It has been a wild year for the blockchain and cryptocurrency spaces. Along with every legitimate startup that has sprung up, have been several that engage in unethical activities. The short-term gains provided by formerly, ever-increasing valuations of cyrptocurrencies provided more than enough incentive for a new wave of scams - including those using ICOs to avoid consumer-protecting regulations and deceive non-accredited investors into investing their savings into various projects.

In addition to scams, there are a lot of legitimate projects, some of which provide more value than others, which are introducing Blockchain technology to various sectors - in efforts to be the pioneers of Web 3.0. But there is a huge difference between using Blockchain for the sake of Blockchain and using Blockchain because it is the right technical infrastructure to achieve a certain goal.

On December 13th, we bring together several panelists who talk about why they are building in this space, the problems that they are solving, and the principles that are the foundational blocks for how they operate. The panel discussion will be moderated by blockchain guru and cofounder of Fueled, Rameet Chawla.

Panelists include:

Jason Grad, Massive - Jason Grad is the co-founder and CEO of Massive, a Miner as a Service, which is an SDK that allows partners to offer their users a premium service in exchange for the users' underutilized CPU. Prior to Massive, Grad founded Cheerful Giving, a leading all-in-one fundraising platform for charities. An award-winning entrepreneur, he is a Techstars and Venture for America mentor and a former top salesperson at Yelp, where he also was a founding member of NYC's national sales team, and co-led the Yelp Foundation 501(c)(3).

David Doss, Energi - David is a full-stack growth & digital marketing professional dedicated to the pursuit of strategic and operational excellence in paid, earned, and owned media. His multilingual and international background spans fintech, real estate, e-commerce, SaaS, media, education, and socio-political causes. With a mission to bring people together globally through technology, he sees cryptocurrency and blockchain as key embodiments of the next generation of global interconnectivity.

Cathy Yoon, Genesis Block - Cathy Yoon is General Counsel to the Genesis Block group of companies, which include a blockchain advisory consulting firm, a technology provider and a FINRA-regulated broker-dealer focusing on the digital asset space. Cathy is responsible for advising the co-founders, and the various Genesis Block business lines on legal issues and strategic matters. Previously, Cathy was Managing Director and Senior Counsel at The Bank of New York Mellon where she worked on a variety of corporate transactional matters. Cathy began her career in private practice at Schulte Roth & Zabel. She is a graduate of New York Law School and Swarthmore College.

Tony Mugavero, Ara - Tony Mugavero is an experienced tech entrepreneur and executive with a media, business, blockchain, and computer engineering background. He is the Founder and CEO of Littlstar, a premium immersive network putting viewers at the center of experiences, and creator of the blockchain platform Ara. Ara is a distributed and decentralized system for all digital content and assets to be made available for sale on the blockchain.. Littlstar leverages this technology, and has the best content in the world from companies like NBCU, Warner Brothers, Universal Music, Showtime, Nat Geo, Discovery, PBS, Red Bull, Virgin, Disney, and more.

Sponsors include:

Fueled - Fueled is a leading product strategy agency in the app development space. We are ready to apply our knowledge of how users interact with technology to blockchain projects.

IBM - IBM is a leading cloud platform and cognitive solutions company. Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are the largest technology and consulting employer in the world, with more than 380,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries.

Blockchain Venture Coalition - The BlockVenture Coalition is an alliance of the top blockchain groups, labs, and VC firms in the world. The BVC and their members have entered into a partnership specifically for the discovery, advancement, and guidance of university blockchain projects through the process of getting visibility with premier sources of funding and seeing their projects get off the ground.



