Speakers

Robleh Ali

Research Scientist, MIT DCI

Robleh Ali is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative. His main focus is on how national currencies can be issued digitally outside the existing banking system and the role of central banks in such a system. The overall aim of the work is fundamentally reforming the financial system by changing the way money is issued.

João Almeida

CTO, OpenNode

On a mission to bridge the gap between Bitcoin and the rest of the world @ OpenNode. Focused mainly on the Lightning Network protocol and providing infrastructure to businesses & developers to build delightful experiences on top of it.

Ria Bhutoria

Director of Research, Fidelity Digital Assets

Ria Bhutoria is Director of Research at Fidelity Digital Assets where she conducts research and analysis on the digital asset ecosystem for clients. Previously, Ria led the efforts at Circle Research where she published sell-side style research on the market. Prior, she was an equity research analyst at Credit Suisse covering the FinTech and Payments sector.

John Carvalho

Chief Communications Officer, Bitrefill

John Carvalho, CCO at Bitrefill, has been dedicated and outspoken Bitcoiner for 7 years, working to defend Bitcoin and debate its function and purpose. John is helping Bitrefill to build a circular economy for Bitcoin.

Cassie Clifton

Podcast Host, BTC Media

Cassie Clifton is the host of the What’s Halvening? podcast, where she explores her passions for energy and Bitcoin at their intersection, mining. Cassie is on the operations team at BTC Media, parent company to Bitcoin Magazine and host of Bitcoin 2020.

Sonja Davidovic

Economist, International Monetary Fund

Sonja is exploring how emerging technologies can help IMF member countries achieve their development goals. Combining her background in finance and economics with technology and country specific knowledge, Sonja offered recommendations on how to deploy fintech applications to advance country’s financial inclusion efforts. Sonja is part of an IMF team working on central bank digital currency implementation considerations. As one of the founding Advisory Board members of the IMF Innovation Lab, she helped guide development, operations, and governance of the lab.

Carl Dong

Bitcoin Core Developer, Chaincode Labs

Carl is a systems engineer with contributions to rust-bitcoin and Bitcoin. He previously worked at 21 and Blockstream before joining Chaincode.

Tadge Dryja

Futurist, MIT DCI

DCI researcher, co-inventor of the Lightning Network, bitcoin developer working on scalability

Amanda Fabiano

Director of Bitcoin Mining, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology

Amanda Fabiano is Director of Bitcoin Mining at Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology’s Blockchain Incubator. Amanda is very interested in the economics of Bitcoin mining, and is currently working on expanding Fidelity's Bitcoin mining operations. Prior to this position, she leads the educational efforts around bitcoin and blockchain for the firm.

Cory Fields

Bitcoin Core Developer, MIT DCI

Not-so-active-lately Bitcoin Core developer. Currently researching long-term solutions for hardening cryptocurrencies.

Sharon Goldberg

CEO, Arwen
Associate Professor, Boston University

Sharon Goldberg is the CEO/Co-Founder of Arwen (formerly Commonwealth Crypto), a Boston blockchain startup that is developing the most secure way to trade cryptocurrency. She is also a tenured associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Boston University, where her research focuses on network security and cryptography. Sharon has authored over 30 technical papers and is the recipient of two IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Ethan Heilman

CTO, Arwen

Ethan Heilman is the CTO/Co-Founder of Arwen and PhD student at Boston University. Ethan has worked as an engineer at several startups and is the author of over 10 technical papers on cryptocurrency, blockchain, cryptography and network security. He is an inventor of the TumbleBit protocol and several of his contributions have been merged into Bitcoin Core. He has spoken at several top security conferences including Black Hat USA and Usenix Security. In his spare time, he enjoys breaking hash functions.

Yael Tauman Kalai

Associate Adjunct Professor, MIT

Yael Tauman Kalai is a senior principal researcher in Microsoft Research and an associate adjunct professor of computer science at MIT. Yael got her PhD at MIT, where her thesis has been recognized with the George M. Sprowls PhD thesis award (2006).

Brad Koeppen

Head of Business Development and Trading, CMT Digital

Building and running a cryptocurrency trading desk requires a unique blend of operations, technology and trading resources. With over 15 years of experience in proprietary trading, from the floor of the CBOE to high frequency equity and ETF trading, Brad has spent his career solving problems in a constantly evolving financial marketplace.

Ada Kokoshi

Digital Assets Lead, State Street

Beralda (Ada) Kokoshi is a Digital Assets lead team at State Street. Her work focuses on building business models on custody, trading and asset servicing products for digital assets. She has over 11+ of experience working across different State Street businesses, such as Custody Operations, Middle Office outsourcing, Data and Analytics, and Global Technology. Ada’s experience varies in several roles including product strategy, program execution, business development and custody operations. Ada has an MBA from Boston University and a BA in International Relations and History.

Antoine Le Calvez

Lead Blockchain Data Engineer, Coin Metrics

Antoine has been analyzing and extracting insights out of blockchains since 2014. He created p2sh.info (now txstats.com), worked at Blockchain.info and now Coin Metrics.

Lindsay Lin

Counsel, Stellar Development Foundation

Lindsay is counsel at Stellar Development Foundation, a nonprofit organization that develops the open-source Stellar protocol. Lindsay provides product, business, and operations advisory to help her team navigate legal and regulatory risks and implications of software development, product design, business development, marketing, and more. Lindsay also contributes to policy engagement efforts, educating policymakers and researchers about the nuances of blockchain technology and their implications for policy objectives.

Quanquan Liu

PhD Student, MIT CSAIL

Quanquan was a research intern at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative for the Summer of 2019. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the MIT Theory of Computation group, advised by Erik D. Demaine. Her research interests include graph algorithms (both in the sequential and parallel/distributed sense), consensus for blockchains, proofs of space/work, and local models of computation. She seeks to apply local techniques to a variety of theoretical and practical problems.

Jameson Lopp

CTO, Casa

Jameson Lopp enjoys building technology that empowers individuals. He has spent the past 5 years working on infrastructure to help people secure their private keys. In his spare time he manages half a dozen Bitcoin side projects including a massive curated list of educational resources at https://bitcoin.page

Galen Moore

Senior Research Analyst, CoinDesk

Galen Moore is a senior research analyst at CoinDesk Research, focused on developing metrics and analysis for crypto asset investors. He previously founded Token Report, an investor newsletter and database tracking global token issuance. He has written about technology, life sciences and venture capital, and holds a master's in business studies from Northeastern University, where he studied how accelerators and incubators impact startups.

Patrick Murck

Chief Legal Officer, Transparent Systems

Patrick Murck is Chief Legal Officer (CLO) at Transparent Systems and an Affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. He works with regulators and policymakers around the world and serves as a member of the IMF’s High Level Advisory Group on Fintech, the Fintech Advisory Group for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Fintech Working Group for the Massachusetts Securities Division, and the Delaware First State Fintech Lab.

Neha Narula

Director, MIT DCI

Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, where her research interests are in cryptocurrencies and distributed systems. She received her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2015, where she published work on fast, scalable databases. Neha has has given a TED talk on the future of money, was named to WIRED's list of 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology, and was listed on Fortune's Ledger 40 under 40. In a previous life, she helped relaunch the news aggregator Digg and was a senior software engineer at Google.

John Newbery

Bitcoin Protocol Engineer, Chaincode Labs

John Newbery has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since 2016. He set up Bitcoin Optech in 2018 to help Bitcoin companies adopt scaling technologies.

Lucas Nuzzi

Network Data Product Manager & Lead Data Scientist, CoinMetrics

Lucas Nuzzi was a Co-Founder at Digital Asset Research, a boutique research and data firm solely focused on digital assets and recently moved to Coin Metrics. Lucas has been working on Bitcoin infrastructure and custody since 2013, and often writes about the many aspects of its technology and governance.

James O'Beirne

Bitcoin Core Developer, Chaincode Labs

James has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since 2015. He developed the assumeutxo scaling proposal and bitcoinperf performance benchmarking framework. He is an occasional commentator on financial markets and monetary policy.

Mike Orcutt

Senior Reporter, MIT Technology Review

Mike is a senior reporter at MIT Technology Review, where writes about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and the future of digital money. He also writes Tech Review's weekly crypto-focused newsletter, called Chain Letter.

Jesse Peltan

CTO, HODL Ranch Mining Company

Jesse is building a low-cost data centre in West Texas for commercial-scale Bitcoin mining using renewable power.

Andrew Poelstra

Research Director, Blockstream

Cryptographer, Bitcoin contributor since 2011, co-maintainer of libsecp256k1

James Prestwich

Founder, Summa

James is an engineer and curry enthusiast.

Jeremy Rubin

Former President, MIT Bitcoin Club

Jeremy Rubin SB'16 MEng'16 is one of the founders of the MIT cryptocurrency community. He continues to work on making Bitcoin achieve its goals. You can see more at https://utxos.org

Elias Simos

Senior Research Analyst, Decentral Park Capital

Building systems and thinking blockchains & cryptoassets broad and deep.

Tara Tan

Investor, IDEO

Tara Tan leads IDEO CoLab Ventures, the investment arm of global design company IDEO.

Bastien Teinturier

Software Engineer, Acinq

Software Engineer working on the Lightning network's specification and implementation.

Amiti Uttarwar

Bitcoin Core Contributor, Xapo

Amiti is a Bitcoin Core contributor at Xapo. She began contributing to Bitcoin in 2019 and attended the Chaincode Labs Summer Bitcoin residency. She has been redesigning how transactions are broadcasted in Bitcoin Core to improve privacy. Her other passions include off-trail backpacking, ice climbing, yoga and meditation.

Manasi Vora

Head of Product Strategy, Sia

Manasi leads product and growth at Sia. She is the Founder of Women in Blockchain Boston and was the Director of MIT Bitcoin Expo last year.

David Vorick

CEO, Sia

Lead Developer of Sia; Proof of Work researcher; Blockchain Philosopher

Stacie Waleyko

Developer, Casa

Stacie is a software engineer passionate about solutions that empower the individual. She is currently a back end developer at Casa working on technology to make self custody easier and safer. Prior to Casa she was the engineering lead on distributed ledger technologies at Context Labs in Cambridge, MA.

Valentine Wallace

Software Engineer, Square Crypto

Working on LDK with Square Crypto.

Pieter Wuille

Co-Founder, Blockstream

Peter Wuille is a Bitcoin Core developer and the co-founder of Blockstream. He is #2 in terms of commits to Bitcoin Core and is responsible for important improvements to Bitcoin like BIP 66, libsecp256k1, and Segregated Witness.

For speaking enquiries send mail to mitbtc-expo@mit.edu and fill out our speaker suggestion form.