Early Stage Contrarian Investing in Crypto, with Ash Arora (LocalGlobe)

Patrick O'Grady is Founder and CEO of Commonware, (https://www.commonware.xyz), an open-source set of primitives that developers can use to build and reassemble their applications without resorting to a complicated fork. Patrick shares his journey into crypto, building in the early days at Coinbase and thereafter joining Ava Labs, where he left to pursue his passion for simplifying blockchain development with the founding of Commonware. He discusses the importance of application specific blockchains, the modularity of Commonware and how it is being designed to be "the best verticalized stack" for building blockchain applications. 

Ryne Saxe is CEO and Co-Founder of Eco, (https://www.eco.com), a network for apps that use stablecoins and stablecoin liquidity, providing a frictionless stablecoin experience that accelerates user onboarding and streamlines money movement onchain. Ryne is quite the polymath, sharing his journey as a physicist, coder, lawyer, turned technology founder. He shares his unique perspective on the evolution of payments technology over the last decade, its embrace of crypto, stablecoins as crypto's killer use case, and insights into building Eco to a platform that maximizes money’s value, with seamless user experience, especially as his second run as Eco’s CEO.

Siddarth "Sid" Sridhar is Founder and CEO of BIMA Labs (https://www.bima.money), a decentralized finance platform that enables users to stake assets like Bitcoin and Bitcoin derivatives such as Liquid Staked Tokens (LST), to borrow USBD, a stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar. Sid talks about his journey from being a Draper-backed investor at 19 years old to being a crypto founder in the BitcoinFi space, the role of USDB plays in social impact by promoting financial inclusion, why over-collateralization is crucial for stability in the USBD model, how USBD differs from other traditional stablecoins - and insights on how BIMA's stablecoin, the USBD, fits into the broader financial ecosystem. 

Aki Balogh is Founder and CEO of iBTC, (https://www.ibtc.network), a platform that harnesses the power of Discrete Log Contracts (DLCs) to establish the safest, theft-proof, and institutionally compliant trustless bridge between Bitcoin. Aki shares his journey into entrepreneurship and consequently crypto, discusses his vision of how Discrete Log Contracts (DLCs) can unlock BTCFi, the mechanics of iBTC fka dlcLink, and his thoughts on the exploding Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem.

Elias Tazartes is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Kakarot, (https://www.kakarot.org), a zero-knowledge EVM written in Cairo aiming to allow users to leverage the scaling benefits of validity roll-ups while maintaining compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem. Elias shares on the emergence of verifiable computing and how Kakarot is innovating applied Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to transform the blockchain industry securing billions of transactions. Elias dives deep into Kakarot’s evolution as it crosses its two-year anniversary, discussing the challenges ahead, the ambitious goals for 2025 and beyond, and how Kakarot is delivering Ethereum-compatible block proving in real-time. He also sheds light on the larger vision of ZK's role in evolving Ethereum and the broader digital ecosystem.

Jason Li is Co-Founder of Solayer Labs, (https://www.solayer.org), builder of Solayer, the hardware-accelerated blockchain, infinitely scaling the SVM to enable high-throughput, near-zero latency use cases. Jason returns this season to share the latest on this revolutionary innovation in blockchain, which enables a mind-blowing 100 Gbps throughput while maintaining an atomic state. He walks us through Solayer's vision of a world where billions of people can process USDC transactions, game in real-time, stream 8K videos, and trade at lightning speed—all within the Solayer blockchain ecosystem.

Eric Won Choi is CEO and Founder of The Guild, a decentralized web3 protocol that combines gig economy elements with social networking, enabling users to monetize their networks and build verified on-chain reputations. Eric shares about his crypto and founder journeys, key insights on on-chain community development, why he is innovating in the on-chain community space, growing the blockchain ecosystem in Korea, the future of web3 communities, and the work behind building the world’s first fully on-chain multi-tier, multi-level affiliate program, a key part of the Guild protocol's stack.

Alex Ryvkin is CEO and Founder of Rho Labs, an institutional grade decentralized crypto native marketplace that allows retail and professional traders to efficiently trade swaps and futures on-chain compliantly. Alex joins us to discuss his journey in traditional finance and crypto, building the first crypto interest rates derivatives exchange, an asset class currently valued at over $500 trillion, opportunities for investors and traders given the broader risk-off sentiment, and the road ahead for Rho Labs. 

Ash Arora is Investment Partner at LocalGlobe, one of the leading early stage venture capital firms in Europe, with one of the highest number of unicorns in portfolio, with companies like SoRare, Layer Zero, Robinhood, Figma, Wise, and Twitter (X). Ash, also a Strategic Partner and member of WAGMI Ventures family, leads the B2B, AI and web3 practice of LocalGlobe. She shares insights gathered over her illustrious career journey as an investor, intricacies of investing through different cycles of crypto, philosophy on evaluating winners, and investing in the current global macro market dynamics. 

Miguel de Vega is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Nillion, a decentralized infrastructure network based on the use of various privacy enhancing technologies to support private storage and computation of sensitive data, while seamlessly connecting to existing blockchain infrastructure. Miguel discusses his journey into crypto, his extensive background in AI, how Nillion seeks to provide decentralized privacy and compute solutions leveraging multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, the importance of decentralization, and ethics and responsibility in AI.