[session 5] Digital Assets: an Investible Asset Class for Institutions?

Muneeb Ali

Co-founder

Stacks & CEO, Hiro

Dr. Muneeb Ali is Co-founder, Stacks and CEO, Hiro. Hiro is a Public Benefit Corp building developer tools for Stacks, the network that enables apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin. Muneeb has raised $75 million USD in funding from investors like Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Lux Capital, Winklevoss Capital, and others. Hiro (formerlyBlockstack PBC) was featured in the CNBC’s list of 100 promising startups to watch. Muneeb received his Ph.D. and Masters in Computer Science from Princeton University. His Ph.D. thesis was nominated for the ACM SIGCOMM dissertation award by Princeton University. Muneeb gives guest lectures on cloud computing at Princeton and his research publications have over 1,700 citations. He is one of the main characters in George Gilder’s book Life After Google and was a technical advisor to the HBO show Silicon Valley.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Founder and CEO

FTX

Sam Bankman-Fried is an MIT graduate with a degree in physics who started his career in financial markets with Jane Street. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system. After Jane Street, he founded the quantitative trading firm Alameda Research. During his time at Alameda, he and his colleagues noticed that the technology from cryptocurrency exchanges for institutional investors could be better. As a result, he created FTX in 2019, which is now the largest crypto trading exchange outside China. Beginning during his time at MIT and continuing throughout his professional career, Sam has been a believer in effective altruism in which he has dedicated his time to maximizing his earnings in order to affect as much positive change in the world as possible. Over the past decade, Sam has donated to initiatives that focus on animal rights, climate change and more.

John Cahill

Chief Operating Officer, Asia

Galaxy Digital

John Cahill is the Chief Operating Officer of Galaxy Digital’s Asia office, based out of Hong Kong. Prior to joining Galaxy, John spent 19 years at Goldman Sachs, most recently running the Hedge Fund Financing business across Asia Pacific markets and had previously run the Securities Lending and Synthetic Product trading desks. John brings valuable expertise in prime brokerage, delta-one trading and financing, as well as in client relationship management, project management, and balance sheet optimization. John graduated from Boston College with a B.S. in Management, with a concentration in Finance.

Melody He (Moderator)

Partner

Spartan Group

Melody is a co-founder of Spartan Group and responsible for leading the group’s advisory business.  She works closely alongside clients in helping them with fundraising and strategic developments in Asia.  Most recently she worked with BitDAO, Qredo, Dapper Labs / Flow, Solana, Blockstack, Origin, and Deribit.  Melody has been an active early stage tech investor over the past decade and an early investor in blockchain companies.  Prior founding Spartan group, Melody was an investment partner at MOX/SOSV, a global top accelerator VC. She started her career in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong where she worked on numerous financing and M&A transactions including the Baidu IPO.