Stories

Henri Pihkala is the CEO of Streamr, a low-latency, scalable, decentralized stack for real-time data. He is a software engineer, serial entrepreneur and an ex-algorithmic trader. He specializes in complex architectures, scalability, data, and blockchain technology.

Matej Michalko is CEO of the Blockchain-based content distribution platform known as Decent which raised more than $4.2 million during its crowd sale at the end of 2016. He is a blockchain pioneer who founded one of the sector’s first Bitcoin marketing agencies as well as one of its earliest cryptocurrency e-gaming consultancies.

Jean-Philippe Vergneis Associate Professor of Strategy at Ivey Business School, Western University in Canada. He is also Co-Director of the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab, and Founding Coordinator of the Crypto Capitalism Center. He recently wrote a history of piracy and capitalism entitled “The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the fringes of Capitalism” (Harvard Business Review Press). He has focused his research on blockchain technology since 2014.

Jameson Lopp leads a software engineering team at BitGo, an enterprise digital asset security service based in Palo Alto. He created Statoshi, a fork of Bitcoin Core that analyzes the statistics of Bitcoin nodes and aims to give a DevOps perspective of the Bitcoin network.  He counts paintball, motorcycles and wine making among his interests. and waxes philosophical on the nature of Bitcoin in his spare time.

Dr. Peter Rizun is Chief Scientist for Bitcoin Unlimited and a leading figure in the block size debate that currently engulfs Bitcoin. His organization develops software used by about 40 percent of the Bitcoin network’s mining power, and aims to solve the block size controversy by giving miners the ability to signal their support for a larger block size, an approach that has been repeatedly rejected by Bitcoin Core.

Dr. Egbert-Jan Sol is CTO of TNO Industry, a leading applied research institute in The Netherlands. He is a participant in the National Blockchain Coalition and founder and chairman of the Digital City Eindhoven. He started his industrial career as a robotics system architect.

Kiril Ivanov is the CTO of LoyalGarden, a loyalty network based on the blockchain. He is a senior software architect with more than 15 years experience, the last 8 with leading banking and insurance institutions, including ING. Kiril has a degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Belarusian State University of Informatics. He has been a contributor to various blockchain initiatives since 2016.

Ron Dijkstra is the CEO of Loyal Garden, a blockchain-based loyalty network. He was previously an executive manager responsible for policy, contract management and procurement for several municipalities in The Netherlands and has a degree in Business Administration and Accounting from the University of Groningen.

Ram Avissar is the Marketing Director of CoinDash, a social trading platform for cryptocurrencies. He has degrees in law and accounting, and previously worked for Ernst and Young Assurance, in their high tech division. Before coming to CoinDash he was a member of the Matchpool team, which recently had its own successful ICO.

Professor Bernard Lietaer is one of the world’s authorities on the design and implementation of currency systems. He is the author of Money and Sustainability and a leading thinker in the field of community and complementary currencies. He helped design and implement the European Currency Unit which became the Euro, and served as the President of the Belgian Central Bank’s Electronic Payment System.