layer-1
(3)
Sota Watanabe
Sota Watanabe is the founder and CEO of Startale Group, a Singapore-based Web3 infrastructure company backed by Sony and SBI. He is the founder of Astar Network, one of Japan's most recognized Layer-1 blockchains, and a central figure in Japan's push to bring tokenized stocks, JPY stablecoins, and onchain finance into the mainstream.
David Cao
David Cao is the co-founder and self-styled 'Chief Get Shit Done Officer' of N1, a Layer 1 blockchain built for finance that promises ultra-low latency and 100,000+ transactions per second. With co-founders Dima Romanov and Sheheryar Parvaz, he spent years building 01, a fully on-chain Solana derivatives exchange, weathered a two-year crypto winter, pivoted through Layer N, and relaunched the whole effort as N1 in December 2024. Backed by Founders Fund, dao5, Multicoin Capital and Arthur Hayes, the New York-based, Harvard-schooled builder is betting that congestion-free, developer-friendly infrastructure is the missing piece for moving real markets onchain.
Ali Yahya
Ali Yahya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the firm's crypto investing practice. A Stanford computer scientist and former Google Brain TensorFlow developer, he discovered Bitcoin in 2010 during security research and joined a16z in 2017 as its first full-time crypto investor. He has backed landmark bets including Solana and LayerZero, and is known for his deep technical thesis on privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and the intersection of AI and crypto infrastructure. Off the charts, he runs a personal life operating system called walrOS built on 16 daily tracked habits and a spaced-repetition learning system.