Conference organizer
Track 1
An Introduction to Decentralized Finance
Claus Skaaning
Founder & CEO at DigiShares. Expert in blockchain business models.
Topic: Tokenization of real estate and large physical assets.
Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares, will review current trends and learnings in the tokenization industry, with a particular focus on the value proposition for real estate and large physical assets.
PhD in computer science. Has worked as a researcher and technical lead for Hewlett-Packard, before founding his first company, Dezide, a software company with focus on Artificial Intelligence for diagnostics and troubleshooting. After heading Dezide as CEO for 12 years, Claus left and started new companies, including Sales on Tap, a sales and exports consultancy company, while also taking part in many other ventures. Claus has extensive experience with developing and managing incubators, being employed in the Aalborg University Innovation incubator, an incubator that accepts and helps around 80-100 startup companies every year.
Ethan Pierse
Keynote: Tokenized Securities and the Future of Investment
About Ethan:
Ethan Pierce is a Founding Partner of Borderless Ventures, enabling cross-border capital and business scale for FrenchTech, CEE and ASEAN startups.
In addition, he is the Director of The CryptoAssets Institute, evangelizing the Business of Blockchain and the Tokenized Economy.
Ethan is an experienced keynote speaker, with a passion for spreading his knowledge on Cross-Border Startup Scale, FrenchTech and ASEAN startup ecosystems, Tokenized Securities, CryptoAssets, Enterprise Blockchain and the Blockchain Economy.
Martin von Haller Grønbæk
Partner at Bird & Bird. International legal specialist in blockchain.
Topic: Tokenization of assets, a perspective.
About Martin
Martin is a partner at Bird & Bird law firm, where he works with IT and new technology from both a legal and commercial perspective. For over 20 years Martin has co-founded several IT startups. He serve on a number of boards of eCommerce, IT and web companies, where his vast knowledge about business, technology and legal matters help guide companies to success. Martin also spend a considerable portion of his time advising on legal and commercial issues related to open licensing within open source, creative commons (open content), open data, open APIs and more.
In Denmark, Martin is considered a pioneer within the Internet and web industry as he introduced the concept of Internet law in Denmark back in 1994.
Blockchain and distributed ledger securities lawyer, strategy consultant, researcher, trainer, Head of Crypto-asset Capital Formation Practice at Lex Futurus Group (lexfuturus.io).
Topic: Legal aspects of tokenized securities, compliance & operations.
About Boulevard
Committee Member, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) representing Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) in ISO/TC307 – Blockchain and distributed ledgers, which works on blockchain and distributed ledger internationally acceptable standards for the 164 countries-strong national standards member bodies). Boulevard is also a member, Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)-Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) DLT security framework WG.
Financial Crime Prevention Expert
Topic: Decentralized Finance – A Financial Crime Perspective
About Stefania
Stefania is currently working within Nordea Sweden as an Financial Crime Prevention Expert, with an active role in the Transaction Monitoring Controls Management. She has previously worked as a Forensic Consultant for Deloitte and has been involved in various Anti Money Laundering, Counter Terrorism Financing, Anti Bribery and Corruption and Anti Fraud projects and investigations across different industries and countries. She has also worked as an Anti Money Laundering Reporting Officer within the Insurance Industry, maintaining the liaison with the relevant national and international regulators. She has a MSc. in Innovation, Knowledge and Entrepreneurial Dynamics from Aalborg University and a BSc. in Accounting and Management Information Systems.
Borys Pikalov
Topic: The next generation of regulatory technologies and the ways to implement them.
One of the biggest challenges for competition and innovation in the financial industry is high entry barrier due to regulatory requirements. You cannot just lift these requirements because you open up the market
to fraud – as happened with ICOs. Blockchains opens exciting opportunity – hard-code compliance rules, make them non-violetable. It will make it possible to lift regulatory restrictions from businesses launching on top of recognized compliance infrastructure, at least up to certain threshold. Then every teenager who can code will be able to start businesses with securities in a few weeks – and we will get extreme amount of innovation and competition.
About Borys
Borys is the Head of Business Analytics at Stobox, an award-winning EU fintech company with a number of digital banking, electronic payments, tokenization, and other technology tools. Borys has done 1500+ hours of research in the digital securities industry. Co-Author of the book “How to
Attract Investments with STO: A Practical Guide”.
Yanina Petrovskaya
Topic: Legislation for blockchain projects in Switzerland & Liechtenstein
About Yanina
Track 2
Blockchain, Real Estate & Investment
Oleksii Konashevych
Topic: Blockchain Real Estate Registry.
The blockchain property registry is possible, despite some skepticism among scholars. A token can represent not only securities but property rights, recent academic research shows. Such a registry can operate with land rights, corporate rights, cars, boats, aircraft, debts and bonds, literally any legal rights and derivatives. In this presentation, you will learn about Title Tokens, Cross-Blockchain Protocol, Smart Laws and Digital Authorities.
About Oleksii
Oleksii is a researcher working on the use of blockchain technologies for state governance and democracy. He earned a Master of Laws in 2005 and a Master of Economics in 2010. He has spent 4 years in academic work, of which three years were fulltime as a Ph.D. fellow in the international program in Law, Science, and Technology, funded by the European government. Before academia, he practiced as a lawyer for ten years. During this period, he held senior positions at Ukrainian largest companies. Before leaving Ukraine, he also practiced in government relations and policy writing. For two years, he held the position as a manager of E-Democracy group (NGO) and consulted the Presidential Administration of Ukraine on issues of e-dem reforms. he is one of the co-authors of the Law of E-Petitions, which he introduced and advocated for, it was adopted in 2016.
During his Ph.D. study, he acquired knowledge in Computer Science, with focus on blockchain and DLT technologies. He am a founder and managing partner of a startup Emernotar.io – an online service for notarizing on the blockchain.
Claus Skaaning
Founder & CEO at DigiShares. Expert in blockchain business models.
Topic: Tokenization of real estate and large physical assets.
Claus Skaaning, CEO of DigiShares, will review current trends and learnings in the tokenization industry, with a particular focus on the value proposition for real estate and large physical assets.
PhD in computer science. Has worked as a researcher and technical lead for Hewlett-Packard, before founding his first company, Dezide, a software company with focus on Artificial Intelligence for diagnostics and troubleshooting. After heading Dezide as CEO for 12 years, Claus left and started new companies, including Sales on Tap, a sales and exports consultancy company, while also taking part in many other ventures. Claus has extensive experience with developing and managing incubators, being employed in the Aalborg University Innovation incubator, an incubator that accepts and helps around 80-100 startup companies every year.
Andrew Baum
Topic: Real Estate FinTech: Hype or Solution?
About Andrew
Has combined academic life and business for the last 25 years. Appointed Professor of Land Management at the Henley Business School, University of Reading, in 1989; Honorary Professor of Real Estate Investment at the University of Cambridge 2009-2014; Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge 2011-2014; Visiting Professor of Management Science, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 2013 onwards.
Outside academic life, has spent the majority of this time working with institutional real estate investors in developing global property investment strategies. Chairman of the investment committee for CBRE Global Investors Global Multi-Manager. Chairman, NewCore Capital Management. Member of the Supervisory Board for the Schroder Exempt Property Unit Trust until 2012. Non-executive director of Grosvenor Limited, 2000 to 2008.
Specialties: Real Estate Investment Strategy, International, Consulting.
Dr Guenther Dobrauz
Partner & Leader PwC Legal Switzerland.
Member of PwC’s Global Legal Leadership Team & Global Financial Services Legal Leader.
Topic: Innovation moves in S-Curves.
Innovation moves in S-Curves. The real trick is to determine the genre defining dominant designs. As we are now in the age of exponential technologies we also move towards Big Bang Disruption. Guenther will take his time to lead you through all of this.
About Dr Guenther Dobrau
Guenther is a Partner with PwC in Zurich and Leader of PwC Legal Switzerland where he also heads the Legal FS Regulatory & Compliance Services practise. He is a member of PwC’s Global Legal Leadership Team directing the firm’s global legal practise in 90+ countries as well as PwC‘s Global Financial Services Legal Leader and former Global LegalTech Leader.
Guenther specialises in structuring, authorization and ongoing lifecycle management of financial intermediaries and their products. His passion as a practicing tech-enthusiast since 2002 is innovation linked to Exponential Technologies with a particular focus on achieving decentralization and he has also been working to promote sustainability since 2010 where he advocates a systemwide change towards a circular economy.
He is the author of three books on innovation and disruption and of five books on European, Swiss and Liechtenstein regulation. He also authored and co-authored 100+ publications in international expert magazines and has to date been speaking at more than 200 conferences worldwide.
Next to being a lawyer, Guenther is an entrepreneur and innovator in the legal field fully embracing technology. His believes that his job first and foremost is to provide an inspiring and rewarding environment that allows talent to grow on the basis of what he considers to be the future of legal services: interdisciplinary and diverse teams of passionate specialists working together on the basis of trust and respect and as part of a truly global legal network but also closely connected to all the other areas of expertise within PwC. He fundamentally believes that regulation has become a strategic dimension and he is passionate about translating legal into business with his team of great Swiss and EU attorneys and lawyers.
He is also passionate about rock music (really his second biggest love after his wonderful family), vinyl records & custom motorcycles. Always interested in innovative ideas, exchange on innovation, legal & regulatory subjects as well as legal talent to join his team.
Paul Huelsmann
CEO FINEXITY AG | Top 10 FinTech and InsurTech Innovators in Germany 2020 – Business Punk.
Topic: The future of real asset investment – a Family Office perspective
Paul Huelsmann is the CEO and co-founder of FINEXITY – one of Europe’s pioneering tokenisation platforms for both retail and semi-professional investors. During the presentation Paul will give an in-depth overview on how to tokenise real assets, how investors can benefit from MiFID II-conform tokens in addition to how Asset Managers can benefit from new ways of raising capital in the most cost-efficient manner.
About Paul
Paul is an experienced commercial manager with a demonstrated history of working in the Infrastructure sector. His strength is program and project management, and he is skilled in ICMS2 elemental cost planning, procurement, parametric estimation, RICS BIM Project Manager, Blockchain FIBREE London chair, BSI committee member for life cycle costing and RICS CPD trainer.
FIBREE co-founder, board member and regional co-chair in the Netherlands.
Emne: Legal and economic opportunities to reduce transaction costs with fragmented ownership-recording
Om Jo
Jo Bronckers is co-founder and vice-president of FIBREE, the Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise (www.fibree.org). In addition, he has been active with his own consultancy firm since 2018 to advise and support organizations in corporate development at the intersection of real estate, finance and digitization. Bronckers studied real estate management and project development at Eindhoven University of Technology. He worked for various organisations in the field of Institutional Real Estate Investment, Asset Management and Financing, including FGH Bank, Rabobank, DLL, IVBN and Vesteda.
Panel 1: Real Estate on the Blockchain
Moderator: Sam Jalaei
Participants: Andrew Baum, Paul Huelsmann, Oleksii Konashevych, Jo Bronckers
Track 3
Part 3: Business Use-Cases & Venture Funding
David Weild IV
Chairman & CEO
Former Vice Chairman of NASDAQ
wikipedia
TEDx Times Square
Topic: Why Growth Rates Will Differ Significantly: Crypto vs. Derivatives vs. Securities
About David
David Weild is Founder, Chairman and CEO of Weild & Co. He is a noted expert on capital markets and capital formation who has testified before the U.S. Congress at the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, the SEC, and in front of the 34-member nations and the European Commission for the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He is regarded by many as the Father of the JOBS Act for studies that he co-authored that were the first to identify and characterize the long-term structural decline in the IPO and listed company markets.
In September 2017, Mr. Weild was named one of twenty Visionaries and one of ten StartUp Entrepreneurs in The World’s Most Influential People in Market Structure, a book by Patrick L. Young. From 2000 to 2003, Mr. Weild served as Vice Chairman of The NASDAQ Stock Market in charge of the Corporate Client Division with line responsibility for NASDAQ’s 4,000 listed companies. He created NASDAQ’s Market Intelligence Desk, Corporate Services Network and dual listings strategy which ultimately resulted in listing Charles Schwab and Hewlett Packard. While at NASDAQ, Mr. Weild had the privilege of working with such luminaries as Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Tom Stemberg (Staples), Craig Barrett (Intel), Michael Dell (Dell Computer), Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar, NeXT Computer) and others. He also had the privilege of working with NASDAQ senior management, the SEC, the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Congress to reopen the U.S. stock markets in the aftermath of 9/11 and had the honor of leading his team to work with NASDAQ listed companies to implement share repurchase programs as a safety net to help investor confidence when markets reopened.
Mr. Weild headed equity capital markets and corporate finance at a top-ten underwriter of IPOs and follow-on equity offerings. During his career, he has participated in managing more than 1,000 public equity offering transactions.
Mr. Weild holds an MBA from the Stern School of Business and a B.A. degree from Wesleyan University. He also studied on exchange at The Sorbonne, Ecole des Haute Etudes Commerciales, and The Stockholm School of Economics. Mr. Weild is former Treasurer of The Bond Club of New York.
David holds FINRA Series 7, 24, 63, 79, 82 and 99 licenses.
Serial Entrepreneur: KYC-Chain.com, Passports.io and SelfKey.org
Topic: Derisking defi – how to derisk decentralized finance investments.
About Edmund
Originally from the United States, graduating from Northeastern University in Boston Massachusetts where he studied law, finance and technology, Edmund Lowell is a serial entrepreneur living in Asia since 2011, innovating at the crossroads of finance, technology and legal fields. Edmund has built a number of Fintech and RegTech products during this time including Incorporations.io, KYC-Chain.com, Passports.io and SelfKey.org The SelfKey foundation raised 21m USD during an 11 minute public sale for the sale of the native KEY utility token. The SelfKey software has processed KYC for over 150,000 identity owners and over $200m USD in transaction volume since Q4 2017.
Founding Partner of Draper Goren Holm
Topic: Early-stage blockchain investing
About Alon
Alon is a Founding Partner at GHV, Co-Founder of Crypto Invest Summit, LA Blockchain Week, 805 Startups & Investedin.
Panel 2: VC Investment funds in the blockchain in sphere
Participants: Hazem Danny Nakib, Ethan Pierse, David Weild IV, Yanina Petrovskaya
