Previous Speakers

Dov Falic
BlockBar
co-founder and CEO

Dov Falic, co-founder and CEO of BlockBar, was born in Miami, Florida and grew up in Panama City, Panama. Dov has been immersed in the luxury and retail industry from a young age. Having started in the warehouse ten years ago, Dov went on to serve as the Global Spirits Director and Executive Vice President of the LATAM division. As part of that role, Dov helped oversee the development of Paneco, the largest e-commerce delivery platform in Singapore and Israel, creating one of the largest liquor distribution channels in LATAM, and running the spirits and wine purchasing for DFA. In partnership with his cousin Samuel, in October 2021, and at the age of 29 Dov founded BlockBar, the first global direct-to-consumer NFT marketplace for wine and spirits.

Samuel Falic
BlockBar
co-founder and COO

Samuel Falic, who is the co-founder and COO of BlockBar, Inc, was born and raised in Miami, Florida. As part of the next generation of the Falic Group, owners of the largest duty-free operation in the Western Hemisphere, Samuel found interest in both finance and law. After completing his bachelor’s degree in Accounting at University of Miami, Samuel continued his education at Cardozo School of Law in New York, completing his J.D. Following that, Samuel went on to join Duty Free Americas, and his background in finance and law allowed him to pursue a variety of positions within the company. After initially working in the legal department, he transitioned into the role of Director of Business Development.

Michael Crosbie
poundtoken.io
Chief Business Officer

Michael Crosbie, Chief Business Officer at the company’s headquarters in Douglas, Isle of Man, has 17 years of experience leading international teams in travel, hospitality, marketing, payments and fin-tech. From 2004-to 2016 Michael led several successful online businesses in the travel industry in France. Moving to the Isle of Man in 2016 to take up a founding role in a marketing business Michael later obtained MasterCard Programme Manager status in 2019. Michael is highly adaptable and is passionate about building strong start-up teams to achieve business objectives.

Alan Sun
poundtoken.io
Chief Executive Officer

Alan has more than 15 years of experience in marketing and operations. He started his career as a consultant with BraiNet Group and was later promoted as a partner of the internet business unit where he built his expertise in business strategies, operation, and corporate governance. In 2011, Alan joined Peak Globe Investment leading investment and post-investment management in online entertainment and FinTech businesses.Since 2017, Alan has been actively involved in investing and managing crypto exchanges across Asia, and in 2018, joined Huobi Group as VP for their overseas operation in Japan and USA.

Chris Aruliah
BCB Group
Chief Commercial Officer

Chris is an industry veteran, passionate about financial innovation, and was previously at Bitstamp, where he held the role of Head of Business Development and was responsible for helping financial institutions enter the crypto market and focused on identifying opportunities for integrating crypto with traditional finance. Prior to that, he launched the open banking payments platform, Token, and built the pipeline for the business in Europe. The major news in 2021 was that BCB bought a private bank in Hamburg, Germany – Sutor Bank – therefore adding a fully licensed bank to the group to enable BCB Group to service clients in the EU and to drive growth across its business lines. BCB Group is the global leading provider of business accounts and trading services for the digital asset economy, regulated in the UK and Switzerland. They provide accounts and payments processing for the pillars of the industry including Bitstamp, FTX, Crypto.com, Fireblocks, Galaxy, Gemini, Huobi and Kraken in dozens of fiat and cryptocurrencies.

Daniel Masters
CoinShares Group
Executive Chairman

Daniel Masters is Executive Chairman of the CoinShares Group. Mr. Masters also co-founded Global Advisors, which notably launched GABI, a ﬁrst-of-its-kind, Jersey-based, actively managed bitcoin investment strategy in 2014. Prior to GABI, Global Advisors was previously responsible for the Global Advisors Commodity Investment Fund and the Global Advisors Commodity Systematic Fund.

Mr. Masters began his career in Oil and Energy trading for Shell Oil, Solomon, and prior to co-founding Global Advisors in 1999, served as Global Head of Energy and Trading Business at Morgan Guaranty Trust Company (“MGT”) in New York (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.). Mr. Masters has a BSc in Physics from Exeter University, a Masters in Management Science and Operational Research from Imperial College, and Graduate Certiﬁcation in Applied Statistics from Penn State University.

Lord Holmes of Richmond, Christopher Holmes

Chris is a passionate advocate for the potential of technology and the benefits of diversity and inclusion.
He is a member of the influential House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology and has previously co-authored House of Lords Select Committee Reports on: Democracy and Digital Technologies [2020], Intergenerational Fairness [2019], Artificial Intelligence [2018], Financial Exclusion [2017], Social Mobility [2016] and Digital Skills [2015]
He is co-chair of Parliamentary Groups on Fintech, AI, Blockchain, Assistive Technology and the 4^th Industrial Revolution and has published a report; “Distributed Ledger Technologies for Public Good: leadership, collaboration and innovation” calling on the Government to look at the challenges and opportunities of this technology for improving public services. A progress update was published in November 2018.
An ex-Paralympic swimmer, Chris won nine gold, five silvers and one bronze medal across four Games, including a record haul of six golds at Barcelona 1992.

Steven Rees Davies
Carey Olsen
Partner

Steven’s practice covers a broad spectrum of corporate law with specific depth and experience in corporate governance, finance, securities, M&A and restructuring. A recognised specialist in the fintech and digital asset sector, Steven worked with the Bermuda government in the introduction and development of its digital asset legal and regulatory regime, and represents a significant number of digital asset companies headquartered, or with operations, in Bermuda. He also has particular expertise in the wider technology, telecommunications and energy sectors.

Steven represents clients on a wide variety of local and cross-jurisdictional corporate and regulatory transactions and restructurings as well as public offerings, private placements and listings on the Bermuda, New York and London stock exchanges. He also advises on complex multinational joint ventures and private equity projects.

Anoosh Arevshatian
Zodia Custody
Chief Risk Officer

Anoosh is the Chief Risk Officer at Zodia Custody and is a pragmatic risk authority with expertise in process risks, enterprise risk management, Frameworks, and systems. Her experiences vary from the public sector to the private sector, spanning multiple continents. Her career started in the public sector at a German NGO in Zimbabwe. She left Zimbabwe to join Citibank in Johannesburg within Treasury & Trade Solutions and later moved to Belfast to set up the Enterprise Risk Management Team. Following two years in Northern Ireland, she moved to London as the Governance Risk & Compliance Methodology Deputy Head. During the pandemic, she decided to take on a new challenge within digital assets at Zodia Custody.

Gerry Afentakis
Zodia Custody
Head of European and MENA Sales

Gerry Afentakis is the Head of European and MENA Sales at Zodia Custody, with over 15 years of experience in the financial services sector. Prior to joining Zodia Custody, he was the head of asset and wealth management for Europe at Matrixport. Afentakis formerly served as executive director and head of strategic development at the financial global credit manager EFA Group.

Fluent in English, French, German, Greek, and proficient in Mandarin, his linguistic versatility enables seamless international collaborations. Afentakis continues to lead with distinction, leveraging his multilingual skills, market acumen, and strategic insight to drive the company’s success in a rapidly evolving digital asset landscape.

Philipp Pieper
Swarm
Co-founder

Philipp Pieper is a co-founder of Swarm as well as the Swarm Network, an open-source project and DAO. Philipp also co-founded Proximic (acquired by comScore), Loop Media and Bitadel Crypto Trading. Philipp has been engaged in decentralised technologies and crypto-asset trading since 2015. He is also a startup investor and mentor at Singularity University and StartX. He is a member of the AIMA blockchain committee and Digital Currency Trade Association (DCTA).

Jonas Gantenbein
Bank Frick & Co. AG
Head of Digital Assets

Bachelors and Masters in Economics/Business Admin in Liechtenstein and Switerzland, Various Positions in financial sector in Liechtenstein between the years 2009 and now and actively engaged with the DLT Space since 2017. With Bank Frick since 2019, mainly tasked with Development of Innovative (DLT) Solutions and Products and Business Development. Since 2023 I’m heading the newly formed Digital Assets Department.

Townsend Lansing
Coinshares
Head of Product

Talked about the Valkyrie ETF company buyout deal following the successful lawsuit victory from Grayscale to allow Spot Bitcoin ETF’s. With a long career in finance that spans Bank of America in New Product Development; a decade in the ETF market with ETF Securities and a decade in the crypto native space he will give us insights on his vision and how they were ready for the ETF market in the USA.

ETF Securities worked with the World Gold Council on the development of the first gold ETF in 2003 and collaborated on the listing of Gold Bullion Securities on the London Stock Exchange in March 2004.In 2003, the company listed the first physically-backed gold exchange-traded commodity (ETC) on the Australian Stock Exchange.