Kate (Mitselmakher) Laurence is the CEO, Founder & General Partner of Bloccelerate VC, a Web3 focused venture fund investing in category-defining blockchain companies since 2018. Kate leads the strategy and investments of the fund. She is passionate about bringing about self-sovereignty of money, assets, and data leveraging blockchain technology. Prior to founding Bloccelerate VC, Kate spent ~ 10 years at the world’s largest technology research firm, Gartner (NYSE: IT). While at Gartner, Kate supported leading investors in Silicon Valley including A16Z, Sequoia, KKR around their enterprise technology investments. Kate graduated from Harvard University and is regularly featured on Bloomberg, Forbes, Geekwire, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is also a part of Milken YLC (Milken Leadership Circle).

Sam Yilmaz is the COO, Co-Founder & General Partner of Bloccelerate, Sam is keen on bringing blockchain immutability, auditability, and censorship resistance to bear in the world. Prior to Bloccelerate, he co-founded and served as a managing partner of Decentralized Applications Fund, the first vehicle to raise all of its investment capital in cryptocurrency and invest only in decentralized applications. Previously, he had co-founded and managed BitAngels, growing the network to the world's largest angel group of its time. He adds an edge with his detail-orientation and diligence on legal compliance, economic models, structuring financing rounds, team building, and crafting of partnerships. He is a published author. He has a triple degree bachelors, a masters in engineering, and another one in economics and finance, from Johns Hopkins and Bogazici respectively. He is regularly quoted in Barrons, Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg. He is also YGS member of World Economic Forum.

Nils Puhlmann is the Founder and CEO of Endari and a Co-Founder of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). With over 30 years of experience in the security industry, he has a proven track record in establishing, leading, and scaling security and risk management organizations at several prominent Fortune 500 companies. In his previous role as the Chief Risk & Security Officer at Moonpay, he pioneered and developed enterprise risk and security programs from the ground up, building the security and privacy of the company’s platform and customer data across all security domains. Prior to Moonpay, Nils served as the Chief Trust and Security Officer at TripActions (rebranded to Navan). His extensive background includes executive roles as the Chief Trust & Security Officer at Twilio, Chief Technology Officer at Endgame, and Chief Security Officer at Zynga, Qualys, and Electronic Arts. Furthermore, Nils co-founded the Cloud Security Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes best practices for security assurance within cloud computing.

Richard Ma is Founder and CEO of Quantstamp, a unicorn portfolio company of Bloccelerate. He is former software engineer at Tower Research where he developed software that handled millions of dollars using extreme testing methods. He was inspired to found Quantstamp to improve security auditing after investing in the DAO and experiencing the aftermath firsthand.

Grigore Roșu is a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a researcher in the Information Trust Institute. He is known for his contributions in runtime verification, the K framework, matching logic, and automated coinduction.

Named one of the “100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs” by Goldman Sachs, nominated for the Patrick Soon-Shiong Innovation Awards by the Los Angeles Business Journal, nominated for the GLL Award by the President of Lithuania. Einaras is an active member of the Young Presidents Organization, which connects 22,000 business leaders in more than 125 countries. He holds an undergraduate degree with honors from the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business.

Huagang is a cybersecurity expert with a hand in inventing some of the most critical security technologies of the last 20 years. He was a founding engineer and later SVP of engineering at Palo Alto Networks, building the world's first next-generation firewall. Before that, he was a founding engineer at IntruVert Networks (acquired by McAfee) which built one of the first intrusion prevention systems. Huagang is also a respected open-source contributor (Linux kernel, LIDS), speaker at Defcon 10, and a Boston marathoner.

Charlie is CTO and co-founder of RWA.xyz, the most comprehensive platform for data and analysis on tokenized assets. Charlie has a background in machine learning and data science, serving as a machine learning engineer at Workday and a software development engineering intern at Amazon. Charlie also served as a venture partner at Contrary Capital. He is a graduate of RPI and is based in New York.

Rober is CEO and founder of Superstate, a venture to modernize the infrastructure of investment funds. Robert co-founded the DeFi platform Compound, a protocol for money markets on Ethereum, in 2017. Compound has over $3B in TVL today. Robert is also a General Partner at Robot Ventures investing in pre-seed / seed fintech and crypto startups.

Joe is co-founder of Maple Finance, an on-chain marketplace for institutional capital. Joe started his career as a consultant at PWC, focused on assurance for private clients. He holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from Saint Louis University. He is based in Melbourne, Australia.

Colin is the Head of Growth and leads business development at Centrifuge, the DeFi protocol for financing real world assets on-chain. At CFG, he focuses on establishing strategic partnerships to build the ecosystem of private structured credit on-chain. Prior to Centrifuge, Colin led the business development efforts at Keemotion (acquired by Sportradar) and prior to that at Axial.net. Colin graduated with a degree in Economics from the College of the Holy Cross.

Alpin is a protocol engineer at Osmosis Labs, where he helps design, architect, and implement new mechanisms into the core Osmosis protocol. Prior to joining Osmosis, he spent several years serving as Managing Director for the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, where he helped incubate the early Polkadot and Avalanche ecosystems and drove the launch of Berkeley’s $25M blockchain research lab, the RDI. During this period, he also served on the executive board of Blockchain@Berkeley, where he launched the organization’s research division, which has spun out multiple companies that have formed the Celestia ecosystem. In his free time, he attends classes in Berkeley, where he is currently completing his degrees in EECS and Business.

Fredric Mark "Ric" Edelman is an American investor and author. He is the founder of Edelman Financial Services, the author of several personal finance books, and the host of a weekly personal finance talk radio show called The Ric Edelman Show. Ric holds the CBDA designation - Certified in Blockchain and Digital Assets. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of 10 books on personal finance. He was ranked three times as the nation’s #1 Independent Financial Advisor by Barron’s and founded the nation’s largest financial planning firm, now serving 1.3 million clients and managing $300 billion in AUM. Edelman is in both Research Magazine’s and Barron’s Financial Advisor Halls of Fame, and recipient of IARFC’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Investment Advisor, RIABiz and InvestmentNews all named him one of the most influential people in the investment management profession. He is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of 10 books on personal finance with more than one million copies in print in seven languages.

Brian Foster is Global Head of Wholesale at Coinbase, where he is responsible for the firm’s client business spanning banks, brokerages, exchanges, financial technology firms, ETF and ETP issuers, and other institutional market participants. In his tenure at Coinbase, Brian has led many of the firm’s foundational commercial deals, including its partnership with BlackRock, and served as a member of the Coinbase Ventures investment committee, where he led principal investments in crypto companies in the trading, security, and infrastructure categories. Prior to joining Coinbase, Brian held strategy and product roles at Curv, a crypto security company (acquired by PayPal), and was a VC at Founder Collective and Marker LLC, where he focused primarily on crypto, cybersecurity, and enterprise software investing. He previously worked in marketing and sales at BuysideFX, an FX trading software company, and began his career as the founder of an online travel agency. Brian holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Middlebury College.

As Head of Digital Assets Research and Portfolio Manager for the VanEck Smart Contract Leaders Fund, Mr. Sigel helps guide VanEck’s digital assets strategy and sits on the investment committee of several of the firm’s private funds. He produces frequent research on Bitcoin, smart contract platforms, and emerging markets adoption of digital asset. Prior to VanEck, Mr. Sigel worked as a research analyst and portfolio strategist at CLSA, an analyst and portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein (where he covered technology and other sectors under Cathie Wood), and a journalist at Bloomberg, CNBC and NHK Japan Broadcasting, where he covered finance. Mr. Sigel is a CFA Charterholder and has a BA from Harvard University. This message is intended only for the personal and confidential use of the designated recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient of this message you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. This communication is for information purposes only and should not be regarded as advice, an offer to sell or as a solicitation of an offer to buy any financial product, an official confirmation of any transaction, or as an official statement of VanEck or any of its subsidiaries. E-mail transmissions cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. Therefore we do not represent that this information is complete or accurate and it should not be relied upon as such. All information is subject to change without notice. All e-mails at VanEck are, in accordance with Firm policy, to be used for VanEck business purposes only. E-mails sent from or to the Firm are subject to being reviewed by the Firm in accordance with the Firm's procedure for the review of correspondence.

Will Peck serves as Head of Digital Assets. In this role, he oversees WisdomTree’s digital asset, crypto and blockchain initiatives. These initiatives include crypto asset management products, tokenization and WisdomTree’s digital wallet offering, WisdomTree Prime. Previously, he served as Head of Strategy and Emerging Technologies for WisdomTree. Prior to WisdomTree, he worked in investment banking for Bank of America Merrill Lynch covering a range of financial services companies. Will serves on the Board of Directors of Securrency, Inc., a technology company focused on blockchain-based financial services infrastructure. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University.

Cynthia Lo Bessette is head of Fidelity’s Digital Asset Management division. Fidelity Investments is a leading provider of investment management, retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage, benefits outsourcing, and other financial products and services to institutions, financial intermediaries, and individuals. In her role as head of Fidelity Digital Asset Management, Ms. Lo Bessette is responsible for leading the teams responsible for the management and development of the investment framework and infrastructure for crypto research, asset tokenization, digital asset/crypto trading, and settlement. In addition, she leads the teams responsible for the development and implementation of new investment capabilities and investment products and solutions, business development, and digital asset education. Previously, Ms. Lo Bessette was head of Asset Management and Digital Assets Legal. As head of Asset Management Legal, she led a team providing legal and regulatory guidance and support across Asset Management and served as chief legal officer for Fidelity’s various investment advisers. In her role as head of the Digital Assets Legal group, she built a team providing legal and regulatory guidance and support to the Fidelity Digital Assets business and blockchain-related technology research and development in the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology. Prior to joining Fidelity in August 2019, Ms. Lo Bessette was Executive Vice President and General Counsel of OppenheimerFunds, where she oversaw the legal, compliance, and internal audit functions. She was also a director of OFI International, Ltd, the UK affiliate of OppenheimerFunds, and OppenheimerFunds ICAV, a family of UCITS offered globally. Ms. Lo Bessette has extensive experience working with asset management firms investing globally across asset classes and serving a worldwide investor base, including retail and institutional investors. She has broad experience advising global asset managers on strategic transactions and on start-up and establishment of new businesses in global markets, investment product development and distribution, and portfolio management matters involving US and foreign regulations and local market practices. She has been in the financial industry since 1995. Ms. Lo Bessette received her law degree from the Fordham University School of Law and received her undergraduate degree, with honors, in east Asian studies and economics from the University of Michigan.

Kate (Mitselmakher) Laurence is the CEO, Founder & General Partner of Bloccelerate VC, a Web3 focused venture fund investing in category-defining blockchain companies since 2018. Kate leads the strategy and investments of the fund. She is passionate about bringing about self-sovereignty of money, assets, and data leveraging blockchain technology. Prior to founding Bloccelerate VC, Kate spent ~ 10 years at the world’s largest technology research firm, Gartner (NYSE: IT). While at Gartner, Kate supported leading investors in Silicon Valley including A16Z, Sequoia, KKR around their enterprise technology investments. Kate graduated from Harvard University and is regularly featured on Bloomberg, Forbes, Geekwire, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is also a part of Milken YLC (Milken Leadership Circle).

"Elad Roisman is a member of the Corporate Governance and Board Advisory Practice and the Financial Institutions Group (FIG) Practice. Prior to joining Cravath, Mr. Roisman was a Commissioner and Acting Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Mr. Roisman represents clients on a broad range of complex regulatory and strategic matters. His practice includes advising public and private companies and other SEC registrants on disclosure, compliance, ESG and general corporate law matters. He counsels clients on mergers and acquisitions, capital market transactions and strategic initiatives, as well as on SEC and congressional investigations, exams and inquiries. In addition, Mr. Roisman applies his deep knowledge of market structure regulation to advise fintech companies, exchanges, trading intermediaries and other financial institutions."

"Representative Wiley Nickel is currently serving his first term in Congress as the U.S. Representative of the 13th District of North Carolina which includes Wake, Wayne, Johnston and Harnett Counties. Wiley lives in Cary with his wife, Caroline, and their two kids. Rep. Nickel serves on the House Financial Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion. Wiley earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Tulane University and later graduated from the Pepperdine University School of Law. Prior to being elected to Congress, Wiley served as a North Carolina State Senator, attorney, small business owner and worked for two White House administrations."

Jared is the Managing Director of Vouch Horizon and Director of Web3 at Vouch Insurance, a digital insurer whose offerings are tailored to the needs of venture-backed startups. He has previously served as an Analyst-in-Residence focused on web3 at Futurum Research and President at Triple Point Liquidity, a platform that connects fund administrators, general partners, broker-dealers, and limited partners. Prior to those roles, he worked across strategy, product, and sales functions for emerging technologies at IBM, supporting their Watson and blockchain offerings. He holds a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College.

J. Gdanski is the Founder and CEO of Evertas, where he has led Evertas’s technical development and underwriting, as well as secured multiple fund rounds from top investors; he is a security, privacy, and risk expert. Prior to launching crypto insurance leader Evertas, he was a leader in the enterprise blockchain space and was one of the first to work on institutional custody for crypto. In this capacity he served as an early, significant contributor to blockchain consortia including R3 and Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, of which he was a founding member. He was an integral part of the first enterprise blockchain RFP and has worked on numerous blockchain-based systems. He was the first dedicated hire in the space for a bulge bracket bank and the world’s largest custodian bank and has presented to regulators, legislators, politicians, and business executives, including from Fortune 50 companies.

Jake Mendel is a director with the Startup Banking practice and leads the bank's early-stage Digital Asset team which he launched in 2022. Jake works hands-on with the east coast's fastest-growing Pre-Series A startups – guiding founders through the process of starting and growing a business and finding ways to improve their likelihood of success with fundraising, hiring, scaling and more. Previously he led customer discovery initiatives for SVB's R&D division. Prior to joining SVB in 2017, Jake was an operator in early-stage companies across the biotech, retail and enterprise software sectors. Jake received an MBA in new venture creation and innovation economies, and a bachelor's in business administration, economics and entrepreneurship from The Ohio State University.

Sarah is an Independent Director on the board of Anchorage Digital Bank NA, the first federally chartered digital asset bank, and a Senior Advisor at FS Vector, a strategic consulting firm in the fintech space. Previously, from inception until acquisition by Walmart and Ribbit Capital in 2022, Sarah was the GC and CCO at ONE, a retail banking platform. Sarah was also the first GC and CCO at Azlo, a small business banking platform, and the first lawyer and Head of Compliance at Blend, an application platform for banks and mortgage lenders. In 2017, Sarah founded the 94104 Exchange, a San Francisco-based forum for fintech lawyers and compliance professionals that facilitated “the unregulated exchange of ideas.” Prior to that, in Washington, DC, Sarah was an attorney at the OCC and at BuckleySandler LLP, and a Principal at Promontory Financial Group. Sarah earned her JD at GW Law and holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Music.

Rachel Anderika is the Chief Operating Officer at Anchorage Digital Bank. She brings more than 15 years of experience in regulatory and risk management and nearly a decade of professional experience at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where she served as National Bank Examiner (and later, Large Bank Examiner) to ensure that national banks operated safely and soundly, while complying with applicable laws and regulations. Rachel then served eight years in the private sector at Promontory Financial Group, a premier bank regulatory consulting firm, later purchased by IBM where she worked with numerous traditional financial institutions on risk management and compliance. Rachel also helped found Promontory’s Digital Assets Risk and Compliance Team, where she guided digital assets custodians through the state and federal regulatory licensing process. Rachel is based in Connecticut and enjoys sailing her 99 year-old wooden boat in her spare time.

Dennison Bertram is building Tally.xyz, the credibly neutral governance layer for the future of digital applications. Tally.xyz powers layer 2 blockchains, DeFi protocols, automated market makers, messaging bridges, data availability layers, and more. Tally.xyz helps teams and communities manage over $10 billion in treasury assets. Dennison was previously a Founder at DappHero, a Low code Ethereum website building tool, and a Developer Advocate at OpenZeppelin, a leading blockchain security and auditing firm.

Flex Chapman is founder of the Krause House DAO. Named after Jerry Krause, general manager of the Chicago Bulls in the National Basketball Association from 1985 to 2003, the Krause House DAO self-identifies as “a community of hoop fanatics that are just crazy enough to buy an NBA team.” The DAO currently owns the Ball Hogs, a BIG3 team and runs an accelerator program. The DAO has 1,900 token holders.

Azeem Khan is a New York-based entrepreneur, Web3 native, and Head of Impact at Gitcoin. He entered into the crypto space in 2013 buying and selling Bitcoin, and he went on to write about it for The Huffington Post. In 2021, he launched a venture-backed Web3 crowdfunding platform. He’s currently focused on impact at Gitcoin, a decentralized autonomous organization that has helped distribute over US$65 million in grants to the Web3 ecosystem since 2017, and helped spawn many multi-billion dollar projects in the web3 space. Notable projects that have benefited from Gitcoin's funding include Uniswap, 1Inch, Yearn Finance, and more.

Matt Wright leads the Consensys Fellowship Program, a pre-accelerator program designed to support web3 startups and founders using the Consensys software suite. Matt joined Consensys when the company acquired JP Morgan's Quorum, an ethereum-based blockchain that protects private transactions with a group of known participants. Matt drove Community adoption for Quorum at both JP Morgan and Consensys. He started his career as community manager for Hackathons at AngelHack. He is also a partner at EVM Fund, a partnership between DAO leaders and experienced venture capital professionals, focused on investing into projects and organizations that enable a global collaborative workforce, backed by the shared ownership economy running on Ethereum. EVM Fund is seeking to bring capital to the builders that are reorganizing the world’s ownership and incentive structures.

Daniel is a software engineer and technical researcher/writer at Offchain Labs, the initial builders of Arbitrum. His educational background is in math and philosophy. He has been following the crypto space from a distance since ~2012, and obsessively since ~2017, as both enthusiast and critic. His primary interest is in blockchain scalability with a focus on Ethereum — the technical protocols as well as the social/ideological debates that ensue. His tech-focused writing has been published by The Block, MolochDAO, Bankless, and the Abacus Crypto Journal, among others. When not wrestling with the Solidity compiler or composing tendentious twitter threads, he enjoys hiking, chess, crossword puzzles, teaching, and flat noodles. He resides in Brooklyn.

Raffi Sapire is the Head of Growth at the Uniswap Foundation. Previously, she served as Director of Operations at Livepeer. She has seven years of banking and venture investing experience, helping founders transfer technology into products through product build and customer discovery. Raphaela gets excited about providing access to cryptocurrency markets to a broader set of retail investors in a responsible way, decentralized projects building the infrastructure for future applications and helping women make more money via negotiations and crypto investing.

Derek Edws (JD/MBA) is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Collab+Currency, a leading consumer crypto venture fund. Trained as an attorney, startup founder, and instructor at the University of Oregon School of Business, Derek invests in sharp founders solving the biggest problems in blockchain-based finance, decentralized organizations, consumer, and culture. Derek is a Co-Founder and Curator of glitch gallery in Marfa, Texas -- an analog gallery for digital objects. He is the co-host of 100PROOF, one of the leading NFT podcasts in the world, and a prolific NFT collector and founding member of Flamingo DAO.

Chris is a British technologist & entrepreneur passionate about simplifying the intersection of culture and finance. Chris is co-founder and CEO of Floor, the leading mobile-first web3 platform and formerly co-founded Button & LinksDAO, after leading mobile at Venmo during it's growth in 2013.

Justin Melillo is an artist, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He is the Founder and CEO of Mona, the 3D world building platform for the immersive internet. As a 3D artist and creative technologist for over 12 years, Justin has worked with world-class teams and clients such as Magic Leap, DreamWorks Animation, Drake, CharliXCX, Sia, Lizzo, and Maroon 5. Justin's AR experiences have been viewed over 100 million times across Instagram and Snapchat.

Kate (Mitselmakher) Laurence is the CEO, Founder & General Partner of Bloccelerate VC, a Web3 focused venture fund investing in category-defining blockchain companies since 2018. Kate leads the strategy and investments of the fund. She is passionate about bringing about self-sovereignty of money, assets, and data leveraging blockchain technology. Prior to founding Bloccelerate VC, Kate spent ~ 10 years at the world’s largest technology research firm, Gartner (NYSE: IT). While at Gartner, Kate supported leading investors in Silicon Valley including A16Z, Sequoia, KKR around their enterprise technology investments. Kate graduated from Harvard University and is regularly featured on Bloomberg, Forbes, Geekwire, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is also a part of Milken YLC (Milken Leadership Circle).

Scott Stornetta is without a doubt, one of the founding fathers of blockchain technology. He is also a notable figure in the world of cryptography and distributed computing. The first mention of a blockchain architecture was from a publication he co-authored which described a digital hierarchy system known as a “block chain” that utilized digital time-stamps for ordering transactions. The concept of a blockchain system was later adopted by Satoshi Nakamoto in developing the popular blockchain for Bitcoin. Together with his long-time colleague and collaborator, Stuart Haber, W. Scott Stornetta laid the foundation for the emergence of today’s blockchain technology revolution. Stornetta is touted as the co-inventor of the blockchain, together with Stuart Haber. Stornetta has spent decades contributing valuable research and published materials to the field of cryptography and distributed computing and has consulted for several universities on the establishment of startup companies.