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Postdoc at Cornell Tech working on applied cryptography and computer security. Founding scientist of Zcash. Ian Miers is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech working on computer security and applied cryptography. His work takes a context-driven approach to making cryptographic systems secure, reasoning backwards from real world problems to design deployable cryptographic protocols that address the subtleties of security for production systems. This includes Zerocoin and Zerocash, the first systems to provide strongly private payments on top of public blockchains. It also includes works improving the security of mobile messaging, including attacks on iMessage and new techniques for forward secure encryption that guard against the exposure of encryption keys. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University under Prof. Matthew Green. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, The Economist, and denounced in at least 2 op-eds. He is one of the founders of Zcash, a privacy preserving cryptocurrency based on his work on Zerocash.
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Saurabh Sharma
Saurabh Sharma is a General Partner at Jump Crypto, leading crypto and infrastructure investments. He is an ex-operator, ex-quant trader, theatre buff, Booth MBA, and Cornell CS graduate. Areas of interest include: - Blockchain - L1/L2 protocols, Web 3.0 Infrastructure, Decentralized/Open Finance, Scalability & Interoperability, Developer Tools, Digital Asset Management (Trading, Credit, Wealth Management) - Cloud Native IT Infrastructure - Data Management, Cybersecurity, ML powered Intelligent Applications.
Robert Hackett
Robert Hackett is the head of content and editorial for a16z crypto at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, Robert was a senior writer and tech editor at Fortune where he co-chaired the Brainstorm Tech and Brainstorm Finance conferences, cofounded Fortune’s crypto franchise The Ledger, co-managed the 40 Under 40 list, and wrote newsletters including Data Sheet. He received national recognition for his reporting, including as a finalist for the 2018 Larry Birger Young Business Journalist Award. His work on the Aug./Sept. 2021 issue of the magazine, “Crypto vs. Wall Street,” helped raise millions of dollars in NFT sales and won “best innovation project” and runner-up for “best business reporting” at the 2021 EPPY Awards.
John Wu
John Wu is the President of Ava Labs, a technology company backed by Andresseen Horowitz that is building the next-generation blockchain platform: Avalanche. His mission is to make financial services and products accessible to everyone. He is using his experience of more than 20 years as a fintech executive and technology investor to create a blockchain-based solution for the origination, issuance, and trading of financial assets. Previously, John was the CEO of the SharesPost Digital Assets Group, which enabled compliant token trading of private shares and funds. Before that, he was a technology investor and the founder of Sureview Capital, a hedge fund supported by the Blackstone Group. John began his investment career at Tiger Management, a distinguished hedge fund that had $20 billion in assets under management at its peak. Afterwards, he managed a global technology portfolio at Kingdon Capital. John received his MBA from Harvard University and holds a BS in Economics from Cornell University.
John Belizaire
John Belizaire is the Co-CEO at Soluna. He graduated from Cornell University in the United States.
Zooko Wilcox
Zooko Wilcox is the founder and former CEO of Zcash. He has more than 20 years of experience in secure distributed systems, free and open source software, and startups. He is known for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko’s Triangle”, and more. He is one of the co-founders of the Tahoe-LAFS project. He started Least Authority Enterprises because he wanted a convenient and safe way to store his files in the cloud.
Alex Marinier
Alex Marinier is Founder & General Partner at New Form. Previously, Alex was an investor at Sand Hill firm DCM Ventures, where he led the firm's expansion into blockchain investing. Prior to that, Alex worked in private equity at Blackstone in New York underwriting secondary transactions. He's a seed investor in Compound Finance, Blockfolio, and Chia among others. A native New Yorker, Alex holds a BSc from Cornell's SC Johnson College of Business.
Michael Casey
Michael J. Casey is CoinDesk's chief content officer. Previously, Casey was the CEO of Streambed Media, a company he cofounded to develop provenance data for digital content. He was also a senior advisor at MIT Media Labs's Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to joining MIT, Casey spent 18 years at The Wall Street Journal, where his last position was as a senior columnist covering global economic affairs. Casey has authored five books, including "The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order" and "The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything," both co-authored with Paul Vigna. Upon joining CoinDesk full time, Casey resigned from a variety of paid advisory positions. He maintains unpaid posts as an advisor to not-for-profit organizations, including MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative and The Deep Trust Alliance. He is a shareholder and non-executive chairman of Streambed Media. Casey owns a small amount of bitcoin.
Jae Kwon
Jae Kwon is a blockchain software architect and co-founder of Tendermint, as well as the President of the Interchain Foundation. After graduating from Cornell in 2005 with a B.S. degree in Computer Science, he worked as a professional developer in Silicon Valley, including at Alexa and Yelp, where he led the mobile application development team. He also co-founded iDoneThis, a productivity service. Jae has worked on numerous open-source projects, such as a CoffeeScript compiler/interpreter written in Javascript, an end-to-end encrypted email system called Scramble.io, and a cryptocurrency exchange. These projects were inspired by the cryptopunk hacker ethos, which ultimately led to his current work with Tendermint. In 2014, Jae created the Tendermint project, and he, along with Ethan Buchman and Zarko Milosevic, further refined the Tendermint consensus algorithm and implementation, with the aim of liberating the blockchain from the costs and drawbacks of proof-of-work mining. His mission is to make this technology more accessible, in order to accelerate the adoption of decentralized ledger technology.
Sanket Jain
Sanket Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Gateway. He is a graduate of Cornell University with a major in Applied Economics and has experience working as a financial analyst at Fountain Financial, LLC and as a corporate restructuring analyst at Houlihan Lokey.
Justin Wong
Justin Wong is the head of finance at Uniswap and previously served as Vice President of Finance at SkyDrop. He graduated from Cornell University.