Aaron van Wirdum is the technical editor for Bitcoin Magazine. With a background in studying the historical influence of society-shaping technologies, he’s been covering Bitcoin and related projects since 2013. He is known for his ability to explain highly-technical subjects to a layman audience and specializes in topics including Bitcoin’s history, scaling and privacy technology.

Mark is the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management. He is also the managing partner of Morgan Creek Digital Assets. Morgan Creek Capital Management was founded in 2004 and currently manages close to $2 billion in discretionary and non‐discretionary assets. Prior to founding Morgan Creek, Mark was CIO and founder of UNC Management Company (UNCMC), the endowment investment office for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Before that, he was senior investment director for the University of Notre Dame Investment Office. Mark has been at the forefront of institutional investing throughout his career. An early investor in alternative asset classes at Notre Dame, he brought the endowment model of investing to UNC, which contributed to significant performance gains for the endowment. The endowment model is the cornerstone philosophy of Morgan Creek, as is the mandate to invest in innovation. Mark is again at the forefront of investing through Morgan Creek Digital Assets, which was formed in 2018. Morgan Creek Digital is an early-stage investor in blockchain technology, digital currency and digital assets through the firm’s Venture Capital and Digital Asset Index Fund. Mark received a BA with honors from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA in accounting and finance from the University of Chicago.

Amiti is a Bitcoin Core contributor at Xapo. She started her career working at startups around San Francisco and joined Coinbase in 2018. She attended the 2019 Chaincode Labs Summer Bitcoin residency. She is contributing to Bitcoin Core by redesigning how transactions are broadcasted to improve privacy. Her other passions include off-trail backpacking, ice climbing, yoga and meditation.

Charlie is host of http://UntoldStories.com. In 2011, at the dawn of the crypto era, Shrem founded BitInstant, the first and largest Bitcoin company. In 2013, he founded the Bitcoin Foundation and served as its vice chairman. Since then, Charlie has advised more than a dozen digital currency companies, launched and managed numerous partnerships between crypto and non-crypto companies and is the go-to guy for some of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. He recently started http://Crypto.IQ, a premier advisory firm providing expert research, education and advice in the world of crypto assets.

Anthony Pompliano is a co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital, an investment firm seeking to provide wider access to blockchain technology and digital assets like bitcoin. Pompliano is widely known on Twitter as an advocate for the decentralized ecosystem, specifically focusing on Bitcoin. He may be best known for coining popular phrases like “Long Bitcoin, short the bankers.” Prior to joining Morgan Creek, he worked at Facebook and Snapchat as a product manager and a growth leader, respectively. Pompliano also writes a daily newsletter, Off The Chain, analyzing crypto news for institutional investors, and hosts a podcast of the same name.

Andrew Poelstra is the director of research at Blockstream, one of the foremost institutions that provide funding and support for the development of Bitcoin Core. He has been working as a cryptographer in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency space for the last six years, contributing to the improvement of scalability and the development of privacy technologies such as Confidential Assets, Bulletproofs, Taproot and Mimblewimble. Most recently, he has become known for his off-brand use of digital signatures in the form of “scriptless scripts.”

Rodolfo is the co-founder of Coinkite, a company that has been developing Bitcoin solutions since 2012. His work has been focusing on the hardware side and he has long been fascinated by the idea of creating a physical bitcoin solution that was actually trustless. Rodolfo is also an avid believer in online freedom of expression.

Alex Gladstein is the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He has also served as vice president of strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In his work, Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers and artists to promote free and open societies. Alex's writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world, including The Atlantic, BBC, Bloomberg, CNN, Fast Company, The Guardian, NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME and WIRED. He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, presented at the European Parliament and U.S. State Department and serves as a faculty member at Singularity University and as an advisor to Blockchain Capital. He currently lives in the San Francisco area, and you can reach him at alex@hrf.org. He co-authored "The Little Bitcoin Book" in 2019 and frequently speaks and writes about why Bitcoin matters for human rights.

"Rockstart Dev" is a serial startup CTO turned open-source developer in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He joined Zap to help launch LN_Strike. He is also a core member at BTCPay Server, as well as a Twitter thought leader.

Leigh Cuen is a tech reporter covering blockchain technology for publications such as Newsweek Japan, International Business Times and Racked. Her work has also been published by Teen Vogue, Al Jazeera English, The Jerusalem Post, Mic and Salon. Leigh does not hold value in any digital currency projects or startups. Her small cryptocurrency holdings are worth less than a pair of leather boots.

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A physics graduate from MIT, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital's international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies and equities, and helped design its automated OTC trading system. Sam left Jane Street Capital in late 2017 and started a quantitative hedge fund and liquidity provider called Alameda Research. After trading on dozens of exchanges and identifying multiple issues, he decided to launch FTX International in early 2019 and plans to launch FTX USA in Q2 2020.

As the co-founder and chief executive officer of BTC Inc, David Bailey is an industry leader and evangelist for the decentralized future. Since 2013, BTC Inc has grown to offer critical intelligence, brand-building expertise and technical incubation specialized for the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem, as well as industry-leading projects like Po.et. Under Bailey’s direction, the company now operates in multiple countries and has raised $35.5 million in aggregate across its businesses.

Bailey is also a member of the board for the Blockchain Education Network; serves on the board of directors for the publicly-traded digital publishing company Maven (MVEN); sits on the board of advisors for the University of Alabama; is a managing partner at 402 Digital Partners, one of the earliest crypto funds; and is an active angel investor for emerging blockchain-based projects.

Isabela has been part of the free software community and an activist for democratization of information since the late 1990s. She joined the Tor Project as project manager in 2015 after working as product manager for international and growth at Twitter for four years. Prior to Twitter, she worked with the Brazilian Federal Government on digital inclusion and other free software projects from the Ministry of Communications as well as the Presidential Palace of Brazil. Isabela became executive director of the Tor Project in 2018.  

wiz is a self-sovereign bitcoin miner and organizer of the Tokyo Bitcoin Hackers meetup. He also runs his own ISP and contributes to various Bitcoin-related projects such as Bisq, BTCPay Server, mempool.space and bitcoin-only.com

Slush is co-founder and CEO of SatoshiLabs — the creator of the world's first hardware wallet, Trezor. Marek has been in Bitcoin since 2010 and founded the world’s first bitcoin mining pool. He is well known to the cryptocurrency community all over the world as an industry visionary and innovator.