Experts

Lenny Rachitsky was Product Lead, Supply Growth at Airbnb. Writing, Advising, Investing, Exploring.

Lenny Rachitsky

Startups

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Linear

Brain behind Lightning Network, Plasma, and writer of the OMG whitepaper.

Joseph Poon is co-founder of Lightning Labs, which is implementing the Lightning Network White Paper Poon wrote to solve limitations in the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s designed to give Bitcoin trustless support for thousands of very low-cost transactions per second. In addition to overcoming Bitcoin’s scaling limitations, it adds capability for cross-chain transactions, privacy protection, micropayments, payment receipts, and multi-hop payments.  Poon is also on the team that’s building OmiseGo, a proof-of-stake blockchain, and the decentralized ethereum-based exchange that will use OmiseGo to let crypto investors trade almost any currency, both fiat and crypto, with each other directly rather than through third-party companies. The OmiseGo blockchain is expected to launch Q4 2017.

Joseph Poon

Mao Shixing is Founder of F2Pool. F2Pool is a Chinese mining pool, also referred to as "Discus Fish". The pool opened on May 5, 2013. This name stems from the time before the pool had an English interface. At the time they were known only by their coinbase signature, which is Discus Fish, the nickname of one of the operators.

Discus Fish

Hayden Adams is Founder of Uniswap. Ethereum developer, Inventor of the Uniswap Exchange Protocol.

Hayden Adams

Jihan Wu is Chairman at Bitdeer Technologies Holding Company, co-founder of Matrixport and Bitmain.

Jihan Wu

Founded in 2015, Wachsman is a global professional services firm focused on the blockchain industry, representing clients valued at billions of dollars. 

With more than 100 employees working from offices in New York, Dublin, and Singapore, Wachsman provides strategic advisory, public relations consulting, events management and production, branding and creative, and corporate development services to many of the most indispensable companies in the blockchain and crypto-asset sectors.

Wachsman

Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur and investor.He first gained attention for innovations in banking and startup finance. Today he is known as the mentor of the PayPal mafia of entrepreneurs, as well as for his warnings of a coming technology deficit with severe economic consequences. He works to accelerate innovation to prevent such a crisis by identifying and funding promising technology ideas and by guiding successful companies to scale and dominate their industries.

In 1998,Thiel made e-commerce easier, faster, and more secure by co-founding and leading PayPal, which now has more than 128 million active financial accounts. In 2002, he sold PayPal to eBay and founded a global macro fund, Clarium.In 2004, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, which offers platforms for finance companies and intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to integrate, visualize, and analyze the world’s information.

In the same year, he made the first outside investment in Facebook, a social networking hub that now has more than a billion million active members. He serves on its board.

Building on his personal success as a venture capital investor, Thiel co-founded and manages Founders Fund, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital fund that has pioneered new methods of venture financing that benefit founders. Through Founders Fund, as well as through his private investing, he has helped the next generation of tech companies, such as SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, RoboteX, and Spotify.

And in 2012 he co-founded Mithril Capital Management, an international technology investment fund.Thiel established and funds the Thiel Foundation, which promotes freedom in all its forms. He sponsors the Committee to Protect Journalists, The Seasteading Institute, and the Human Rights Foundation. He funds the artificial intelligence research of theMachine Intelligence Research Institute.

He also aids work against violence through theOslo Freedom Forum and through the research of philosopher René Girard, which is extended and promulgated by Imitatio. He also promotes better health by funding the longevity research of Dr. Cynthia Kenyon and the SENS Research Foundation.Thiel created the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, which nurtures the tech visionaries of tomorrow. And he formed Breakout Labs to help independent scientists, engineers, and inventors advance their most radical ideas.

Thiel earned a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and technology and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution.

His articles have appeared in Policy Review and the Wall Street Journal. He co-produced the film Thank You for Smoking, was rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, and received the Innovation Award from the Economist in 2010. He lives in San Francisco.

Peter Thiel

Dr Garrick Hileman, head of research at Blockchain, co-founder of Mosaic, research associate at the London School of Economics.

Garrick is best known for his research on monetary and distributed systems innovation, particularly cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. 

Garrick was ranked as one of the 100 most influential economists in the UK & Ireland. He is regularly invited to share his research and perspective with public sector institutions, including the CIA, US Army and Naval War Colleges, Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and the Financial Stability Board, as well as media, including the BBC, CNBC, FT, WSJ, and NPR. Garrick is frequently sought as a speaker.

Notable cryptocurrency and blockchain research publications include the "2017 Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study" (University of Cambridge) and the "2017 Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study" (University of Cambridge). He also created and published the CoinDesk "State of Bitcoin" and "State of Blockchain" reports from 2013-2016. Garrick's other research interests include sovereign debt, financial crises, financial repression and prudential regulation, black markets, and systemic risk. He completed his PhD in economic history at the London School of Economics under the supervision of professors Albrecht Ritschl and Niall Ferguson.

Garrick's teaching includes developing the UK's first university taught class on blockchain technology at the University of Cambridge, and teaching on numerous executive education programs and other classes for Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, Northwestern, and the London School of Economics.

Garrick has worked for 15+ years in the private sector with both start-ups like Blockchain and Mosaic and established companies such as Bank of America, The Home Depot, IDG, and Allianz. Garrick’s technology experience includes co-founding a San Francisco-based new venture incubator and IT strategy consulting for multinationals. Garrick has served on the boards of directors of both publicly traded and private companies, and he has worked or consulted in a wide range of industries, including banking, technology, online media, specialty finance, insurance, business services, retail, non-profit, education, and government.

Garrick’s volunteer work includes serving as a Big City Mountaineers guide for at-risk urban teens on backcountry excursions in the Sierra Nevada. He also was a founding member of the record-setting PolarVision expedition, which raised funds and awareness for sight-related charities.

Garrick Hileman

Vlad Zamfir is part of the Ethereum Development Team and is an analytics consultant at Burson-Marsteller. Zamfir is known for his active involvement in the Ethereum community, his work on "cryptoeconomics", proof-of-stake and blockchain sharding in the Ethereum ecosystem. He is also concerned about ethics in the use and governance of blockchain technology.

Since 2014, Zamfir has been a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organisation that supports the development of the Ethereum platform. He is the lead developer of the Casper protocol upgrade. If successful, Casper would shift ether from being a proof-of-work coin to a proof-of-stake coin and help achieve large-scale network scalability.

Vlad Zamfir

Marek Palatinus, also known as slush, is the inventor of the bitcoin mining pool concept and operator of the Slush’s mining pool, designer of the lightweight Stratum protocol and the core programmer of TREZOR. With nearly 15 years experience in IT, Marek has co-developed several successful internet startups and worked as an enterprise architect for one of the largest banks in Central Europe. Since his introduction to Bitcoin in 2010, he has dedicated his entire time to developing useful services and tools that can make bitcoin widely adopted.

He is the CEO and Head IT Architect at Satoshi Labs, which is responsible for building some of the most widely used Bitcoin products (such as TREZOR, Slush Pool, and Coinmap).