybercity, later renamed Freenation, described as Asia's first free web page and email provider. In 1998 he founded Outblaze, which developed multilingual white-label web services and grew to serve over 75 million end-users. In April 2009, Outblaze's messaging assets were sold to IBM, which used them to open its first cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong. Siu subsequently transformed Outblaze into an incubator for digital entertainment projects, from which Animoca Brands emerged. He studied at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, with training in cello, flute, and piano. He has received the Standard Chartered Platinum Achievers Award, the URENCO Innovation Award, and was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow.

Yorick de Mombynes is a Conseiller Maître at the Cour des Comptes, France's national audit office, a position he has held since January 2025. He previously served as Conseiller Référendaire at the same institution from 2017. He is a prominent commentator on Bitcoin, having published extensively on the subject in outlets including Les Echos, L'ADN, and the Polytechnique alumni journal La Jaune et la Rouge, and has spoken at events including Surfin'Bitcoin and the Université d'été d'économie politique in Aix-en-Provence. His public positions include opposition to central bank digital currencies, which he views as incompatible with Bitcoin, and support for Bitcoin as a monetary and political phenomenon he describes as a Copernican revolution.

Before returning to the Cour des Comptes, he served as an advisor to Prime Minister François Fillon at Matignon from 2007 to 2010, and subsequently held several senior roles at Total E&P, including VP for Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, and VP for Algeria and Mauritania, before departing in January 2016. Earlier in his career he lectured in politics and economics at Sciences Po Paris for nearly five years. He holds a degree in philosophy, is a graduate of ESCP and IEP Paris, and is a former student of ENA. He also authored a work on the aesthetic philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Youssef Boudrigua is Senior Project Lead at CACEIS Consulting in Paris, focusing on project delivery and consulting. Educated at IAE Nantes/Audencia Business School.