Experts

Riyaz Faizullabhoy is CTO at a16z Crypto. Formerly, Security Infrastructure, Blockchain at Facebook, founding engineer at Anchorage, Security Engineer at Docker. Work hard, be kind.

Investments

Organizations

a16z crypto

Riyaz Faizullabhoy

Barry Silbert is the Founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group. Sitting at the epicenter of the bitcoin and blockchain industry, DCG is a global enterprise that builds, supports, and invests in companies all over the world. 

A pioneer in bitcoin investing, Barry established himself in 2012 as one of the earliest and most active investors in the industry. In 2015, he founded DCG and today, DCG is one of the industry’s most prolific investors, backing more than 120 companies in 30 countries around the world, including Coinbase, Ripple, BitPay, and Circle.

In addition to its investment portfolio, DCG owns Grayscale Investments (the largest asset manager in the industry with ~$2 billion in AUM), Genesis Trading (the largest regulated OTC crypto trader), and CoinDesk (the preeminent media and events company in the space). DCG also invests directly in digital currencies and other digital assets. 

Prior to DCG, Barry was the founder and CEO of SecondMarket, a venture-backed technology company that was acquired by Nasdaq. Barry has received numerous awards and accolades including being named Entrepreneur of the Year by both Ernst & Young and Crain's, and being selected to Fortune’s prestigious "40 under 40" list.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Barry worked as an investment banker in New York. He graduated with honors from the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.

Barry Silbert

Diem, formerly Libra. Our mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that can empower billions of people. Libra will be built on a secure, scalable, and reliable blockchain; it will be backed by a reserve of assets designed to give it intrinsic value; and it will be governed by the independent Libra Association, which was formed to manage and evolve this new ecosystem.

The Libra Association is working to empower people around the world through the creation of a simple global currency.

Diem

Michael Arrington most recently Co-Founded CrunchFund after leading TechCrunch to a successful exit with AOL. His venture investments include Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest. Michael was the Editor of TechCrunch, which he founded in 2005. In 2008 Time Magazine named Michael “One of the World’s 100 most influential people”. Michael also practiced securities law at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Michael graduated from Stanford Law School and  Claremont McKenna College.

Michael Arrington

The cofounder of Stellar Development Foundation. Learn about his work with Stellar.org and his background in the technology space.

Jed McCaleb

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.

He is Co-founder GiveCrypto, Building an open financial system for the world.

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.

Brian Armstrong

Solidity, the Contract-Oriented Programming Language. Solidity is a statically typed, contract-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts on the Ethereum platform.

Solidity is a statically-typed curly-braces programming language designed for developing smart contracts that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Smart contracts are programs that are executed inside a peer-to-peer network where nobody has special authority over the execution, and thus they allow to implement tokens of value, ownership, voting and other kinds of logics.

When deploying contracts, you should use the latest released version of Solidity. This is because breaking changes as well as new features and bug fixes are introduced regularly. We currently use a 0.x version number to indicate this fast pace of change.

Solidity

Make passwords disappear with a touch of Magic. Enable customizable, future-proof, passwordless login with a few lines of code.

Reliable and fast email delivery with failover. Instead of passwords, user security is backed by elliptic curve cryptography and hardware security modules.

Plug-n-Play even if you have an existing auth solution. Enable users to log in via desktop, mobile, or FIDO devices.

Magic Labs

Partner of Placeholder VC, co-author of Cryptoassets, formerly led crypto ARKinvest.

Chris Burniske

Balaji S. Srinivasan is co-founder of Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center. Formerly the CTO at Coinbase.

Prior to the Coinbase acquisition, Balaji took over as CEO of Earn's predecessor to help turn that company around. Before that, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, he was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, where he won a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award and was named to the MIT TR35.

Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC in 2013 which reached 250,000+ students worldwide.

Riyaz Faizullabhoy

CTO at a16z Crypto.

Riyaz Faizullabhoy Introduction

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