The event was held at the prestigious <em><strong>Paulson Auditorium at NYU Tisch Hall, 40 W. 4th Street, New York</strong></em>. The Paulson Auditorium is a beautiful theatre-style venue that can accommodate up to 470 seated participants (just in case we reach that level). It is part of the <a title=”NYU Stern” href=”http://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/about/visit-stern”>NYU School of Business</a>.
Brian Lio is the founder and CEO of Smith + Crown, a cryptofinancial services group that provides research, data, and insights on blockchain technologies and digital assets. Previously, he founded the Bright Iron Group, a NY-based design, strategy and user experience firm, whose clients included Nike, BlackRock, Samsung and GE. He has also held positions at Microsoft and DDB. Brian graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science.
Maciej is the founder of Userfeeds.io — the content ranking & reputation system for blockchain communities inspired by liquid democracy and Google’s Pagerank.
Userfeeds develops the engine for algorithms that use token-based signals for ranking content. Tokenized content discovery offers alternative models of incentive alignment between publishers and audiences and value distribution from co-created network effects. Token-based filtering combined with open data can offer solutions to fake news, trolling and spam by changing the existing attention economies of large platforms.
Vinny is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded the digital gift card platform, Gyft, which was acquired by First Data Corporation in 2014. After over a decade of experience in e-commerce, he realized that no-one had a universal solution to tackle identity fraud for consumers.
Julian is an economist by trade, fascinated with blockchain technology, as well as sociology and the economics of decentralised systems. In the past, Julian served as a consultant and researcher of public policies with a background in public economics, the framing of which he finds very useful for understanding decentralised systems.
Chris Burniske is a partner at Placeholder, a venture capital firm based in New York City that invests in decentralized information networks. Prior to Placeholder, he pioneered ARK Invest’s crypto efforts, leading the firm to become the first public fund manager to invest in bitcoin in 2015, and co-authored the best selling book, Cryptoassets. His commentary has been featured in national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg and Fortune. Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BS from Stanford and can be found on Twitter @cburniske.
Nick is a software engineer and musician, who is the founder of WeiFund, a decentralized crowdfunding platform, and BoardRoom a decentralized governance platform. Nick has several interests regarding political systems, economic philosophy, decentralized ecosystems, natural and synthetic forms of harmony, sustainable architecture and agriculture, law, and energy management.
Brian Kelly is an investor, author, and financial markets commentator. He is an expert in global financial markets, macro-economics and digital currencies. Brian Kelly has over twenty years experience in financial markets and is the author of the book The Bitcoin Big Bang – How Alternative Currencies are About to Change the World. He is a CNBC contributor and can be seen regularly on Fast Money.
Shawn is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Storj Labs.
Ankur Nandwani is Product Manager at Coinbase where he manages the consumer division of the company. Prior to that he co-founded BitMonet which was the Bitcoin-based monetization platform for content publisher.
Doug is a Founder at Livepeer – a decentralized video infrastructure protocol and platform that has been live on the Ethereum network since April, 2018. Doug is the author of the Livepeer protocol and MerkleMine distribution algorithms, both of which have been focused on designing incentives for wide and active participation in decentralized networks. Previously Doug has served as Founder and VP Engineering at Hyperpublic (acquired by Groupon) and Wildcard where he focused on architecting and building realtime data processing systems, as well as building and leading happy and effective teams. He has a BSE in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania where he focused on research related to decentralized systems including the Bittorrent protocol.
Luis is Aragon’s founder and CEO, a company that is building a standard for DAOs (Stripe Atlas for Ethereum-based companies). Luis has been awarded as the best underage European programmer in 2011, is a Forbes 30 Under 30, a MIT TR35 and was an Advisor to the VP of the European Commission. He cofounded the blockchain startup Stampery, backed by Tim Draper. Prior to founding startups, he created the world’s first Linux distribution with facelogin.
Sarah Hody focuses her practice on advising entrepreneurs, technology businesses, financial services companies, and innovators in the blockchain space. She has experience counseling on corporate structure matters such as entity formation and dissolution, state and federal regulatory compliance, corporate governance, and consumer-facing licensing and use agreements. She is also familiar with banking laws, bank services agreements, and financial services litigation.
Sarah’s background includes serving as in-house counsel at Coinbase, a digital currency exchange company, where she negotiated and drafted agreements on global payment services integrations, evaluated risks and advised business teams on commercial partnerships, and managed the company’s state money transmission licensing programs.
Emma is Argon Group’s General Counsel and has more than 15 years of experience both in-house and at top-level law firms, Simpson Thacher and Skadden. She graduated from Stanford Law School and Durham Law School.
Thomas Linder joined MME in 2015. Due to his long-standing role at a Big-Four advisory firm, including temporary employment in the US, he has broad experience in advising Swiss and foreign companies in international tax matters. He is particularly specialized in leading inter-disciplinary projects in the context of acquisitions, corporate restructurings and migrations and has in-depth knowledge in cross-border transactions and tax accounting.
Thomas has a strong personal national and international network among consultants, enterprises and administrations which, in combination with his comprehensive technical skills, allows him to develop creative, tailor-made and efficient tax structuring solutions. He is regularly publishing and lecturing on current tax topics and is the co-author of several textbooks.
Richard Craib is the founder and CEO of Numerai, a hedge fund built by a network of data scientists. Previously, Craib was a data scientist at an asset management firm with $15 billion under management. He has a degree in pure mathematics with a focus on abstract algebra at Cornell University.
Joey is building the world’s first decentralized prediction market platform. Augur is built on the Ethereum blockchain and allows users to forecast events and be rewarded for predicting them correctly.
Juan Benet invented IPFS, Filecoin, and other protocols. He is the founder of Protocol Labs.
Simon is a full-stack engineer that builds decentralized applications for use in the music industry & online communities. He has been in the blockchain space since 2011, and has been doing Ethereum-based development at ConsenSys for more than 2 years. During this time he helped found Ujo and develop the first smart-contract driven rights management prototype with Imogen Heap, and was a key participant in the design of the ERC20 standard. Before joining ConsenSys he completed an MA in Socio-Informatics (researching sustainable online community design) which has formed the basis of new work related to meme markets & the attention web.
Linda Xie is co-founder and managing director of Scalar Capital. Previously she was a product manager at Coinbase which she joined in June 2014. At Coinbase, Linda has worked with regulators and law enforcement on compliance for digital assets. Prior to Coinbase, she was a portfolio risk analyst at AIG. Linda is also an advisor to 0x, a protocol for decentralized exchange of Ethereum tokens. Linda holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Peter is Director of Research at Coin Center, the leading non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin. He is a graduate of NYU Law, as well as a self-taught designer and coder.
He drafts the Center’s public regulatory comments, and helps shape its research agenda. He has briefed policymakers and regulatory staff around the world on the subject of Bitcoin regulation. Previously, he was a Google Policy Fellow and collaborated with various digital rights organizations on projects related to privacy, surveillance, and digital copyright law.
Brock Pierce is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with an extensive track record of founding, advising and investing in disruptive businesses. He is the Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation and Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Blockchain Capital.
Blockchain Capital is the first sector-focused venture fund that invests solely in Blockchain
technology companies and the Bitcoin ecosystem. The firm has made more than 70
investments in the sector. Blockchain Capital was recently named the most active FinTech
Venture Fund by Pitchbook.
Brendan Eich is the co-founder and CEO of Brave Software (https://brave.com/) and the Basic Attention Token (https://basicattentiontoken.
David is the CEO and co-founder of the company behind Sia, one of the front-running decentralized cloud storage platforms. He discovered bitcoin in 2011, studied it through 2014, then began working full time as a blockchain engineer.
Will Warren is Co-founder and CEO at 0x where he is developing public infrastructure for peer-to-peer exchange on the Ethereum blockchain. After receiving a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC San Diego, Will worked as a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory conducting applied physics research. Will spent two years in UC San Diego’s Structural Engineering doctoral program before dropping out to pursue an interest in Ethereum full time.
Stephan is digital strategist at disrupt consulting and has more than 20 years experience in IT businesses. He advises finance and telecom enterprises on digital strategy.
In 2015 he was part of the of the UBS crypto 2.0 innovation lab at Level39 in London. Stephan has been working on digital currencies since 2008 and holds a PhD from ETH Zürich.
Marco Santori leads Cooley’s fintech practice, and is an authority in the law of blockchain technology. He is the Legal Ambassador for the Delaware Blockchain Initiative, the drafter of the New Jersey Digital Currency Jobs Creation Act and was called “The Dean of Digital Currency Lawyers” by an American Banker journalist. Marco focuses his practice on structuring innovative products into existing regulations, as well as crafting new regulations where required. He counsels on compliance with and disputes over money services, securities and derivatives laws, with both high-growth fintech companies and international financial institutions.
Jake is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at CoinFund LLC, a blockchain technology research company and private cryptoasset investment vehicle. Jake has 9 years of experience in pure and financial technology, a background in computer and mathematical sciences, and an avid interest in blockchain and financial technology. Previously, Jake was Partner & CTO at Triton Research, a technical product manager and engineer at Amazon.com, and spent five years as a financial technologist at Highbridge Capital Management and as a quantitative researcher at Kohera.
Nick runs The Control and is an investor at Runa Capital, an early stage venture fund. Previously, he worked on business development and marketing at Coinbase.
William Mougayar is a Toronto-based investor, researcher, blogger, and author of The Business Blockchain (Wiley, 2016). He is a direct participant in the crypto-technology market, and an advisor or board member to some of the world’s leading blockchain organizations, including Ethereum, OpenBazaar, Coin Center, Steemit and Bloq. He blogs regularly about the present and future of blockchains at Startup Management.
Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Fred is married with three children and lives in New York City.
Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. Armstrong founded the company, which has become one of the largest in the Bitcoin space, in June 2012.
Before founding Coinbase, Armstrong worked as a Software Engineer at AirBNB from 2011-2012. Previously, he founded UniversityTutory.com and also worked as a software engineer at CarWoo.com.
Muneeb co-founded Blockstack, a new decentralized internet where users control their data and apps run without remote servers. Muneeb received his Masters in Computer Science from Princeton University and did PhD-level research in distributed systems at Princeton working in the systems group and at PlanetLab—the world’s first and largest cloud computing testbed. Muneeb was awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship and a Princeton Graduate Fellowship and gives guest lectures on cloud computing at Princeton. He has built a wide range of production systems and published research papers with over 900 citations.