Paul Puey is the CEO and co-founder of Edge, a San Diego-based self-custody crypto wallet and security platform. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate who once shipped 3D graphics at Nvidia, he caught the Bitcoin bug in 2013 and launched Airbitz in 2014, rebranding it to Edge in 2017 as crypto moved beyond Bitcoin. His pitch is stubbornly simple: if you do not hold your keys, you do not own your coins, and security belongs on the edges of the network, in your hands, not on someone else's server.
Ambre Soubiran is the CEO and chairman of Kaiko, the independent provider of institutional-grade, regulatory-compliant cryptocurrency market data and indices. After a decade structuring equity derivatives at HSBC in London and Paris, she walked away from traditional finance in 2016 to buy control of Kaiko - then a bright idea with no revenue and no staff - and built it into a global data business with roughly 130 people across New York, London, Paris and Singapore. She has raised over $80M and positions Kaiko as the trusted, neutral source of truth for crypto markets used by exchanges, asset managers and regulators.
Kraken is one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, founded in 2011 and launched in 2013 by Jesse Powell after the Mt. Gox security failures convinced him crypto needed an exchange built on trust. Operated by parent company Payward, Inc., Kraken lets retail and institutional clients buy, sell, trade, stake, and self-custody dozens of digital assets, alongside crypto futures, margin, and index products. By late 2025 it served over 5 million funded accounts, held tens of billions in client assets, and was preparing for a public listing.
David 'Dave' Ripley is Co-CEO of Kraken, one of the world's largest and longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. He joined via Kraken's 2016 acquisition of Glidera, a bitcoin wallet service he co-founded, and rose from COO to CEO to Co-CEO as Kraken expanded aggressively — completing $1.5B acquisitions, raising $800M in 2025, and filing confidentially for a U.S. IPO. A former BCG principal and electrical engineer turned crypto operator, Ripley has shepherded Kraken from a 50-person startup to a 2,600+ employee global exchange while navigating major SEC enforcement actions and a shifting regulatory landscape.
Alexander Leishman is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of River, a Bitcoin-only financial institution built to provide brokerage, custody, and mining services to individuals and institutions. With a background spanning aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, computer science at Stanford, and security engineering at Airbnb, Leishman co-founded River in 2019 after stints at MaiCoin, Deloitte, and Polychain Capital. River has raised over $17.7 million in venture funding and became the first Bitcoin-only exchange to publicly release its financial statements in April 2025. Leishman also serves on the board of Brink, a Bitcoin research and development nonprofit.
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Luis Cuello is the Founder and CEO of Minted Protocol (MintedAssociates Corp), building mUSD - the first exclusive Canton-native institutional stable settlement token. With a background spanning BNP Paribas fund administration and M&A at Johnson & Johnson, Cuello brings traditional finance credibility to one of DeFi's most ambitious institutional plays: a GENIUS Act-aligned stablecoin backed 1:1 by HQLA-equivalent reserves on the Canton Network, the blockchain infrastructure processing $6T+ in monthly settlements for the world's largest financial institutions.
Marshall Hayner is the Founder and CEO of Metallicus, a San Francisco-based blockchain infrastructure company building compliant, regulation-forward digital banking tools for credit unions and financial institutions. A Bitcoin miner since 2009, Hayner pioneered social crypto payments with QuickCoin (the first Facebook-integrated Bitcoin wallet) in 2014, then spent a decade building Metallicus into the only blockchain company certified as a service provider for the Federal Reserve's FedNow instant payment rail. His company's flagship products - Metal Pay, Metal Blockchain, and the Digital Banking Network - sit at the intersection of traditional finance and decentralized infrastructure.
Varun Deshpande is the co-founder and CEO of Juno, a San Francisco-based crypto-native digital banking platform that bridges traditional finance and decentralized finance for the US market. A serial entrepreneur from BITS Pilani, he previously co-founded BeeWise (acquired by Aditya Birla Money), Nuo Network (a DeFi lending protocol), and TopTalent.in. With Juno, he has raised $24M across seed and Series A rounds from top-tier investors including Sequoia Surge, Polychain, ParaFi Capital, and Jump Crypto, building a platform that lets users earn, spend, and manage crypto alongside traditional banking.
Spencer Bogart is a General Partner at Blockchain Capital, one of the oldest and most active venture firms in the crypto industry. A CFA charter holder who started his crypto career writing Wall Street's first blockchain research report at Needham & Company, Bogart now leads research across Blockchain Capital's five funds and 85+ investments. Known on Twitter as @CremeDeLaCrypto, he made early bets on DeFi before the term existed and has been a consistent voice for Bitcoin fundamentals and crypto infrastructure since 2014.
Richard Craib is the South African-born founder and CEO of Numerai, the world's first AI-powered crowdsourced hedge fund. By encrypting financial data and opening it to thousands of anonymous data scientists globally - who stake NMR cryptocurrency on their models - Craib built a machine learning meta-model that now manages hundreds of millions in assets. In 2017 he pioneered the concept of a hedge fund issuing its own cryptocurrency. Backed by Paul Tudor Jones, Naval Ravikant, and JPMorgan, Numerai raised a $30M Series C at a $500M valuation in late 2025 and achieved a 25.45% net return in 2024.
Tim Draper is a third-generation venture capitalist and founder of Draper Associates, the firm behind early bets on Hotmail, Baidu, Skype, Tesla, Coinbase, and Robinhood. He pioneered viral marketing with Hotmail's email footer tagline, bought 30,000 bitcoins at a U.S. Marshals auction in 2014 for $19 million, and has never sold. The founder of Draper University of Heroes in San Mateo, he frames entrepreneurship as a heroic calling - handing students superhero capes on day one. Twice tried to split California into multiple states. Consistently predicts Bitcoin will hit $250,000. Sings his own original songs at startup conferences. Backed 60+ unicorns from seed stage across four decades.
Chris Burniske is a partner and co-founder of Placeholder, a venture capital firm that has invested in over 75 blockchain companies and networks since 2017. He co-authored the influential book 'Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond' and led ARK Invest to become the first public fund manager to offer bitcoin exposure in 2015. Known for his unconventional approach - famously rolling up barefoot on a skateboard to pitch Cathie Wood - Burniske combines deep technical knowledge with a surfer's mentality toward finding uncrowded opportunities in crypto markets.
Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output (IOHK), one of the five original co-founders of Ethereum, and a polarizing figure in cryptocurrency who left Ethereum over a for-profit vs. nonprofit dispute. He now runs a peer-reviewed blockchain platform, owns an 11,000-acre buffalo ranch in Wyoming, funds alien-hunting expeditions, donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon for formal mathematics research, and is pioneering anti-aging medicine while building political influence through his Wyoming Integrity PAC.
Troy Kanji is an analyst at Boost VC, a pre-seed venture capital firm in San Mateo focused on deep tech investments. With a background in molecular biology from Brown University—where he researched ALS using Drosophila genetics—he bridges the worlds of science and finance. Before Boost VC, he cut his teeth at Trinity Life Sciences, F-Prime Capital (genomics), and Castle Island Ventures (crypto), building a unique cross-disciplinary lens. He's also co-founder and board member of Revalia Bio, a Yale spinout revolutionizing drug development with human data trials using donated organs.
Vitalik Buterin is the Russian-Canadian programmer who, at age 19, wrote the Ethereum whitepaper and changed what a blockchain could be. He turned a programmable ledger into an idea engine - smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs - and then spent years fighting to keep it decentralized. He travels with a single suitcase, posts thousand-word blog essays at 2am, and once cried over a World of Warcraft nerf that indirectly launched a $200B ecosystem.
Vlad Tenev is the Bulgarian-American co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the company that forced Wall Street to abolish trading commissions and put a brokerage in every pocket. Born in Varna, Bulgaria, and raised in Virginia after emigrating at age 5, Tenev studied mathematics at Stanford and UCLA before dropping his PhD to build trading software startups. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt launched Robinhood to give ordinary people the same tools as professional traders - for free. After navigating the GameStop firestorm, congressional testimony, a bruising post-IPO collapse, and two rounds of layoffs, Tenev rebuilt Robinhood into a diversified financial platform now worth nearly $100 billion and included in the S&P 500. He also co-founded Harmonic, an AI startup pursuing mathematical superintelligence, which reached a $1.45 billion valuation in 2025 after its AI model won a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
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.
Joseph Lubin is the co-founder of Ethereum and founder/CEO of ConsenSys, the most influential Ethereum software company in the world. A Princeton-trained engineer who spent years at Goldman Sachs before pivoting through a Jamaican music production detour to become one of crypto's most consequential builders, Lubin methodically constructed the plumbing of the Web3 internet — MetaMask, Infura, Truffle — while most people were still debating whether blockchain was real. As of 2026, he chairs SharpLink Gaming's mission to build the world's largest publicly-traded ETH treasury, and warns loudly about centralized AI's threat to democratic society.
Preethi Kasireddy is a serial founder, engineer, and educator who pivoted from Goldman Sachs investment banking to venture capital at Andreessen Horowitz, then taught herself to code at Hack Reactor and went on to build at Coinbase, found TruStory, create DappCamp - one of the most respected Web3 developer bootcamps - and most recently co-found Ferta, a root-cause fertility coaching startup. Her writing on Ethereum and blockchain architecture has become essential reading for tens of thousands of developers worldwide.