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.
Juan Benet (born Juan Batiz-Benet) is a Mexican-American computer scientist, founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, and the inventor of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Filecoin. A Stanford-trained distributed systems engineer, he left Yahoo's orbit after a startup acquisition to build open-source protocols that challenge the foundational architecture of the web. His Filecoin ICO raised $257 million in 2017, and the network now holds over 15 EiB of decentralized storage. In 2026 he launched a podcast exploring neurotech and human intelligence augmentation - a signal that the architect of decentralized storage is now thinking about upgrading the human mind itself.