Slingshot is a San Francisco-based crypto trading app that lets people buy, sell, and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains from a single USDC balance - hiding the usual friction of wallets, bridges, and gas fees behind a clean consumer interface. Founded in 2020 by Coinbase alum Clinton Bembry, it raised roughly $18M through a Ribbit Capital-led Series A and was acquired by NFT marketplace Magic Eden in April 2025.

Illia Polosukhin is a Ukrainian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017), the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture powering virtually every modern AI system, and co-founded NEAR Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain that raised $500M+ and peaked at a $20B+ market cap. Now CEO of the NEAR Foundation, he is building 'User-Owned AI' - privacy-preserving, decentralized AI infrastructure that puts users in control of their data and models rather than corporations.