Keynotes
Nico Andreoulis (Chainlink)
Nicolas Andreoulis is an economist at Chainlink Labs, where he researches market-design and MEV-related questions for Smart Value Recapture (SVR). Active in crypto since 2019, he co-founded Sperax USD—the first Arbitrum-native stablecoin—designing its collateral-efficient architecture and guiding its early growth to $30 million TVL. After Sperax, Nicolas worked at Harvard Business School as a Research Associate under Prof. Marco Di Maggio, building novel datasets on cryptocurrency market crises and microstructure. Earlier, he was a senior researcher at Princeton University under Prof. Atif Mian and a pre-doctoral fellow at the London School of Economics under Prof. Paul De Grauwe, focusing on macro-finance research. He holds an MSc in Economics from UCL.
Talk Title: The biggest heist in history: unpacking the $15bn Bybit hack
Bio: As one of the world’s leading journalists covering organised crime and tech, Geoff White has spent decades investigating the shadowy forces of fraudsters, hackers and money launderers. His work’s been featured by BBC News, Audible, Sky News, The Sunday Times and many more.
His latest book, Rinsed, reveals technology’s impact on the world of money laundering. It springs from his work on the hit podcast and book The Lazarus Heist, which explored North Korea’s computer hacking campaign.
Geoff White
Talk Title: A Factor Model for Digital Assets — Understanding Return Drivers
Bio: Cristian is a Senior Product Manager at CF Benchmarks, the leading provider of digital asset indices. He leads initiatives at the intersection of quantitative research and index design, with a focus on systematic risk factors and theme-based indices. Prior to CF Benchmarks, he worked as a Quantitative Researcher at sentiment data provider RavenPack, where he specialized in sentiment-based investment strategies across asset classes. Cristian holds an MSc in Quantitative Finance from the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Cristian Isac (CF Benchmarks)
Talk Title: DeFi in 2034
Bio: As a practitioner, Dan Liebau is the Founder of Lightbulb Capital in Hong Kong and Singapore. Previously, he was the CIO of the Modular Blockchain Fund at Modular Asset Management and the COO of HSBC Securities in Singapore. As an academic, Dan is an Affiliate Faculty Member at Singapore Management University where he teaches courses on Blockchain & Digital Assets, and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). He is also a Lecturer in ESSEC’s top-ranked Master in Finance program. Previously he was a visiting professor at IE business school, where he received the teaching excellence award. Dan’s research work investigates blockchain in the financial markets context, and has been published by various academic journals by Springer and MIT Press. He is also the founding Associate Editor-in-Chief of the World Scientific Annual Review of Fintech journal. Dan is completing his PhD in Finance at Erasmus University, and hold Master degrees in Innovation (SMU) and Finance (IE).
Daniel Liebau (Lightbulb Capital)
Talk title: Ethereum Staking Deep Dive: Trust Assumptions and the Future of Institutional Investing
Bio: Julia Schmidt is a Senior Smart Contract Engineer at Alluvial, where she builds institutional-grade liquid staking solutions on Ethereum and Solana. Previously, she worked at Trufin Labs developing liquid staking protocols for blockchains including Polygon, Aptos, and NEAR. She holds a PhD in Computational Materials Chemistry and an MSc in Computer Science from Imperial College London. Her research on chiral organic semiconductors has been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Julia Schmidt (Alluvial)
Talk title: Lock bitcoins to secure your chain
Bio: Orfeas is currently a research associate at Imperial College London. He obtained his PhD in Cryptography and Blockchains at the University of Edinburgh in 2021, under the supervision of Aggelos Kiayias. He has worked on building and analyzing decentralized applications on blockchains, layer-2 protocols, payment channels, and voting solutions, all through formal cryptographic methods. Among others, he has formally analyzed the security of the Lightning Network and created a novel virtual payment channel construction. He is knowledgeable in software engineering and secure architecture. His interests further include formal verification, incentive analysis, and provable security.
Orfeas Thyfronitis Litos (Common Prefix)
Talk title: Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network
Bio: Lefteris is a Research Scientist at Mysten Labs working on Blockchains, Applied Cryptography and Distributed Computing. He is interested in increasing the digital trust of online information and processes, especially those that impact the physical world. He is working on building a scalable and robust infrastructure for the future decentralised internet focusing on scalable blockchain systems, bias-resistant decentralised randomness generation, secure software update dispersion and novel applications of threshold cryptography and distributed consensus.
Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (Mysten Labs)