Cryptocurrencies, the blockchains, smart contracts, and proof work. The new world of finance is filled with strange terms and unique concepts. If you intend to know what the blockchain may do and where digital finance is going — the best way to discover is by listening to a professional. Many of the world’s top digital money innovators deliver talks.
Here are the top 25 blockchain and cryptocurrency speakers.
1. “Sir” John Hargrave
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A good starting point for is with a knight — or at the very least someone who styles himself as you. “Sir” John Hargrave is just a former comedian, the founder of Zug.com, and the author of Blockchain for Everyone: How I Learned the Secrets of the New Millionaire Class (And You Can, Too).
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Hargrave’s book uses real stories and examples to spell out how the blockchain works. He’s also the CEO of Media Shower, a blockchain media platform. His publication, Bitcoin Market Journal, is out to significantly more than 100,000 blockchain investors each month.
Hargrave has additionally written about mind-hacking, but his strength is his in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of the blockchain industry and the clarity with which that he addresses his audiences. His topics vary from how the blockchain works through success stories to specific Bitcoin investment strategies. Whether you’re buying general explanation of the crypto world or specific information about steps to make the most of it, John Hargrave could keep you both informed and entertained.
2. Samson Williams
For anyone who bought Bitcoin at the end of 2017, playing someone who holds a master’s degree in emergency and disaster management could be of use. But Williams doesn’t just know about dealing with crises. He’s also an established expert on the world wide impact of the blockchain.
Williams was the chair of a United Nations Blockchain Commission subcommittee looking at world wide health and emergency response. As the main London School of Business and Finance, Williams has taught blockchain courses throughout the Middle East.
Williams’s talks have covered the type of the blockchain, but they’ve also explored if the blockchain is right for particular companies.
Blockchain is a tool, but it’s not likely to be the right solution for each and every problem. Williams helps businesses to understand what the blockchain can and can’t do. He also looks to the future, explaining what will happen when cryptocurrencies meet artificial intelligence and automation.
3. Joel Comm
Together with Travis Wright, Joel Comm may be the presenter of the Bad Crypto Podcast, the Internet’s most popular blockchain audio program. Comm has interviewed all the blockchain’s most prominent figures, exploring both technology and the opportunity. (He’s still hoping to interview Satoshi Nakamoto, but who knows? Maybe he’s interviewed him already.)
Comm brings two benefits to his talks. The first is definitely an irreverent, down-to-earth approach. Comm isn’t an engineer or perhaps a coder. He’s an everyman with a deep curiosity about the latest technology.
As Comm checks the future, that he brings people who have him, asking the right questions and learning as that he goes. And the second benefit is a back ground in digital development.
Comm is definitely an Internet entrepreneur who’s sold a business to Yahoo and written best-selling books about digital opportunities. As a blockchain speaker, if that he says there’s something of value in the space, he’s worth playing.
4. Cherie Aimée
Cherie Aimée was working as a programmer and technology CEO when she found that she was having difficulty breathing. Sometimes she felt that she was suffocating; at other times, she’d hyperventilate. When her arms “felt heavy,” her husband rushed her to hospital. Within minutes, Cherie was in cardiac arrest. She was just 35 years old.
Cherie had survived Hodgkin lymphoma, but the medication she had taken had weakened her heart. The hospital placed her in a coma and put her on a life support machine until 1 day; she received a heart transplant.
The spiritual awakening she underwent throughout her amount of ill health has influenced her go back to the world of technology.
When Aimee talks to audiences now in regards to the blockchain, her focus is on its human aspects, on the ethical utilization of digital currencies, and on what businesses may bring trust to a trustless system.
5. Calvin Weight
Cherie Aimée discusses “why Bitcoin”—and, in fact, why anything. Calvin Weight is much better qualified to go over the what of Bitcoin. As the CEO of Coinbook, a cryptocurrency exchange, Weight has seen what goes on behind the scenes in the crypto world. He’s also an early on adopter who had been already active in cryptocurrencies when Mt. Gox collapsed, when Bitcoin suddenly inflated, and if the bubble burst.
Weight’s talks often focus on Bitcoin basics. He draws on his back ground in finance and the markets to spell out why cryptocurrencies are a type of money and how they work.
As the pinnacle of an exchange, Weight also has a unique perspective on many of the most critical issues surrounding cryptocurrencies now, including security, regulations, and the challenges of building a fresh way of making transactions with a new type of currency open to everyone.
6. Josina Rodrigues
There’s a real value in playing a cryptocurrency speaker who’s building a cryptocurrency business. They can explain the issues and the challenges, discuss how companies are overcoming them, and discuss the trends that companies are following.
But it’s also worth listening to somebody who can take a broader view. Josina Rodrigues is a Portuguese Ph.D. researcher emphasizing the blockchain. She even offers twenty years of experience being an economist, is a finance director, and consulted for numerous enterprises.
The consequence of that blend of hands-on experience and academic distance implies that her talks can be technical. She’s discussed the role of the blockchain in cybersecurity, explained how AI and the blockchain are changing risk management and talked about the consequence of the blockchain on sustainability. It’s a long way from building an exchange but blockchain technology, but it’s always valuable.
7. Brian Armstrong
Like Calvin Weight, Brian Armstrong now offers insight in to how the cryptocurrency infrastructure has been built and where it’s going. As the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, few folks have spent additional time working with digital coins and experimenting with the blockchain.
Armstrong’s back ground is in development; that he even worked at Airbnb in early days of the platform, where that he focused on fraud prevention. That gave him a unique insight into international payment systems. At Coinbase, Armstrong had to deal with the complexities of international transactions, as well as user demand and government regulations. (The company is believed to have approached the SEC about receiving a brokerage license that would enable it to trade in fiat currencies as well as digital coins.)
At Disrupt SF in 2018, Armstrong talked about the ongoing future of cryptocurrency. There aren’t many individuals who have had a more significant role in building its past.
8. Brad Garlinghouse
Calvin Weight and Brian Armstrong have created exchanges, platforms on which digital currencies are bought and sold. Brad Garlinghouse created a coin—and not only any coin but probably one of the most commonly used coins. Ripple wasn’t intended for consumers. It was meant to help banks and businesses to utilize blockchain technology to send and get money around the world.
The company has can be found in for a lot of controversies, with many people accusing the firm of selling unregistered securities. Despite those arguments (which have descended in to some bitter legal disputes) Ripple’s XRP remains the third-largest digital coin behind only Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Garlinghouse came to Ripple with a rich back ground in the technology industry. He had led YouSendIt, which became Hightail, and worked at both AOL and Yahoo, among others. None of those jobs have turned into as controversial or as innovative as his current role. Garlinghouse leads the expansion of just one of the world’s most important cryptocurrencies and one of its most crucial cryptocurrency speakers.
9. Jihan Wu
Despite the nation banning the usage of cryptocurrencies, China dominates blockchain technology. Its mining organizations are the world’s biggest, supported by inexpensive and plentiful electricity.
Those miners don’t come bigger than Bitmain, a company which makes mining tools, and whose two mining pools have already been described as controlling almost 30 percent of all of the power utilized in Bitcoin mining.
The founder of Bitmain is Jihan Wu, a Beijing University graduate now estimated to be worth nearly $2 billion. In November 2018, Wu left Bitmain, chased by way of a large number of lawsuits, and has since started a new over-the-counter cryptocurrency service called Matrix.
No view of cryptocurrency could be complete with a Chinese perspective, and few people have seen more of the controversies and complexities of that space than Jihan Wu.
10. Kathleen Breitman
Controversy and cryptocurrency speakers appear to go in conjunction. When Kathleen Breitman and her husband, Arthur, chose to launch an electronic coin that might be easier to manage than Bitcoin, she anticipated to raise about $20 million in the ICO.
By enough time the ICO closed, the Swiss Tezos Foundation that collected the funds was sitting on $232 million worth of digital currencies, the most raised ever in one offering.
And then it all went wrong. The Tezos Foundation was light emitting diode by a South African called Johann Gevers, who is referred to as refusing release a the funds to developers. He also refused to resign.
Supporters were not able to receive the tokens that they had bought. The press got wind of the story. Lawsuits started initially to fly. The Breitmans funded the development themselves—as well as the cost of the litigation. Eventually, Tezos did get off the bottom. Supporters received their coins, and the non-profit wing has focused on spending $30 million in grants.
11. Nick Szabo
If Satoshi Nakamoto were a cryptocurrency speaker, he’d be at the top of the list. Nick Szabo isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto, but some people say he’s. (He denies it, so he’s only at number eleven.) The reason that Szabo is so usually associated with the writer of the Bitcoin white paper is that he’s mostly of the people who have all the necessary qualifications and experience. He features a degree in computer science and engineering, but that he also has a JD from George Washington University Law School.
That mixture of computer knowledge and legal expertise has allowed him to mix coding with contract law to make smart contracts.
It’s those smart contracts that show the most important promise in the blockchain world, enabling digital tokens to confirm that contractual obligations have been met and the agreement can move on to another location stage. For anyone enthusiastic about how the blockchain is going to automate the sharing economy or improve supply chains, Nick Szabo has ideas worth hearing. Nick Szabo added legal knowledge to his coding skills.
12. Elizabeth Stark
Elizabeth Stark added Internet expertise to her legal skills. As a law school graduate, she’s no expert coder, but she’s taught at both Stanford and Yale about the Internet.
Her Lightning Labs company can also be the leading developer of Lightning, an open protocol layer that uses blockchains and smart contracts to enable inexpensive and fast private transactions.
What Elizabeth Stark might be most well-known for, though, is her willingness to share with people in the crypto world things they don’t want to hear. Her talks have criticized the explosion of ICOs that light emitting diode retail investors to stock up on coins that are more likely to fail.
She’s attacked the tendency towards centralization at some crypto businesses that want to retain get a handle on over their coins. Stark has also been credited with converting Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey to the benefits of the blockchain. Square is now considered one of the most popular ways for people investors to get Bitcoin.
13. Laura Shin
Laura Shin also didn’t enter into the crypto world with a back ground on paper lines of code. Her experience is in writing. As a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first conventional journalist currently talking about cryptocurrencies and the blockchain full-time. She’s since setup a couple of podcasts about the crypto world by which she interviews the industry’s leading figures.
Shin has been watching the development of the blockchain almost considering that the publication of the Bitcoin white paper. She’s observed cryptocurrencies develop, seen exchanges established and hacked, and written about every issue affecting the blockchain, from security and fraud to ICOs and regulation.
It’s always helpful to hear from cryptocurrency speakers who are building the platforms and grappling with the technology. But it’s believe it or not valuable to hear people who usually takes a broader view and are familiar with what’s happening throughout the crypto space.
14. Arianna Simpson
Crypto pioneers usually have unique stories that brought them to the space. For some, it’s a chance to reinvent an economic climate that scarcely survived an accident. For the others, it’s the ability to build something on a fantastic new technology.
For Arianna Simpson, it was a visit to Zimbabwe where she saw first hand the results of hyperinflation. The Zimbabwean dollar was losing half its value every day. Returning to the United States, Simpson started thinking about a country by which no government or bank was regulating currency.
Simpson have been working at Facebook, but she took a new job at crypto firm BitGo before creating Autonomous Partners. The cryptocurrency hedge fundraised money in the “lower eight digits.”
As a cryptocurrency speaker, Simpson will be of the very most considerable interest to investors. She’s compared crypto investing strategies with approaches taken by Warren Buffett and Howard Marks, and noted that crypto markets are “very sentiment-driven.”
15. Travis Wright
Travis Wright is, with Joel Comm, half of the Bad Crypto Podcast, a down-to-earth program that explains the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. When Comm and Wright started the podcast, they admit which they knew almost no about the technology. Their goal was to create audiences together as they talked to pioneers in the crypto space and learned all about digital tokens and crypto coins. They’ve since learned enough to launch their very own currency, BADcoin.
What Comm and Wright lack in hands-on technical knowledge (they don’t have a crypto business, and they haven’t built a token to power a smart contract) they replace with style. Travis can also be a comedian, and his approach is always to combine big ideas with big, fun entertainment. As a former technology trainer, he also knows steps to make complex topics comprehensible and clear proper to use. Expect his cryptocurrency talks to be both informative and fun.
16. Kathryn Haun
We’ve already seen a couple of cryptocurrency speakers who have combined technology knowledge with legal training. But few of those speakers have the legal background of Kathryn Haun.
A former federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice and an Assistant US Attorney in Washington DC and San Francisco, she’s prosecuted countless crimes. Her focus is on cybercrimes, the deep Web, and digital currencies. She has taught about cybercrime and cryptocurrencies at Stanford Law School and sits on the board of directors of Coinbase.
The topics that Haun discusses are hugely important to anybody working in cryptocurrencies. Buyers and sellers of illicit goods have used Bitcoin. Exchanges have already been hacked. Wallets have been broken into and their contents stolen.
Few folks are better placed than Kathryn Haun to spell out the security risks on the blockchain and the threat from cybercrime. Kathryn Haun’s talks are all in regards to the risks in cryptocurrencies.
17. Arthur Hayes
For Arthur Hayes, it’s all about the huge benefits. Hayes completed a degree in economics from Wharton School of Business then did what you aren’t that type of education would do: that he headed to Hong Kong and worked as an equities derivatives trader. He worked for Deutsche Bank and Citibank, making markets and trading futures, forwards, and swaps.
In 2013, Hayes saw an opportunity in digital currencies. He started trading and investing in Bitcoin, conducting arbitrage between exchanges and between derivatives.
That experience led Hayes to begin to see the opportunity in a Bitcoin derivative exchange model. Together with a few partners, Hayes founded BitMEX, a P2P leveraged financial loans trading exchange. Traders may use Bitcoin as collateral to produce trades.
What Hayes offers is insight to the part of cryptocurrencies that’s both opaque and attractive to many: the potential to make money trading on the movements of an extremely volatile asset.
18. Naval Ravikant
Dubbed by his fans — the “angel philosopher (how many cryptocurrency speakers can say that they have fans)? Naval Ravikant is best referred to as the co-founder of AngelList.
The business is just a kind of dating service for investors and startups, joining together entrepreneurs who need investors, and investors looking to support good ideas. The company has since expanded into recruitment, building a job service for start-ups, and a kind of marketing firm that helps start-ups find their first clients.
It wasn’t long though before Ravikant was moving towards the new opportunity in cryptocurrencies. In 2017, Ravikant spun off CoinList, an ICO platform for startups and accredited investors.
In a tweetstorm that year, Ravikant argued that blockchains combine the openness of democracy and the Internet with the merit of markets, and predicted that the blockchain would replace networks with markets. You can see why the entrepreneurs who have benefitted from his matchmaking call him an “angel” while people who read his tweets and hear his talks consider him a philosopher.
19. Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott, an adjunct professor at business school INSEAD, is both a number one cryptocurrency speaker and an authority on the effect of technology on business. In 2017, along with his son, Alex, Tapscott created the Blockchain Research Institute which runs multiple projects to investigate blockchain strategy, what sort of technology may be used and implemented, and its effects.
Tapscott delivers a range of different talks, nevertheless the top of the list are speeches about the “Blockchain Revolution.” He discusses what that he calls the technology that’s likely to have “the greatest impact on the enterprise and the global economy.”
What audiences receive is a specially unique perspective. Cryptocurrency speakers who work in the industry can explain the way the technology works and why it works. Tapscott explains what the blockchain can do and why it’s imperative to business and society.
20. Apolo Anton Ohno
Cryptocurrency investors can often believe they’re skating on thin ice. Some of the characters are slippery, industry often catches a chill, and at any minute they might fall through a giant crack and lose all of it. Being guided by Apolo Anton Ohno could be valuable. Ohno has won eight Olympic skating medals. (He also won the fourth season of Dancing with the Stars.)
But Ohno isn’t just fast on his feet. He’s also thinking about the blockchain. After investing early in Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ohno and his partners setup a cryptocurrency trading platform called HybridBlock and sought to raise $50 million within an initial coin offering.
Ohno’s talks are primarily about training and winning, but they’re also about adapting—which is definitely an essential skill for a host as cold and variable as the cryptocurrency world.
21. Linda Xie
If you’ve ever wondered how cryptocurrency firms cope with the spikes popular that can suddenly strike the crypto markets, then Linda Xie could have some stories for you. When she worked at Coinbase, she was responsible for creating the internal products and services that helped departments such as for example compliance, legal, finance, and fraud detection to scale as the market grew.
It was that position that gave her a unique insight in to how crypto companies are riding the wave and developing industry.
It also gave her the ability and the expertise to break out and open her very own business. Xie is now the co-founder of Scalar Capital, a crypto asset investment firm that raised $20 million to buy blockchain businesses and privacy technology.
Xie has been proven to give people a basic introduction to crypto-assets, but she also offers a unique perspective on fundraising from crypto markets as she explains the way the blockchain can change the world.
22. Yael Tamar
Yael Tamar arrived to the cryptocurrency world while building a fintech venture in Silicon Valley. Again and again, she was asked why she wasn’t utilising the blockchain, and the more Tamar looked at it, the more she started to ask herself exactly the same question.
She opened a blockchain storytelling agency, then caused a company building blockchain tech for enterprise and still another that was building out an ICO.
Tamar now lives in Israel, where she’s on the Advisory Board of Blockchain Israel, an organization that promotes blockchain technology in the united kingdom and provides tools, networking, and capital for local startups.
Tamar has additionally the founder of Women in Block, an association that tries to generate executive and thought leadership opportunities for women taking care of the blockchain. Tamar is frequently invited to be on the advisory board of ICOs and has to assess whether the project is viable and offers value. It’s an essential perspective on a dynamic industry.
23. JB Rubinovitz
Most of the talks delivered by cryptocurrency speakers are in regards to the future. They’re about what the blockchain can do, how it might change finance, and how it could improve supply chains.
What makes JB Rubinovitz stick out is that she’s already implemented a real-world application, and she’s used it to make a real social huge difference.
Users who install her Bail Bloc application allow a number of their computer’s unused processing power to be properly used to mine Monero.
At the conclusion of each month, the Monero raised by Bail Bloc’s network of volunteer computers is changed into fiat currency and donated to one of the bail funds in the National Bail Fund Network. The goal is always to generate enough compounding revenue to secure the release of 1000s of immigrants from ICE detention.
Rubinovitz has shown that even a simple application may use blockchain technology to have a real-world impact.
24. Olaoluwa Osuntokun
One of the truly amazing things about the blockchain and the cryptocurrency world is that it’s open to anybody. It’s an international movement that may bring advantageous assets to every corner of the planet.
Olaoluwa Osuntokun was created in Nigeria but moved to the United States and studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He started his career as a pc software engineering intern at Google before co-founding Lightning Labs.
Osuntokun is now the CTO. The company has raised $2.5 million to make Bitcoin a more efficient and user-friendly payment form by lowering the cost of small BTC transactions.
Osuntokun is the main network of men and women around Bitcoin who are improving the service and bringing its conventional uptake closer.
25. Hunter Horsley
Both Olaoluwa Osuntokun and Hunter Horsley have been named on Forbes’ list of 30 under 30 in finance. But while Osuntokun is focusing on improving technology, Horsley is all about the amount of money.
The co-founder of Bitwise Asset Management, Horsley, has raised $4 million to create transparent cryptocurrency indexes. He was previously something manager taking care of monetization at Facebook and Instagram and has a degree in economics from Wharton.
Horsley and Osuntokun together show that there have always been two aspects of the rise of the blockchain: an effective and efficient technology; and a financial system built to beat old-fashioned financial platforms.
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Updated April 2020
