cross-chain
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Ryan Zarick and the Promise That Survived a 3 a.m. Button
A late-night fantasy-sports emergency, a move to Vancouver and a string of technical papers trace the long partnership behind LayerZero. For its CTO, the interesting part has always been the problem that looked too hard.
Bankole Omodunbi
Bankole Omodunbi is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Verbwire, a Web3 infrastructure startup that turns weeks of Solidity, Hardhat and wallet configuration into a single REST API call. A former Managing Director in equities quant trading at Credit Suisse with 16+ years on Wall Street, he left banking in 2021 to build developer tooling that lets engineers deploy smart contracts, mint NFTs, move assets cross-chain and spin up wallets using familiar languages like Python and Java. Verbwire raised a $12.3M Series A and is based in the New York area.
Griffin Dunaif
Griffin Dunaif is the co-founder and CEO of Halliday, a San Francisco blockchain startup building the first agentic workflow protocol - infrastructure that lets developers ship onchain applications without writing smart contracts. A Stanford computer science graduate (2023) who left to build, Dunaif started Halliday in 2022 as a buy-now-pay-later tool for gamers, then pivoted to the broader bet that workflows, not contracts, are how AI agents will safely operate onchain. The company has raised $26 million total, including a $20 million Series A led by a16z crypto in March 2025.