Presentation: Blockchain Enabled: Ask The Experts Panel

Paul is a proud Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate of UC Berkeley with a wide range of technical skills from low-level 3D graphics engineering to development of custom web CMS systems, even before people knew what a CMS was. He held lead engineering positions with Nvidia and Chromatic Research, but most recently owned and operated several non-technical small businesses throughout California. There he learned the importance of the intersection of people, business, and technology. 

Today, he aims to bring Bitcoin mainstream with software and products aimed at simplifying Bitcoin and making it insanely easy to send and secure this revolutionary currency while maintaining the highest level of privacy. When not converting people to bitcoin you’ll likely find him climbing a rock in Joshua Tree or at a local climbing gym.

I am the CEO and co-founder of bloXroute Labs, and a researcher at the Northwestern University Networks Group, where my research focuses on blockchains and cryptocurrency networks.

My research is now being used at bloXroute Labs to develop and deploy a global networking infrastructure which allows practically all blockchains to scale to thousands of on-chain transactions per second (TPS), without requiring any protocol change, implementation change, without requiring consensus to use bloXroute, and without altering their security model.

I'm also fairly nice.

Amy is a software engineer at Coinbase and was the first engineer hired for Coinbase Commerce, a non-custodial payment processor that allows merchants to accept cryptocurrencies. Coinbase Commerce has launched and has processed millions of dollars, free, of crypto payments for merchants across the world. She is now building out a new team within the Coinbase consumer flagship product, Coinbase.com, to help investors grow and diversify their portfolios. She is hiring aggressively for the NY and SF offices so please email amy.yin@coinbase.com to chat about opportunities to build Finance 2.0!

She is passionate about technology for the developing world and closing the gender gap. While studying Computer Science at Harvard, she founded the Harvard Women in Computer Science and received the Harvard College Women's Leadership Award for her contributions to the technical and entrepreneurial community of women at Harvard. Before Coinbase she was an engineer at Hired and Facebook's Internet.org and started Vapor Communications while in college with Harvard Professor David Edwards. In her free time she maintains a steady yoga and weight lifting practice, goes to music festivals with her friends, reads and travels.

Chris is the lead backend developer for OB1, which builds OpenBazaar, a decentralized ecommerce marketplace using cryptocurrency.

Eran is an investor, advisor, and serial entrepreneur with three exits as a founder. With more than a decade of experience in retail and ecommerce, Eran has been publicly recognized for his achievements, winning Techstars and AlleyNYC PitchNites; the United Nations World Summit Award for Innovation; and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Startup, among others.

Eran is passionate about startups that solve a significant problem, especially in crowdsourcing and retail marketplaces. After spending so much time in the retail world, he was astounded to learn that there is no clear view of the shopper to drive an authentic understanding of who they are when they log into a site or walk into a store. He was further concerned with the fact that this critical missing component forced retailers to scrounge for unreliable, third-party data in an attempt to deliver the best online shopping experience to their customers -- all while shoppers lack both control and visibility into who has access to their shopping data and how it’s being used.

As Shopin’s CEO and CoFounder, Eran is turning retailers’ websites into a distributed Amazon via a universal shopper profile, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrency, delivering the most personalized online shopping experience possible.