Experts

Arjun Rao is VP, Engineering at Place Exchange. Formerly, Engineering Manager at BlackRock.

Arjun Rao

Fred Ehrsam is the co-founder of Coinbase. Previously, Ehrsam worked as a trader in the Securities Division at Goldman Sachs, and in Portfolio Analytics at BlackRock. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Duke University.

In 2014, Ehrsam was named one of TIME’s 30 People Under 30 Changing the World. In the same year, he was also included as part of Forbe’s 30 Under 30.

Starting something new with Matt Huang.

Fred Ehrsam

Gavin Andresen is Bitcoin developer. All-around geek.

Gavin Andresen

Ryan Selkis is Founder and CEO of Messari. Entrepreneur, investor, and writer helping to build the bitcoin / digital currency ecosystem. Founder of Messari, and formerly an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and founding team member at the industry's most active investor (Digital Currency Group) and largest media brand (CoinDesk). Working on new ventures and angel investing.

Ryan Selkis was the Managing Director at CoinDesk, a site providing the latest news, analysis, and insights in the cryptocurrency and blockchain spaces. Prior to CoinDesk, Selkis was the Director of Growth for Digital Currency Group, an investment firm focused on the crypto space. He holds an MBA from MIT School of Business.

Ryan Selkis

Wang Chun is Co-Founder and Administrator at F2Pool, founder of stake.fish. In Cod We Trust.

Wang Chun

Vinny Lingham is known as the "Bitcoin Oracle" on account of his highly accurate predictions around the pricing of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

He is the founder and CEO of Civic, an identity management startup run on the blockchain. He was previously recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos.

By the way, He is General Partner at Multicoin Capital and Newtown Partners.

Vinny Lingham

Jae Kwon is a blockchain software architect and co-founder of Tendermint, and the president of the Interchain Foundation.

After graduating from Cornell in 2005 with a B.S. degree in computer science, he worked as a professional developer in Silicon Valley, including at Alexa, and at Yelp where he led the mobile application development team. He also cofounded iDoneThis, a productivity service.

Jae has worked on numerous open-source projects, including a CoffeeScript compiler/interpreter written in Javascript, an end-to-end encrypted email system called Scramble.io, and a cryptocurrency exchange. These projects were inspired by the cryptopunk hacker ethos, which ultimately led to the current work with Tendermint.

Jae has been working on a project he created in 2014, called Tendermint. He initially invented and refined (with Ethan Buchman and Zarko Milosevic) the Tendermint consensus algorithm and implementation with the aim of liberating the blockchain from the costs and drawbacks of proof-of-work mining. His mission is to make this technology more accessible, in order to accelerate the adoption of decentralized ledger technology.

Jae is also the President of the Interchain Foundation, based in Zug, Switzerland. The Interchain Foundation (aka ICF) was founded with the mission to promote the vision of Cosmos, the internet of blockchains, to enable public blockchain interoperability and scalability.

Jae Kwon

Mike Goelzer is an engineer, hacker and leader of product management for the libp2p Project (libp2p.io) at Protocol Labs. Previously, he was a member of the team that built the Docker engine and Docker’s clustering technology. Before that, Mike has been an entrepreneur, engineer and computational chemist.

Mike Goelzer

As an entrepreneur, inventor, and investor, Gary Kremen has over twenty five years of experience with emerging growth companies and developing breakthrough technology.

He is founder of several Silicon Valley companies.  In 1993, he founded Match.Com the world’s largest dating company where he came up with he idea of online dating, wrote the original business plan, invested the original capital, lead the design of the product and hired the first 20 employees.  Kremen also founded Clean Power Finance (backed by Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures), the leading residential solar power financing platform company which over one third of all solar installers in the U.S. run their business upon.  He co-founded, with Ben Dubin, Full Source Software and Los Altos Technologies, early Internet firms.  Gary incubated, was the first outside board member and wrote the first check in Dolores Labs (now Crowdflower), the leading crowdsourcing company.

He is an investor in over 50 companies including such clean technology companies as HydroNovation, Watersmart Software (where he is the Chairman), Sunlink, Carbon Flow, Recurve, Greenbox (acquired by Silver Springs Network), Enmetric, Ready Solar (acquired by Sun Edision), Solar Universe, Lifefactory, People Power Co., Niman Ranch, and Marone Bio Innovations.
Gary is the primary inventor of the seminal U.S. patent for dynamically created web pages, patent #5,706,434 as well as patents #7,698,210 and #7,890,436.  He holds an MBA from Stanford University as well as degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Northwestern University.

Gary Kremen

Don Tapscott is one of the world’s leading authorities on the impact of technology on business and society. He has authored 16 books, including Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which has been translated into over 25 languages.

Don has been advancing groundbreaking concepts for over 3 decades. His 1992 bestseller, Paradigm Shift, helped coin this seminal management concept, and The Digital Economy, written in 1995, changed business thinking about the transformational nature of the Internet. Two years later he helped popularize the terms “Net Generation” and “the Digital Divide” in Growing Up Digital. 

Don’s most recent and ambitious book was co-authored with his son, startup CEO and bitcoin governance expert, Alex Tapscott. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing the World was published in May 2016 and is, according to Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen, “the book, literally, on how to survive and thrive in this next wave of technology-driven disruption.” 

In 2017, Don and Alex co-founded the Blockchain Research Institute, whose 70+ projects are the definitive investigation into blockchain strategy, use-cases, implementation challenges and organizational transformations. 

Don is a member of the Order of Canada and is ranked the second most influential management thinker in the world by Thinkers50. He is an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD and Chancellor of Trent University in Ontario. It is hard to imagine anyone who has been more prolific, profound, and influential in explaining today’s technological revolutions and their impact on the world.

Arjun Rao

VP, Engineering at Place Exchange.

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