real-world-assets
(8)
Dave Hendricks
Dave Hendricks is the co-founder and CEO of Vertalo, an Austin-based platform that acts as an SEC-registered transfer agent and tokenization engine for real-world assets. He has spent close to a decade building infrastructure to turn illiquid private securities into compliant, transferable digital assets. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LiveIntent, the programmatic email advertising platform, and helped build CheetahMail into the world's largest email service provider before its 2004 sale to Experian. Earlier he ran the worldwide relationship between Arthur Andersen and Oracle and worked on large securitization projects. He is known for a pragmatic, institution-focused view of crypto and a habit of dismissing hype cycles in favor of durable financial plumbing.
Adam Silver
Adam Silver is the co-founder and CEO of Plural (Plural Finance / Plural Energy), a San Francisco startup building a financial operating system for energy infrastructure. Plural tokenizes real-world clean energy assets - solar arrays, batteries, and data centers - turning them into programmable, investable products, and runs a FINRA-member broker-dealer with a transfer agent license. A former Deloitte consultant and ServiceNow product lead, Silver became obsessed with what he calls 'the miracle of lights turning on,' then with the unacceptable difficulty of financing the assets behind it. In September 2025 Plural closed an oversubscribed $7.13M seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to roughly $9.3M, with over $300M in distributed solar and battery assets available for investment.
Jack Chong
Jack Chong is the co-founder and CEO of Checker, a New York fintech that gives banks and payment companies a single API to reach the world's stablecoin and digital-asset liquidity. An Oxford PPE graduate who once trained to be a Chinese diplomat in the Arab world, he co-wrote one of the industry's first rigorous primers on real-world-asset tokenization before building Checker, which moved more than $3 billion in volume in under a year and raised $8M led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures and Framework Ventures.
Tzvi Wiesel
Tzvi Wiesel, who also goes by Todd, is the co-founder and CEO of BAXUS, an on-chain marketplace for rare wine and spirits built on Solana. A former fine-and-rare bottle and cask trader, he set out to fix what he calls an antiquated, broken secondary market for collectible liquids by giving each bottle a tokenized, tamper-proof record of provenance and ownership. Under his lead BAXUS acquired the collection-tracking app BoozApp, raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital, and now connects thousands of collectors, brands and institutions worldwide. He is also a working whiskey reviewer, heading the US reviews team at The Whiskey Wash.
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn is the co-founder and CEO of Ostium, an onchain exchange for trading perpetual futures on real-world assets like oil, metals, equity indices and FX. A former professional ballet dancer who performed at the Royal Danish Ballet before studying neuroscience at Harvard, she met her cofounder running arbitrage strategies out of a Cambridge hacker house and built Ostium into the category leader for 'perpetual-ified' traditional assets. In December 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto at a roughly $250M valuation, and she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Finance the same year.
Nathan Allman
Nathan Allman was the founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, the firm that did more than almost anyone to drag tokenized U.S. Treasuries from a whitepaper idea into a multi-billion-dollar reality. A Brown graduate and former Goldman Sachs digital-assets trader, he left Wall Street in early 2021 to build what he framed as a decentralized investment bank, betting that boring, yield-bearing, regulation-aware products - not speculation - would be how traditional finance finally moved on-chain. Under his watch Ondo grew to roughly $3.5 billion in total value locked, launching USDY, OUSG, Ondo Global Markets and the institution-focused Ondo Chain. He died unexpectedly in May 2026.
Hitoshi Harada
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
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.