Experts

Rupert Hackett is Co-Founder & Managing Director at Caleb and Brown, Co-Founder & CEO at Bitcoin Australia. Builder of bits and blocks.

Caleb & Brown

Upside DAO

Apollo Capital

Rupert Hackett

Charlie Lee is Creator of Litecoin, ex-Director of Engineering at Coinbase.

Lee created Litecoin while working at Google, where he served as a Software Engineer. He worked on YouTube, Chrome, and Play Games.

Although Lee was immediately excited by cryptocurrency, he was unhappy with the early altcoins. He claimed that most didn’t offer any true differences or advantages over Bitcoin.

Thus, Lee created Litecoin in 2011. Its Scrypt proof of work function was meant to keep mining distributed and fair. Unlike most altcoins at the time, Litecoin was launched publically and had no premine. Lee also cut Litecoin’s block time from Bitcoin’s 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes.

Despite being the creator of Litecoin, Lee claims “that in order for Litecoin to succeed, Bitcoin must first become adopted by the mass”. He currently spends about 95% of his time working on Bitcoin projects.

Charlie Lee

Matt Odell is the co-founder of Final Message, Bitcoin Citadel. Advisor of Bottle Pay. He is also co-founder of CoinPrices, a site that delivers news and analysis on cryptocurrencies.

Matt Odell

As the President and Co-Founder of Blockchain.com, Nicolas Cary travels the world to connect with the bitcoin community and be an evangelist for the story of Blockchain. As an active philanthropist, Cary executed the world's first University donation in Bitcoin. Cary is also an active investor in cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

Nicolas Cary

Tone has worked on Wall Street for almost 10 years starting as a Risk Analyst at Bear Stearns and later becoming a VP at JP Morgan Chase in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

His expertise is in Economic Trends, Trading and Risk Analysis. Ever since getting involved in the Crypto Currency ecosystem in early 2013, he has been very active in spreading the relevance and importance of this technology as it helps promote economic freedom. Tone has been featured in several Documentaries like Magic Money & Bitcoin - Beyond the Bubble.

Tone is now an independent content creator at ToneVays.com and on his YouTube Channel focused on sound economics & finance. Tone holds a Masters Degree in Financial Engineering from Florida State University along with Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics and Geology.

Tone Vays

Entrepreneur, Product Geek, and Investor. Chartered Financial Analyst.

After a career in finance, Robert decided to help make the world a better place. One part web designer, one part finance jock, he spends his time dreaming of ways to make privacy mainstream.

He holds an Economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, is a Chartered Financial Analyst, and has worked at awesome financial institutions.

Robert Leshner

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a best-selling author, speaker, educator, and one of the world’s foremost bitcoin and open blockchain experts. He is known for delivering electric talks that combine economics, psychology, technology, and game theory with current events, personal anecdote, and historical precedent effortlessly transliterating the complex issues of blockchain technology out of the abstract and into the real world.

In 2014, Antonopoulos authored the groundbreaking book, Mastering Bitcoin (O’Reilly Media), widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. His second book, The Internet of Money, unveiled the “why” of bitcoin—and became a bestseller on Amazon— and led to the wildly successful follow-up The Internet of Money Volume Two. His fourth book, Mastering Ethereum (O’Reilly Media) will be available in December of 2018.

He is a teaching fellow with the University of Nicosia, serves on the Oversight Committee for the Bitcoin Reference Rate at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and has appeared as an expert witness in hearings around the world, including the Australian Senate Banking Committee and the Canadian Senate Commerce, Banking and Finance Committee.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

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

Jed McCaleb

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

Naval Ravikant is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He’s invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others.

I am a founder and Chairman of AngelList. I’m also a Venture Partner at MetaStable. I previously co-founded Epinions (which went public as part of Shopping.com) and Vast.com. I’m an active angel investor, and have invested in dozens of companies, including Twitter, Uber, Wish, Thumbtack, Postmates, Kraken, Yammer, Stack Overflow and OpenDoor.