Andy Pickering

Guy Itzhaki is CEO of Fhenix, a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) company whose CoFHE coprocessor lets smart contracts on existing EVM chains compute over encrypted data without users moving to a new chain. Itzhaki spent much of his career at Intel, where he took its SGX and TDX trusted execution environments to market and later led its FHE and blockchain initiatives, with a stint as a technology advisor for the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games, before joining founder Guy Zyskind to launch Fhenix three years ago.

David Wei Liang is a vice president at Conflux Network, the Layer-1 blockchain built around its Tree-Graph consensus and positioned as a bridge between China’s engineering ecosystem and global Web3 markets. His career has centred on distributed systems. He earned a PhD in computer science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, studying peer-to-peer networks, followed by postdoctoral research in distributed systems. He then worked at Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab in Hong Kong and became chief blockchain expert at China Telecom, where he led work on the blockchain-enabled SIM card, BSIM.

Michael Huynh is Chief Marketing Officer at Lumia, a blockchain built specifically for tokenized real-world assets. It aims to handle an asset’s whole lifecycle, from compliant issuance to on-chain liquidity. Michael has worked full-time in crypto marketing since 2017, with Polygon, Avalanche and a few hundred other projects. He also co-founded the DCENTRAL conference series, which ran events across the US and into Asia.

Milton “Todd” Ault III is the founder of Ault Blockchain and executive chairman of Hyperscale Data (NYSE American: GPUS). Hyperscale Data is an AI data center company whose subsidiaries are building two things: Ault Blockchain, a finance-first, EVM-compatible layer one, and Ault Markets, the trading venue that sits on top of it. Ault has spent 37 years in traditional finance, starting at Dean Witter and running a hedge fund for much of that time. He has been involved with Bitcoin since 2011, later spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a mining operation, and says he was debanked around ten times before the US regulatory climate changed.

Marc Ryan is Co-Founder and CEO of Spout Finance, a Solana lending protocol that lets people borrow USDC against tokenized US stocks without paying interest. Based in New York, Marc first got into crypto during the 2017 ICO boom and stayed through DeFi summer and the NFT cycle. Meanwhile he worked as a technology investment banker at HSBC, covering fintech, software and hardware, and that experience showed him how cheaply wealthy clients could borrow against their portfolios compared with everyone else.

Michael Steuer is President and CTO of the Casper Association, the Swiss non-profit behind Casper Network, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 built for regulated real-world assets and payments between AI agents. Born in Amsterdam and based in Los Angeles for more than two decades, Michael has spent around 30 years in technology. That includes a stint as CTO for mobile at THQ, where his team shipped some of the first downloadable mobile games. He then co-founded Casper in 2018, built much of its ecosystem tooling through his company MAKE, and returned to lead the project in 2024.

Ran Hammer is CEO at Orbs, a decentralized Layer-3 blockchain that works behind the scenes for DEXs. It gives smart contracts the automation and execution logic they lack on their own, which powers limit orders, TWAP, liquidity aggregation and perpetual futures across dozens of venues. Ran is an Israeli based in London and a former high-tech M&A lawyer. He has been with Orbs since its 2017 beginnings, working as general counsel, then in business development, then as chief business officer, before taking over as CEO in September.

Eli Hylands is the founder of Flow Crypto, a New Zealand on and off ramp that launched about a month before this recording. He has been involved in crypto for roughly ten years, and before Flow he worked as a software developer and business analyst at IAG. He built the platform largely by himself over about a year, alongside his day job, after seeing a gap open in the local market.

Nikita Monastyrskiy is chief marketing officer at Keeper, the self-custodial wallet formerly known as Tonkeeper. He started in crypto in 2018, running bounty and Bitcointalk signature campaigns while still at university, then spent four years at a crypto marketing agency, rising from community manager to senior growth strategist. He went on to join the marketing team at Ethereum layer two Mode, helping take it from launch to exchange listings, before moving to Wallet in Telegram in 2025 as head of partner marketing. He later switched from the custodial side to the self-custodial one, joining Tonkeeper to lead its marketing.

Chad Barraford is a co-founder and the technical lead of THORChain, the cross-chain decentralized exchange that lets users swap native assets — real Bitcoin for real Ethereum — without wrapping, bridging or trusting an intermediary. He found crypto in 2017 while traveling, having sold everything he owned, and built a blockchain from scratch as an academic exercise on the theory that the best way to understand a thing is to construct it from zero. He met his co-founder at a Cosmos hackathon in Berlin in 2019; the first lines of THORChain were written there, and the token launched a week later.