Ondo Finance is a U.S.-based blockchain company that brings traditional financial assets - U.S. Treasuries, money-market funds, stocks and ETFs - on-chain as tradable, yield-bearing tokens. Through products like OUSG (tokenized short-term Treasuries), USDY (a yield-bearing dollar token) and Ondo Global Markets (tokenized U.S. equities), it aims to make institutional-grade financial products accessible to anyone, anywhere, around the clock. The company is also building Ondo Chain, a blockchain purpose-built for regulated real-world assets.
Edward Woodford is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Hash, the Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company that quietly powers digital-asset features inside Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Shift4. A Goldman Sachs commodities alum who bought his first Bitcoin from an ATM as an MIT grad student, he built and sold a regulated derivatives venue before turning Zero Hash into a billion-dollar 'plumbing' business that has settled more than $45 billion in volume and onboarded over five million people to crypto.
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.
Zerohash is a Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider that lets banks, brokerages, fintechs and marketplaces embed digital-asset products - trading, payments, stablecoins and tokenization - through a single regulated API. Rather than building blockchain rails, custody and compliance themselves, clients like Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Morgan Stanley and Franklin Templeton plug into Zerohash's licensed, end-to-end platform. Founded in 2017 by Edward Woodford, the company reached unicorn status in 2025 and has settled tens of billions of dollars in volume for millions of end users across nearly 200 jurisdictions.
Baton Systems is a post-trade infrastructure company that uses a shared permissioned ledger to give banks real-time control over collateral, payments and FX settlement. Its Core platform connects to legacy systems without ripping them out, and is already used by some of the largest banks in the world to move trillions of dollars with bank-grade safety in minutes instead of days.
Cybersource is a global payment management platform owned by Visa, helping merchants accept, secure, and optimize digital transactions in 190+ countries. Founded in 1994 and acquired by Visa in 2010 for ~$2B, it powers payment gateway, tokenization, fraud management (Decision Manager) and orchestration services for hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide.
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.
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Marshall Jones is the CTO and Co-Founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based fintech company that has become the world's leader in payment tokenization with over 5 billion tokens stored. He co-founded VGS in 2015 alongside Mahmoud Abdelkader after building PCI-compliant payment vaults at Balanced Payments (later acquired by Stripe). Under his technical leadership, VGS has raised over $104 million in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Vertex Ventures, serving Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, and banks globally.
VGS (Very Good Security) is a payments tokenization and credential management platform that lets companies process and store sensitive card data without ever touching it themselves. Founded in 2015 by Mahmoud Abdelkader and Marshall Jones, the San Francisco company runs a composable Card Management Platform, a PCI-compliant Vault, and network value-added services used by Fortune 500s, fintechs and banks - having crossed 5 billion tokens managed as of 2025.
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.
Fabrice Grinda is a French-born serial entrepreneur, prolific angel investor, and co-founder of FJ Labs - the venture fund Forbes named home to the #1 Angel Investor in the world. With 1,100+ startup investments, 300+ exits, and a ~39% realized IRR built over 25 years, Grinda has backed household names including Alibaba, Airbnb, Uber, Coupang, and Vinted - often before anyone else saw the potential. He built and sold Zingy for $80M after sleeping in his office on $2/day, scaled OLX into the world's largest free classifieds platform across 90+ countries, and in 2024 co-founded Midas, a tokenization platform that hit $1.4B TVL within a year. Off the clock, he walks to the South Pole, kite-surfs, heli-skis, and throws week-long birthday parties with themed nights for 100+ friends.
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.