TC Sessions: Blockchain 2018
July 6, 2018 — Zug
Speakers
Brian Behlendorf
Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project Linux Foundation
Patrick Berarducci
Law and Software ConsenSys
Galia Benartzi
Business Development Bancor
Nicolas Brand
Partner Lakestar
Vitalik Buterin
Founder & Inventor Ethereum Foundation
Sam Cassatt
Justin Drake
Researcher Ethereum Foundation
Mona El Isa
Jim Fruchterman
Founder and CEO Tech Matters
Roham Gharegozlou
Founder & CEO Dapper Labs
Colin Hanna
Principal Balderton Capital
Jun Hasegawa
CEO & Founder Omise
Jarrad Hope
Cofounder Status.im
Leanne Kemp
Founder & CEO Everledger
Hope Liu
CEO Eximchain
Joseph Lubin
Founder ConsenSys
Kris Marszalek
CEO & Co-founder Crypto.com
Dolfi Mueller
Mayor City of Zug
Gil Perez
SVP Products & Innovations, Head of Digital Customer Initiatives SAP
Jutta Steiner
Founder – CEO Parity Technologies
Gert Sylvest
Bill Tai
Founding Chairman HUT8 Corp
Pierre-Edouard Wahl
Head of Blockchain PwC Switzerland
Phil Windley
Chair Sovrin Foundation
Changpeng Zhao
CEO/Founder Binance
Hanna Zubko
Founder & VP Business Development IntellectEU
Guy Zyskind
Founder & CEO Enigma
Patrick Berarducci is the Deputy General Counsel at ConsenSys and Co-Chair of The Brooklyn Project. Prior to joining ConsenSys, Pat co-founded and was the software architect and full-stack developer of a health-tech startup. Pat also worked as an attorney for seven years at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. As Co-Chair of The Brooklyn Project, Pat helps lead the innovative “open source” industry initiative to develop blockchain-focused policy, thought leadership, technology, and products, all with the aim of protecting and empowering consumers. As Deputy General Counsel at ConsenSys, Pat helps navigate the evolving global intersection of blockchain technology and the law. In addition to a wide array of legal topics, Pat, who majored in computer science and minored in mathematics, has researched, published and presented on technical topics such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and blockchain technology.
Galia Benartzi is a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the Bancor Protocol, a standard for the creation of Smart Tokens™, cryptocurrencies with built-in convertibility directly through their smart contracts. Smart Tokens™ interconnect to form automated token liquidity networks, allowing user-generated currencies to thrive. Galia has a BA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College and an MA in International Economics from SAIS Johns Hopkins. In 2005, Galia co-founded Mytopia, the first social gaming company for smartphones (acquired by 888), and in 2010, Particle Code, a cross-platform development technology for mobile applications (acquired by Appcelerator). In 2013, Galia moved from Silicon Valley to Tel Aviv to support and invest in Israeli technology as a Venture Partner at Founders Fund, where she also launched numerous local currency pilots to model, build and test software for community currencies. Galia is a founding member of Powder Mountain, permanent home of the Summit community in Eden, Utah, and creator of the Eden2Zion Reality trips by the Schusterman Foundation. She is passionate about decentralized technologies, women’s empowerment, consciousness, natural wellness and plants.
NICOLAS BRAND is a partner at LAKESTAR, a global venture capital group, where he invests in and builds businesses at the intersection of finance, blockchain and technology. He is passionately obsessed with the sector as blockchain has triggered the most significant migration of value in the history of mankind. Far beyond finance, NICOLAS anticipates an impact on everything, from enterprise IT to the very foundation of the digital world, the internet, which might see a complete overhaul. Based out of Zurich, NICOLAS most recently led LAKESTAR’s investments into ShapeShift.io, Blockchain.com and two confidential transactions on the US West Coast. Be it as investors in a venture or in a protocol, LAKESTAR partners with the best entrepreneurs to help them build globally relevant platforms.
Vitalik Buterin is a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine who has been involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011, and has contributed to Bitcoin both as a writer and the developer of a fork of bitcoinjs-lib, pybitcointools and multisig.info, as well as one of the developers behind Egora. Now, Vitalik’s primary job is as the main developer of Ethereum, a project which intends to create a next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform that allows people to create any kind of decentralized application on top of a blockchain that can be imagined.
Sam’s experience spans from consulting to technology entrepreneurship. His clients have included some of the world’s largest organizations in government and industry, where he has consulted on consumer analytics, computer vision, and machine learning. He has also led entrepreneurial technology organizations at the forefront of consumer mobile technology. He focused on the intersection of technological and biological computation at Johns Hopkins University, conducting graduate work and research in Cognitive Sciences. His research into human visual and language processing eventually led him to co-found Sensorstar Labs, a research and development company focused on computer vision, robotics, and biosensing. In consumer technology, he acted as CTO of Atmospheir, a mobile identity company. Now, as CSO at ConsenSys, he defines strategy regarding business models in the emerging blockchain economy. Additionally, Sam brings expertise in Venture Capital, software development methodology, enterprise architecture, and growth strategy to ventures within ConsenSys. He designed and implemented the investment and mentorship processes that now comprise ConsenSys Labs, their portfolio of prominent companies in the blockchain space. Sam has volunteered time in South Africa with Engineers Without Borders, building water pumps that require no electricity and educating local communities on their construction. He has served on the board of The Philosophical Society of Washington and the Baltimore Green Currency Association, an organization that issues and promotes local currency.
Justin studied mathematics at Cambridge University. He was a Bitcoin entrepreneur from 2014 to 2017 and is now an Ethereum 2.0 researcher.
Former star-trader at Goldman Sachs, promoted to Vice President by the age of 26 and made the “top 30 under 30” list in Trader Magazine in 2008 and Forbes Magazine in 2011 after profitably trading the 2008 and 2011 crashes. Moved to Geneva-based macro fund Jabre Capital in 2011, before deciding in 2014 that the future of finance lay in blockchain technology. She studied Economics & Statistics at the University College London.
Jim Fruchterman is the founder of Tech Matters and Benetech, nonprofit developers of technology for social good.
Roham is the CEO of Dapper Labs, the creators of CryptoKitties, Flow and NBA Top Shot. Roham started his first startup at the age of 14 and has since funded and built over a dozen companies. Formed in February 2018, Dapper Labs was spun out of Axiom Zen, the award winning venture studio, to spread the benefits of decentralization through the power of play, fairness, and true ownership. It has raised funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Venrock, Google Ventures, Samsung, and the founders of Dreamworks, Reddit, Coinbase, Zynga, and AngelList, among others. Roham is an occasional angel investor; his portfolio includes SaaS leaders Intercom, toutapp, and teampay, among others. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biological Sciences from Stanford University.
Prior to joining Balderton Capital, Colin worked at SoundCloud in Berlin where he led Emerging Market Growth and worked as a Business Analyst. Prior to SoundCloud he was at ProSiebenSat.1 building out their media for equity business in Asia and investing for their Berlin-based E-commerce incubator. Colin began his career with three years at Goldman Sachs in New York where he worked on several Chinese internet IPOs, including Qunar (NASDAQ: QUNR), Vipshop (NASDAQ: VIPS) and Tarena (NASDAQ: TEDU). Colin has a B.A. from Princeton University in Political Science where he was also a Captain of the Men’s Swimming Team. He has competed in the United States Swimming Olympic Trials and spent his childhood in Indonesia and Hong Kong.
Jun is an entrepreneur and no stranger to the startup world. Prior to founding payments company Omise, he was involved in founding a series of tech companies in Japan mainly in the fields of e-commerce, life log and mobile payments. He has over 16 years of professional experience in web & product design and previously held several management positions with Alpha-do Inc. in Japan. Currently based in Bangkok, Jun is the full-time CEO of Omise, a multinational payments company currently present in Thailand (HQ), Japan, Singapore and Indonesia that has raised over USD 50M in funding. He has led the company through dramatic growth, from its launch in 2013 to its establishment as one of Southeast Asia’s leading online payment platforms. In 2015, Jun’s desire to stay on the pioneering edge of practical tech innovation led to Omise becoming one of the first companies, and the very first financial services company, to join the Ethereum community. In 2017, after over a year of research and development, this culminated in the launch of OmiseGO, the crowd-funded blockchain division of Omise tasked with creating the OMG network, an Ethereum-based public blockchain with the ambitious vision of enabling financial service equity by radically decentralizing value transfer and exchange.
Jarrad is the thought leader and Co-Founder of Status, an open source mobile client for the Ethereum Network that serves as a gateway to DApps, secure wallet, and more. Status raised more than $100M in less than twenty-four hours through its token sale of SNT. Jarrad has been involved in the Blockchain technology space since 2010, and has been an active contributor to Ethereum since its inception. He possesses a strong vision to leverage the cutting edge technology of Blockchain, as well as employ crypto-economics in our society’s future, with a higher goal of pushing the movement of ‘libre software’ forward. Jarrad established the Ethereum Amsterdam Meetup, which now has hundreds of members organizing and taking parts in its events. Jarrad has also been an active contributor to OpenNARS an academic general-purpose AI project. Prior to Status, he founded several successful startups, primarily around software distribution.
Leanne Kemp is the Founder & CEO of Everledger, a leading emerging technology enterprise that tracks the provenance of high-value assets on a global digital ledger in an authenticated immutable manner. Using her extensive background in emerging technology, business, jewellery and insurance, Leanne is pushing boundaries with Everledger in building a global verification system that asserts transparency along the entire supply chain process. This enables the tracking and protection of high-value assets, consequently mitigating risk and fraud in global marketplaces. Her leadership role in technology has been recognised, winning awards including Innovator of the Year 2018 at the Women in IT Awards (London) as well as being named in UK Business Insider’s 26 Coolest Women in UK Tech 2016 and Brummell Magazine’s Top 30 Female Innovators 2016 in Brummell Magazine. She has also been named an IBM Champion for 2018. Leanne is an appointed member of the World Economic Forum’s Blockchain Council and a Co-Chair for the World Trade Board’s Sustainable Trade Action Group. She is also on the IBM Blockchain Platform Board of Advisors.
Hope is the Co-Founder and CEO of EximChain, a software development company which is focused on supply chain applications. From supplier credit to inventory management, Eximchain helps businesses connect, transact, and share information more efficiently and securely. Eximchain’s mission is to provide blockchain-enabled tools to transform the global supply chain by integrating SMEs and increasing transparency. Hope has a B.A. from Peking University and MBA from MIT. Previously, she handled cross-border transactions at UBS Asia for 6.5 years. She is the Lab Lead of the North America Blockchain Association and has been working on Eximchain from the MIT Media Lab since 2015.
Joseph Lubin is a co-founder of blockchain computing platform Ethereum and the founder of Consensus Systems (ConsenSys), a blockchain venture studio. ConsenSys is one of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the blockchain technology space, building developer tools, decentralized applications, and solutions for enterprises and governments that harness the power of Ethereum. Headquartered in New York, ConsenSys also has a global presence, employing top entrepreneurs, computer scientists, software developers, and experts in enterprise delivery worldwide. Lubin graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He worked in the Princeton Robotics Lab, at tomandandy music developing an autonomous music composition tool, and at private research firm Vision Applications Inc. building autonomous mobile robots. As a software engineer and consultant, Lubin worked with eMagine on the Identrus project and was involved in the founding and operation of a hedge fund with a partner. He held positions as Director of the New York office of Blacksmith Software Consulting, and VP of Technology in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs. Through these posts, Lubin focused on the intersection of cryptography, engineering, and finance. Switching gears, Lubin moved to Kingston, Jamaica to work on projects in the music industry. Two years into his musical endeavors, Lubin co-founded the Ethereum Project and has been working on Ethereum and ConsenSys since January 2014.
Kris leads the long term strategy and development of Crypto.com including the Crypto.com Wallet and Card App and the MCO Visa Card. Crypto.com is building the first global blockchain financial institution and consumer brand delivering on the vision of Cryptocurrency in Every Wallet.
Assistant for theoretical economics, University of Zurich, 1979 – 1987 Teacher for economics and law, Gymnasium Zug, since 1985 Attorney at Law, own law office, Zug, 1993 – 2003 Elected member of the parliament, City of Zug, 1982 – 2002 Elected member of the city council, City of Zug, since 2003 Head of the Department of Building and Development, City of Zug, 2003 – 2006 Mayor, City of Zug, since 2007
Gil is a member of the SAP SE P&I senior executive leadership team and reports to Bernd Leukert, member of the SAP SE Executive Board responsible for products and innovation. Gil is responsible for driving customer adoption of new innovative digital technologies and new business models across SAP products/LOB. Recent focus and customer adoption has been: SAP Manufacturing Suite & Ariba Network, Robotics/IoT & Logistics/Supply Chain, Mapping and Locations Services, Connected Vehicles, Blockchain and AR/VR/MR Prior to this role Gil was SVP of IoT and Digital Supply Chain SAP SE. Gil has over 20 years of experience in enterprise software at SAP, at numerous startups and as General Partner of a VC fund. Gil brings a rich and diverse background as a co-founder, investor and senior executive in 5 companies which were successfully acquired. Three of the five companies were acquired by SAP AG. Gil is based in Palo Alto, CA and was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.
Jutta Steiner is the co-founder and CEO of Parity Technologies.Parity Technologies has developed the most advanced Ethereum client and has recently started a new blockchain network protocol called Polkadot—a pioneering work to address governance, interoperability, and scalability of blockchain technology and a fundamental building block of the future decentral Web 3. She previously served as Chief of Security for the Ethereum Foundation, overseeing security audit and integration prior to the launch of the public blockchain in 2015.
Gert Sylvest is co-founder of Tradeshift and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers, an R&D and investment arm covering blockchain, AI/ML and IIoT and other emerging technologies with expected supply chain and commerce impact. He has extensive experience with digital, cloud based procure-to-pay and financing, large-scale public-to-private procure-to-pay infrastructures, cross-regional cloud deployments, blockchain and interoperability. Before leading Tradeshift Frontiers, Gert led the global cross-regional network strategy focusing on platform deployment and growth in China, and as CTO of Tradeshift. Prior to co-founding Tradeshift, he was responsible for the technical design and implementation of the Danish (Nemhandel) and European (PEPPOL) peer-to-peer-based source-to-pay digital infrastructures, with Accenture and Avanade. Gert holds a MS in Computer Science and Music, specializing in real-time distributed collaboration systems.
Bill Tai has been funding startups as a Venture Capitalist since 1991 and has had 23 of his startups become listed companies. He is among the first investors in Bitfury, Canva, Color Health, Dyad.net, Tweetdeck/Twitter, Wish.com and Zoom Video, where he was the first backer to commit at the company’s formation. Operationally he is Founding Chairman of Hut8 Mining (NASDAQ: HUT), an energy infrastructure company with subsidiaries HighriseAI (GPU cloud) and American Bitcoin (NASDAQ ABTC) operating BItcoin mining data centers. He was also Founding Chairman & CEO of iAsiaWorks (IPO via Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley) a builder / operator of data center infrastructure in 10 countries through Asia, Founding Chairman of Data Sciemce pioneer Treasure Data (acquired by SOFTBANK) and Founding Chairman of IPinfusion (Tokyo:4813). Originally trained as a chip designer, he joined LSI Logic, a seminal Silicon Valley startup formed by the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor after earning a BSEE with Honors from University of Illinois. After an MBA at Harvard he was issued Badge #A001 during the formation of TSMC (NYSE:TSM), now among the world’s 10 most valuable companies (~$2.5 Trillion USD market value as of 2026. ) He has served as Board Director of 8 publicly listed companies (AWRD EGHT HUT8 IAWK NPIX TMTA TUNE and IMGO) that grew from startups he funded at their formative stages. He is founding Chairman of ACTAI Global 501(c)3, a community of Athletes Conservationists Technologists Artists & Innovators supporting 1) environmental conservation and 2) economic empowerment via entrepreneurship.
Phil Windley is an Enterprise Architect in the Office of the CIO at Brigham Young University. A passionate tech educator, he is chair of the Sovrin Foundation, the co-founder and organizer of the Internet Identity Workshop, serves as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at BYU, writes the popular Technometria blog, and is the author of the books The Live Web published by Course Technology in 2011 and Digital Identity published by O’Reilly Media in 2005. Phil serves on the Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards for several high-tech companies. Phil has been a professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University (twice) and the University of Idaho. In addition, Phil was the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Kynetx, the company behind the open-source connected-car product, Fuse. He also spent two years as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the State of Utah in 2001-2002, serving on Governor Mike Leavitt’s Cabinet and as a member of his Senior Staff. Before entering public service, Phil was Vice President for Product Development and Operations at Excite@Home. He was the Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of iMALL, Inc. an early creator of ecommerce tools. Phil received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Univ. of California, Davis in 1990.
Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, is a serial entrepreneur with an impressive track record of successful startups. He launched Binance in July 2017 and within 180 days, grew Binance into the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. CZ is a Chinese-Canadian coder who spent his youth flipping burgers before studying at McGill University Montreal. He then spent time in Tokyo and New York, first building systems for matching trade orders, then developing software for Bloomberg’s futures trading on Wall Street. In 2005, CZ quit his role as head of the Bloomberg Tradebook Futures Research & Development team and moved to Shanghai to start Fusion Systems. Soon thereafter, he learned about Bitcoin and joined Blockchain.info as Head of Technology. An expert in blockchain and trading systems, CZ has built Binance into the leading blockchain ecosystem, comprised of Exchange, Labs, Launchpad, Info, Academy, Research, Trust Wallet, and Charity Foundation.
Hanna Zubko is Co-Founder and CEO of IntellectEU Inc, a fintech integrator focusing on connecting back-office systems to blockchain networks and building blockchain-based applications for KYC/identity management, document management and authentication, supply chain transparency. In addition, Hanna serves as Vice Chair for Hyperledger Marketing Committee and Co-Chairs Blockchain for Social Impact working group. Hyperledger is an open source collaborative initiative hosted by the Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology, uniting 200+ leading organizations. IntellectEU joined Hyperledger at its inception as one of the founding members. For the last three years Hanna served as a judge at SWIFT Innotribe Competition for Fintech StartUps. Hanna is a member of Entrepreneurs Organization and Forbes Business Development Council.
Guy is a long time tinkerer, most comfortable sitting at the intersection of entrepreneurship and research, and he is deeply passionate about decentralization. Prior to Enigma, Guy was a graduate student at MIT researching and teaching blockchain technology. Guy has authored several academic papers, most recently on privacy and the blockchain, including the Enigma whitepaper (downloaded over 100K times) and “Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data” which has received over 200 citations. Previously, Guy led the development of several start-up companies. Guy holds a M.S. from MIT and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University.