Speakers

Paul Brigner

Paul is Vice President of Strategic Alliances and member of the Board of Directors at Electric Coin Co., the creators of Zcash. He is also an Adjunct Faculty of FinTech at Georgetown University and the founder of PGP* (Pretty Good Policy) for Crypto, a monthly event series in Washington, DC focused on crypto policy. Previously, Brigner served as Head of the Coinbase Institute and has held senior roles at Verizon, the Internet Society, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Chamber of Digital Commerce. A U.S. Army veteran, Brigner holds both a Juris Doctor and an MBA from Georgetown University.

Aisling Connolly

Aisling holds degrees in math, economics, and computer science, and obtained her PhD from the ENS in Paris in 2019. She has spent the past years working extensively on threshold cryptography and confidential computing, in both trad-fi and web3. Beyond this, she also worked on scientific and technical direction, strategy, and the legal aspects of building and using privacy tech. Her current focus is on building and deploying a credibly neutral private computation network at TACEO.

Wei Dai

Wei Dai is a research partner at 1kx, where he focuses on research and investment in crypto infrastructure. Before joining 1kx, he was a research partner at Bain Capital Crypto and served as a technical advisor to numerous startups scaling blockchains and building products using privacy protocols. Prior to his investment career, he had published over a dozen academic papers on Cryptography and blockchains. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.

Casey G.

Casey G. is the CEO of zeroShadow. He launched his first company at age 11, inventing biodegradable golf tees to help save trees, earning two patents and national media attention. He later founded Parature, a CRM SaaS company that grew to over 120 employees and was sold to Microsoft. Recognized as a top entrepreneur, Casey has since launched several ventures, including Small Act Network, a software platform merging social media and philanthropy. He continues to consult on business development and emerging technologies, with recent projects focusing on retail, green energy initiatives, and Blockchain/Web3.

Remi Gai

Remi is the founder of Inco, a programmable privacy layer for Web3 that enables encrypted computation on public blockchains such as Ethereum, Base, and Solana. Previously, Remi was a web3 founder fellow at South Park Commons, a software engineer at Google and Microsoft, and a venture capitalist at 8 Decimal Capital.

Matthew Green

Matthew D. Green, an associate professor of computer science and a member of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, is a nationally recognized expert on applied cryptography and cryptographic engineering. His research includes techniques for privacy-enhanced and regulatory-compliant systems. Green is one of the creators of the Zerocash protocol, which is used by the Zcash cryptocurrency, and his work is used by a number of private currencies. He is the author of a popular blog, A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

Lucy Harley-McKeown

Lucy Harley-McKeown is an editor at Project Glitch and a freelance journalist based in London. She has written for publications such as WSJ, Wired, Insider, The Independent, Yahoo Finance, and Teen Vogue, among others. She was previously an editor at The Block and has since helped produce podcasts with Universal and Project Brazen. In a previous life, she worked in book publishing for Yale University Press and the BBC in London.

Amal Ibraymi

Amal Ibraymi is the legal counsel at Aztec Labs, where she supports the company’s legal efforts to advocate for privacy-enhancing technologies and decentralized finance. Before joining Aztec, Amal was a privacy associate at the New York and Paris offices of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, where she advised on data protection, cryptography, and global privacy compliance. Amal is dually trained in the U.S. and France, holding an LLM from NYU School of Law and a JD/MA from Sciences Po Paris.

Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin is an independent journalist and policy communications consultant. She primarily covers crypto policy and regulation and has recently been published in the Brogan Law newsletter, Decrypting DC, and Project Glitch. Veronica was previously on staff at Unchained, Forbes, Protocol, the San Francisco Examiner, and SF Weekly, covering crypto and fintech. She has been awarded the New York Financial Writers Association Claudia Deutsch award, the National Press Club Feldman Fellowship, the Anne O’Hare Memorial Scholarship, and San Francisco Press Club awards for Best Profile in a Daily Paper and News Story in a Non-Daily Paper. For more, visit veronicairwin.com.

Michael Lewellen

Michael Lewellen is a technology strategist and software architect with over 14 years of experience in cryptocurrency and blockchain systems. He currently serves as Head of Solutions Engineering at Turnkey, a secure key management platform empowering developers to build on-chain applications safely and efficiently.

Lewellen has advised Fortune 500 companies and contributed to the security councils of major blockchain protocols including Arbitrum and Compound. Beyond his technical work, he is deeply involved in policy and education. He serves as a Research Fellow at Coin Center, Board Director for the Texas Blockchain Council, and lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas.

His expertise spans blockchain security, governance, and public policy—recently extending to legal advocacy through a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice aimed at defending crypto innovation and users’ rights.

Ian Miers

Ian Miers is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on solving real-world security issues using cryptography. He is one of the founding scientists of Aleo, Bolt Labs, and Zcash, startups commercializing his work on privacy-preserving payments and smart contracts. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist.

Ross Schulman

Ross Schulman is the Senior Software and Policy Engineer at SpruceID, where he helps build privacy-preserving digital identity infrastructure. He combines technical development with public interest policy work to advance secure, user-centric identity systems. More details on Ross’s work will be available soon.

Michael Mosier

Michael co-founded Arktouros, a legal boutique dedicated to emergent technology and civil society, and is a partner at ex/ante, an early-stage venture fund supporting technology that advances personal agency and sovereignty. He has twice been the first in-house counsel at tech companies: Espresso Systems, building configurable private computation and decentralized sequencing, and Chainalysis blockchain analytics.

In public service, Michael served as Acting Director of the U.S. Treasury’s FinCEN; Associate Director of OFAC; a Deputy Chief in the Dept. of Justice’s Money Laundering Section; and a Director at the White House National Security Council.

Neha Narula

Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, where her research interests are in cryptocurrencies and distributed systems. She is also on the Board of Directors for Block and the Innovation Advisory Council for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Neha has given a TED talk on the future of money and was named to WIRED's list of 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology. She received her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2015, where she published work on fast, scalable databases and before that was a senior software engineer at Google.

Mike Orcutt

Mike Orcutt is an editor at Project Glitch and a career science and technology journalist with a track record of building successful media products. He was MIT Technology Review’s first reporter focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. While at Tech Review, he created and produced Chain Letter, a weekly newsletter focused on the evolution of blockchain technology. Mike then worked as a senior editor at The Block, a crypto media publication, where he focused on paywalled news products.

Since going freelance to focus on building Project Glitch, Mike’s bylines have appeared at MIT Technology Review, Wired, The Boston Globe, and Quanta Magazine. He has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Whitman College.

Michael Reilly

Michael Reilly is an editor at Project Glitch, focusing on elevating stories at the intersection of technology, privacy, and policy. He has spent his career shaping editorial strategy and building teams that translate complex technical shifts for a broad audience. Additional biographical details will be shared soon.

Hester Peirce

Hester M. Peirce was appointed by President Donald J. Trump to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and was sworn in on January 11, 2018.

Prior to joining the SEC, Commissioner Peirce conducted research on the regulation of financial markets at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She was a Senior Counsel on the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, where she advised Ranking Member Richard Shelby and other members of the Committee on securities issues. Commissioner Peirce served as counsel to SEC Commissioner Paul S. Atkins. She also worked as a Staff Attorney in the SEC’s Division of Investment Management. Commissioner Peirce was an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) and clerked for Judge Roger Andewelt on the Court of Federal Claims.

Commissioner Peirce earned her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Case Western Reserve University and her JD from Yale Law School.

Lizandro (Laz) Pieper

Lizandro (Laz) Pieper serves as the Research Director at DeFi Education Fund (DEF), where he leads the organization’s efforts to conduct research and write reports related to DeFi and blockchain technology. Laz's research is largely focused on U.S. national security laws, as well as financial privacy and inclusion. Laz holds a B.A. in Political Science with a concentration in U.S. Law and Government, as well as minors in both Legal Studies and Criminology from Colorado State University, and is currently obtaining a B.S. in Applied Computer Science at the University of Colorado.

Nikhil Raghuveera

Nikhil Raghuveera is Co-Founder and CEO of Predicate, a network built to simplify transaction prerequisites. Nikhil is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center, a leading think tank focused on global economic policy.

Prior to Predicate, Nikhil was Head of Strategy & Innovation at the Celo Foundation. He also worked in management consulting, nonprofit management and economic consulting at organizations including the Boston Consulting Group, the Equal Justice Initiative, and Cornerstone Research. Nikhil graduated with an MBA from The Wharton School and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Samczsun

Samczsun is the founder of the Security Alliance and works with leading technologists and researchers to secure the future of crypto. He’s also a security advisor for Paradigm. Previously, Sam was a security engineer at Trail of Bits, where he worked on improving security tooling for developers and helped clients write safer code.

Arnaud Schenk

Arnaud Schenk is a co-founder of Aztec. Aztec's goal is to build powerful and flexible cryptography to help developers overcome blockchain's main barrier to real world use: enforced transparency. Aztec builds Noir, a universal Rust-like programming language built for zero-knowledge proofs, and the Aztec network, an Ethereum layer 2 with native support for fully programmable encrypted state. Arnaud is currently the Executive Director of the Aztec Foundation, and serves on its board.

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is editor-in-chief of Use Case, a print magazine debuting in October 2025. He also programs many of the crypto industry’s top conferences. Until July 2022, Seward served as the deputy editor-in-chief of CoinDesk, leading the newsroom in its award-winning coverage. Before crypto, he worked as a business reporter in the NPR system and earned a graduate degree from the Columbia Journalism School.

Abhi Shelat

Abhi Shelat graduated from Harvard in 1997 and then joined a startup company in the Bay area for a few years. Then he completed a PhD at MIT. His PhD thesis, supervised by Silvio Micali, focused on non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Then he worked at the Zurich IBM Research Lab. In Fall 2007, he joined the faculty in the computer science department at the University of Virginia, and in 2013 was promoted to Associate Professor. In 2016, he moved to Northeastern University and was promoted to full Professor. He has received a small number of awards, including most notably the NSF Career award, the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award, a University of Virginia Professor of the Year award by the student ACM chapter.

Justin Thaler

Justin Thaler is Research Partner at a16z and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His research interests include verifiable computing, complexity theory, and algorithms for massive data sets. In 2011, he produced the first implementation of a general-purpose interactive proof system. He is the author of a comprehensive survey on SNARKs titled “Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge,” and a co-creator of Apache DataSketches, an open-source library of production-quality streaming algorithms. Before joining a16z crypto and Georgetown, Justin was a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs. Before that he completed his PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University.

Peter Van Valkenburgh

Peter Van Valkenburgh is the Executive Director of Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Previously, he was a founding board member of the Zcash Foundation, a non-profit charity dedicated to building financial privacy infrastructure for the public good, and an advisor to StarkWare, a company developing trust-minimized scaling solutions using zero-knowledge proof cryptography.

Due to his expertise in these subjects, he has been invited to testify before the US Congress on six different occasions. He testified before the Senate Banking Committee and was the first witness before that body to offer a detailed explanation of Bitcoin and its financial regulatory implications. He has also testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, the Financial Services and Energy and Commerce Committees of the House of Representatives.

Ying Tong

Ying Tong is an applied cryptographer working on privacy for coordination and purpose limitation. She is interested in real-world applications and better methods for threat modeling and inclusive design. She has worked on financial privacy, privacy-preserving digital identity, and protocols for zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation. She is also a contributor to the ZKProof Standards effort to standardize generic zk-SNARKs.