SALT Talks

Rich Caputo is the Chief Executive Partner of The Jordan Company, a New York-based private equity firm focused on investments in middle-market companies across a range of industries. Mr. Caputo serves as Chairman of the Firm's Partnership Board and Executive Committee and is a director of a number of the Firm's portfolio companies. Rich Caputo details his background, the thirty year evolut...

Dr. P. Jillian Bethel is CEO of OKX for the Bahamas and a lifelong champion of the Bahamian crypto community. Jillian is an entrepreneur and former obstetrician-gynecologist who became interested in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies while leading international health management and medical research teams. In 2018, Jillian returned to the Bahamas to apply blockchain initiatives to grow...

Ben Sparango is the Head of Business Development at Solana Labs, a leading Layer-1 blockchain protocol, where he focuses on DeFi payments, gaming, NFTs and DAOs. Prior to Solana, Sparango was an investment analyst at Multicoin Capital, a multi-strategy crypto fund. Sparango tells his journey to crypto and Solana that includes an impactful panel at our 2016 SALT event in Las Vegas. He discusses Sol...

Staci Warden is the CEO of the Algorand Foundation, an organization dedicated to enabling an inclusive, decentralized, and borderless global economy - at scale - based on the Algorand blockchain technology, a leading layer-1 blockchain. Before, she spent a career in traditional finance (TradFI) with stops at Milken Institute, JPMorgan, Nasdaq, U.S. Treasury Department, the Center for Global Develo...

Gary Mendell is the founder and CEO of Shatterproof, a national nonprofit dedicated to reversing the addiction crisis in the United States. After losing his son Brian to addiction in 2011, Gary founded Shatterproof to spare other families the tragedy his had suffered. Mendell recounts the tragedy of his son’s passing and details the lessons learned that led to the creation of the non-profit Shatte...

Troy Tsui is the CEO of Swim Protocol - a DeFi Protocol bridging the multichain landscape with user adoption and protocol integration in mind. He was previously a trader at Alameda Research since 2018. Prior to his time at Alameda, Troy was a trader on SIG’s Fixed Income desk, where he designed their municipal bond algorithmic strategy. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Engineering Ma...

Alan Murray, CEO of Fortune Media, authored his latest book, Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business. Murray also writes a closely read daily newsletter, the Fortune CEO Daily. This follows a long media career that's included leadership positions at Pew Research Center and the Wall Street Journal.  Murray discusses his journey to becoming CEO of Fortune magazine, his visi...

Dr. Derar Islim is the COO at Genesis Trading, a digital currency prime broker. He is responsible for managing strategic initiatives, integrating new services, coordinating daily business operations, and executing on Genesis’s global vision to build the world’s preeminent prime brokerage in the digital currency ecosystem. Dr. Islim oversees custody, risk, operations, strategy, product and people d...

Kristin Smith is the Executive Director of the Blockchain Association, the Washington DC-based trade association representing more than 80 of the industry’s leading companies. Smith serves as a liaison between policymakers and the cryptocurrency industry to assist in the creation of legislation and regulation that promotes the growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem in the U.S. Kristen Smith discus...

George Melika is the Co-Founder and CEO of sFOX, a cryptocurrency prime brokerage backed by Social+Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator. He is a fintech expert with over 20 years of software development experience building algorithmic, proprietary, and cryptocurrency trading platforms. Melika details his background as an engineer and how it led to his career in Bitcoin and crypto. He explain...

Dan Gunsberg is the co-founder and CEO of Hxro. He's also the co-founder of Hxro Network, a decentralized derivatives protocol built on top of the Solana blockchain. He also serves as the director of the Hxro Foundation. Prior to Hxro, Gunsberg served as the COO of DV Trading, a derivatives-focused principal trading firm. Gunsberg details how he first came to understand and believe in Bitcoin....

Asen Kostadinov is the Chief Strategy Officer at Copper, cryptocurrency custody firm. He joined the company from MMC Ventures where he led the blockchain/crypto investment portfolio and also led the fund’s research department. Previously, he spent four years as an equity research analyst at Barclays, covering European media and video and internet gaming. Initially, he worked in the aerospace indus...

Robin Wigglesworth is the FT’s global finance correspondent, based in Oslo, Norway. He focuses on the biggest trends reshaping markets, investing and finance more broadly across the world, with a particular focus on technological disruption and quantitative investing, and writing longer-form features, analyses, profiles and columns. He authored the recently published Trillions: How a Band of Wall...

Orlando Bravo is a Puerto Rican billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder and managing partner of Thoma Bravo, a private equity investment firm that specializes in software and technology-enabled services sectors. The 2019 Forbes 400 listed Bravo as the first Puerto Rican-born billionaire. Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo. He led Thoma Bravo’s early entry into sof...

PlanB @100trillionUSD is a former institutional investor with 25 years of experiences in financial markets and has a legal and quantitative finance background. By tapping to both the S2F and the logarithmic regression, PlanB suggested that the primary cryptocurrency will reach $100k by the end of 2023. PlanB, the anonymous Twitter pseudonym created the Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow (S2F) model where he us...

Spencer Jakab, the Editor of the Heard on the Street column in The Wall Street Journal, has written a splendidly entertaining account of the meme stock craze: “The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors.” During one crazy week in January 2021, a motley crew of retail traders on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets forum had seemingly done the impossible—they had brought...

Dr. Mark Epstein is an American author and psychotherapist who integrates Shakyamuni Buddha's teachings with Sigmund Freud's approaches to trauma. He often writes about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy. In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year’s worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist bac...

Ben Nelson is the Founder of Minerva, and a visionary with a passion to reinvent higher education. Prior to Minerva, Nelson spent more than 10 years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from startup to the world’s largest personal publishing service. With over 42 million transactions across 22 countries, nearly five times greater than its closest competitor, Snapfish is among the top e-c...

Raghu is the Co-founder and CEO of FalconX, one of the largest and fastest growing digital asset brokerages. Raghu believes most of world's value will be tokenized in the next 5 to 7 years, and Crypto is the first usecase of that. Fiat is getting tokenized with Stablecoins and culture + art with NFTs. Next up, equities. Tokenization will make financial services accessible to the 3+ billion use...

Steve is the CEO of Algorand and responsible for overall business vision and strategy. Algorand is a blockchain cryptocurrency protocol that aims to be scalable. The Algorand platform supports smart contracts, and its consensus algorithm is based on proof of stake and a Byzantine agreement protocol. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO. —————————————————————— Watch this video on You...

Afsaneh Beschloss discusses her distinguished career in finance, including her roles as founder and CEO of RockCreek, a leading global investment firm, her time as treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank, and as managing director and partner at the Carlyle Group. Overall, prices climbed 6.8% year-over-year, the largest increase since June 1982, and rose 0.8% over the past month. H...

Avik Roy is an Editor at Forbes and the President of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. In his recent article "Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning" Avok writes "It's becoming clear that Bitcoin is not merely a passing fad, but a significant innovation with potentially serious implications for the future of investment and global finance. To understand those implicat...

Joshua Frank is the co-founder and CEO of The Tie, a crypto-focused data company that analyzes social media and news sources to create sentiment analysis. Prior to co-founding The Tie, Frank worked at SS&C Technologies where he helped develop solutions for custodians, brokers and asset managers. As he became more interested in the digital asset space, Frank continued to run into what he descri...

Jeremy Allaire is Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Circle, a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments and commerce. Founded in 2013, Circle is the pioneer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully-reserved, and regulated dollar stablecoin. Governed by the Centre Consortium, led by Circle and Co...

Bitcoin for Billions: Building the Lightning Network with Elizabeth Stark, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Lightning Labs. Moderated by Brett Messing, Partner, President & Chief Operating Officer, SkyBridge. ——————————————————————  Watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SALTTube/videos For podcast transcripts and show notes, visit https://salt.org/salt-ny-library SALT...