People

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.

Rajeev Sambyal is a Managing Director, Digital Assets at BNY, a title under which he was listed as a speaker at Point Zero Forum 2026. As Head of Digital Assets Platform at BNY Mellon, Sambyal oversees the development of the bank's digital assets products and services. Before this role, Sambyal led BNY Mellon's efforts to identify and build solutions using blockchain, AI and machine learning, and was listed in 2023 as Director of Artificial Intelligence & Innovation. He joined BNY Mellon from State Street, where he held various leadership roles building solutions for financial markets using emerging technologies.

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.

Reena Verma is Head of Tokenized Deposit Commercialization at The Clearing House.

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.

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.

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.

Sara Rona is Managing Director, Head of UK/Europe and MENA at Silicon Valley Bank, based in New York. Rona joined SVB in 2018 as a managing director within its Global Gateway team, covering tech startups and venture capital firms that need cross-border banking services. She previously worked at HSBC, IFC-World Bank and Deutsche Bank, and holds an MBA in international business.

Sara Sisenwein has served as Senior Director of Growth Operations at Binance.US. She previously held the role of SVP Client Relationships at BillGO, where she worked with fintech companies including Capital One, Credit Karma and Quicken and contributed to the launch of a patented real-time payment solution.

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.

Stanley Chan is the Chief Executive Officer of CMU OmniClear Limited and the Group Chief Executive Officer and an Executive Director of the Board of CMU OmniClear Holdings Limited, based in Hong Kong. CMU OmniClear carries out the operations and business development of the Central Moneymarkets Unit (CMU), a debt securities clearing and settlement system, on behalf of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). Before joining CMU OmniClear, Chan was Division Head of the Financial Market Infrastructure Service Division of the HKMA and Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong FMI Services Limited. He joined the HKMA in 1995 and worked across reserves management, financial infrastructure development, bank licensing, and clearing and settlement systems oversight. He is a CFA charterholder and holds an MBA from the University of Adelaide.

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.

Stéphane Heip is Chief Executive Officer at Enzyme, the infrastructure for tokenized finance founded in 2017. A trained business lawyer, he joined Enzyme in 2024, bringing a background spanning go-to-market, sales, and business strategy.

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.

Suzy Singh is Deputy Chief Operating Officer at Securitize, the tokenization platform. She speaks publicly on institutional tokenization, including Securitize's issuance of its own common stock on-chain and its partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald. She has discussed the long lead times, often six to 24 months, between first institutional conversations and launches of tokenized products.

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.