BITCOIN AND RADICAL INNOVATION

Dr. Wolf von Laer is the chief executive officer of Students For Liberty (SFL). SFL is a non-profit organization of more than 80 people, that trains and supports pro-liberty students in the United States and around the world. Dr. Wolf von Laer received his Bachelor of Arts at Erfurt University, his Master’s degree at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and his PhD in Political Economy at King’s College London.

Dr. Wolf lived and studied in the US, Turkey, Spain, Germany, the UK, Sweden, and Argentina. He has published several book chapters, a book about central banking, and a peer-reviewed journal article. Dr. Wolf has appeared in The Wallstreet Journal, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Huffington Post, Bitcoin Magazine, Coindesk, and CSPAN. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Samson Mow is currently the CEO of JAN3, a bitcoin technology company focused on accelerating hyperbitcoinization. He has procured bitcoin adoption for governments and infrastructure development projects. In 2021 he participated in the Latin American Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference in El Salvador, becoming an adviser to President Nayib Bukele, who seeks to promote the use of bitcoin in his country.

As one of the top executives in the bitcoin ecosystem, his experience ranges from running one of the largest exchanges and mining pools —when he was the COO of BCC–, to guiding the development and implementation of bitcoin infrastructure as —CSO of Blockstream—.

Natalie Brunell is a podcast host, educator and media commentator in the bitcoin space. Her popular shows, Coin Stories Podcast and Hard Money, feature interviews with Bitcoin thought leaders and cover headlines related to finance and economic issues facing society. Coin Stories is the top woman- hosted bitcoin education podcast in the world. Previously, Natalie was an award-winning TV journalist and investigative reporter. For more than 10 years she covered in- depth local and national news topics and holds a regional news Emmy for breaking news coverage as well as multiple Emmy nominations for investigative news stories. Natalie was recently an adjunct professor of Advanced Communication and Visual Storytelling at the University of Southern California. She holds a Master’s of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University.

Julia Shumishyna is the COO at Ikonia, a company that develops and drives the adoption of decentralized technologies across variety of sectors. Julia has been instrumental in the operations at Forza X, handling financials, along with risk and compliance, and human resources across industries such as football and blockchain.

Committed to catalysing change, she works on products and technologies that can redefine community building and fortify their strength. Forza Football has collaborated with Arsenal, Olympique Lyonnais, Tigres UANL, Kerala Blasters FC, Galatasaray, Club Atlético River Plate and Tijuana Xolos. At IKONIA, an NFT incubator, she is in charge of financial and business operations.

Julia holds a Bachelor of Arts from Kyiv National University of Economics with a major in International Economy, and another one from the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt in International Accounting and Finance. She is a visual co- curator at Biorhythm, a cultural platform that explores non- verbal environmental communication.

Eli Dourado is a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. His work focuses on identifying and eliminating the barriers to the hard technology innovations needed to drive large increases in economic growth. He has worked on projects related with geotermal energy, permitting, aviation, space, and cryptocurrency. He has published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy.

Prior to joining the CGO, Eli was the first policy hire at a supersonic aviation startup. He was a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its technology policy program. He received a PhD in economics from George Mason University and a BA in economics and political science from Furman University.

Magatte Wade is a businesswoman and advocate for African dignity and prosperity. She is the director of the Atlas Network's Center for African Prosperity and member of the Board of Directors of Conscious Capitalism Inc. She is on the Advisory Board of the Whole Planet Foundation, Whole Foods Market.

She has been named one of the 20 most powerful young women in Africa by Forbes; Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum in Davos and winner of the Leading Woman in Wellness in the Global Wellness Summit. In 2014 she was featured on the cover of Forbes Afrique, named the person in French-speaking Africa who has the greatest positive impact on the future.

She has written for The Guardian, HuffingtonPost.com, Barron's and has been reviewed in The New York Times. She has spoken at the UN, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Aspen Institute, TED, Conscious Capitalism as well as universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, and the Wharton School of Business. She is the creator of different brands inspired by African traditions such as SkinIsSkin.com.

Pedro López Sela is managing partner of FrissOn Capital, the Deep Tech Fund of Latin America, and Team Principal of ExO Builder, the most diverse technological entrepreneurship ecosystem in the world. He has co-founded more than 10 companies and trained more than 5,000 people in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. He is the author of bestsellers on innovation, business and entrepreneurship.

He is an OpenExO ambassador, an instructor for Lego Serious Play and B Corp, and has been a judge and mentor at several recognized Innovation and Entrepreneurship Awards. He is a Member of the Council of the National Institute of Electricity and Clean Energies, Santander X and Red OTT México, among others. In 2018 he was recognized by the British Council as an Active Citizen. He is the author of EBELI (Evidence Based Entrepreneurship & Lean Innovation), a step-by-step guide to developing entrepreneurship projects.

Lyall Swim is the chief innovation officer at Atlas Network. In his role, Lyall leads the organization’s team and systems development as Atlas Network continues to grow in size, reach, and impact. For the past 17 years, he has engaged with more than 20,000 adult learners in dozens of organizations around the world. His focus has been to build increased leadership and operational capacity and enable organizations to successfully navigate various forms of change. He is a sought after speaker on ethics, leadership, new ideas adoption, and education innovation.

As the director of operations for Sutherland Institute, Lyall helped lead a redesign of the organization that enabled the Institute to better leverage the strengths of each staff member and increase the profile and influence of the Institute in Utah. Lyall holds a Doctorate of Education with an emphasis in organization leadership from Pepperdine University. He also holds a bachelor's in Communications and an M.B.A. from Brigham Young University.

His research and writing on leadership, ethics, education reform, adult learning, and innovation adoption have been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals and various local and national outlets. Above all, Lyall enjoys spending quality time with his wife and three teenage children.

Sophie von Laer, the CEO of Strategic Maverick, fearlessly unlocks the full potential of leadership within and beyond the bitcoin ecosystem. With a Ph.D. in organizational leadership, multiple engineering degrees, and a track record of overseeing large engineering teams with a $1.6B budget, Sophie embodies a unique blend of practical expertise and theoretical acumen. Sophie and her team reshape management systems and cultivate transformative cultures within organizations through cutting-edge leadership training and data-driven consulting.

Ben Nelson is the founder of Minerva, America's most innovative, selective, and effective university, whose goal is to foster critical and creative thinking through a renewed evidence-based approach to learning. It also developed the Minerva Project model, with which it shares its vision with other institutions. Previously, Ben Nelson was part of Snapfish, which became one of the largest photo printing companies in the world. In 2005, Nelson led its sale to Hewlett Packard for $300 million. He was president and director of Community Ventures, a network of local brand portals in the United States.

Ben Nelson was born in Haifa, Israel in 1975. He studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he became interested in redesigning higher education. He is the author of the book Building the International University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education.

Patrik Arnesson is the founder of IKONIA which aims to make NFTs/Smart contracts user friendly. He believes that the biggest challenge for NFTs is to make it easy to understand in order for it to become mainstream. Previously he founded Forza Football with more than 15M downloads and Forza FC which is a whitelabel platform for football teams working with clubs like Arsenal and Southampton. Currently he’s running a stealth startup within the area of content creators.

Participant in the conversation on “Blockchain and its uses to popularize soccer and sports in Mexico and Latin America.”

Brendan is a founder of Andromeda Protocol and aOS, the first multi-blockchain operating system that makes Web3 easier, better, and faster. He is an experienced CTO and entrepreneur across multiple industries. He is a digital transformation expert with deployed solutions using the converged stack of emerging cryptographic platforms, primitives, smart contracts, artificial intelligence, eCommerce, mobile, and extended reality technologies. He has successfully led and sourced technology teams from all over the world.

With Panini, the largest collectible company in the world, Brendan created the first officially licensed NFT trading cards for the FIFA World Cup, English Premier League, NFL, NBA and other globally recognized brands. The mobile free-to-play digital trading card apps, Dunk, Blitz and FIFA Trader acquired millions of users in seven languages. The FIFA mini-app embedded in Tencent Sports & News App during the 2018 FIFA World Cup achieved maximum downloads of 40,000 per minute with social media access to WeChat’s 800 million daily active users.

Brendan started his technology career as an early member of the 3rd largest credit card company in America. He founded a national mail-order pharmacy with patients in all fifty states and US Territories. Brendan is on the Advisory Board for PicPocket Inc. a technology company with seminal patents in geofence-based content aggregation and drone technologies.

Guillermo Peña is a political scientist and economist focused on economic development through the private sector. He is currently the director of Institutional Development at the Universidad de la Libertad. He is also president of the Eléutera Foundation in Honduras, founded in 2013, which analyzes the upward social mobility, solutions for migration, educational modernization, reform and opening of the electricity market, electronic government, and bureaucratic simplification.

In the private sector, he is president of Orchid Properties, a special economic zone development and development company, and is the managing partner of Blackbeard Media Group, a branding and strategy firm. He has also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Free Zones of the Americas (AZFA), the National Association of Industrialists (ANDI, Honduras), and as vice president of the Honduran Electric System Operator (ODS).

Petar Čekerevac leads the Project on Decentralized Technology at Atlas Network. Prior to his work with Atlas he helped build Libertarian Club - Libek, a well known think tank in Serbia, and Talas.rs, a pro-liberty media outlet covering Serbia and the Balkans. Petar has also worked in the software business. His main interests are radical innovation, including bitcoin, decentralized finance, privacy technology, lifespan and healthspan extension, and the intersection of technology, science, and human freedom. He has a BA in International Affairs, and a MA in Peace Studies.

Ricardo Obert Martínez is general director of the Festival de las Ideas and general director of the Sistema Nacional Esperanza Azteca. He is chairman of the Board of Grupo Mardupol. He has more than thirty years of experience in the real estate and industrial sector. His interest in the dissemination of culture, ideas and the arts have led him to collaborate in multiple foundations and participate as a host on radio and television.

Ricardo Obert studied at the Escuela Libre de Derecho, the Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresas (IPADE) and at Harvard University.

Roberto Salinas León is the director of the Center for Latin America at Atlas Network. He is president of the Alamos Alliance, a renowned economic colloquium that is held annually in Álamos, Sonora. He was a representative of The Economist Conferences in Mexico, from 1997 to 2010.

He has published more than 2,000 articles in media such as El Economista, Nexos, The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and several others. He has been an economic commentator for the newscast Hechos on TV Azteca, as well as on Radio Red and Radio Fórmula, in Mexico. He is an occasional commentator on CNN Latin America, Reuters, BBC, and currently he is a analyst on Carlos Mota’s program, Es Negocio, on ADN40.

He has given more than 1,000 conferences in various regions of the world, across four continents. He has testified before the United States House of Representatives on free trade and economic policy in Mexico. He is adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington DC, and senior debate fellow of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

He has taught courses on Political Economy and Liberal Thought at the Escuela Libre de Derecho, UNAM, ITAM, and the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala. He studied Political Economy, History, and Philosophy, and earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Political Theory from the Purdue University, Indiana. He was recognized by Líderes Mexicanos magazine.

Jorge Carlos Díaz Cuervo has a Degree in Economics from the University of Southwestern, in Texas, United States. He has a Master’s in International Management from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), and a Master’s in Management of Social Security Systems from the University of Alcalá, Spain. He holds a PhD in Law from the Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and won the 2015 Marcos Kaplan Award for the best doctoral thesis in Law and Social Sciences from UNAM.

He has held various positions in the Federal Public Administration; between 2006 and 2009 he was deputy and coordinator of the Social Democratic Parliamentary Coalition in the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District (IV Legislature).

He is a member of the Technical Directorate of the Institute for Democratic and Participatory Planning of Mexico City, vice president of Regional Development of the Mexican Association of Urban Planners and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Southwestern University.

Between 2020 and 2022 he was general director of Kybernus, a Grupo Salinas program that promotes young social leadership in Mexico. He was recently appointed chancellor of the Universidad de la Libertad, a higher education institution of Grupo Salinas.