Talk Videos from Crypto Economic Security Conference (CESC) 2020

Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011 and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years of looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November of 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol. In 2014, Vitalik was a recipient of the two-year Thiel Fellowship, tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s project that awards $100,000 to 20 promising innovators under 20 so they can pursue their inventions in lieu of a post-secondary institution path. You can find his website at Vitalik.ca.

Alessandro is a co-founder and Chief Scientist at StarkWare. Alessandro is a faculty member in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His research spans the areas of complexity theory, cryptography, and security, and focuses on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of zero knowledge proofs that are short and easy to verify. He is a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol, and is an author of libsnark, the leading open-source library for succinct zero knowledge proofs. Alessandro is a founding scientist of the Zcash company. He received B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and in Math, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, from MIT

Chief Economist, Libra Association. Co-Creator of Libra.

Head Economist at Novi (Facebook), on secondment to Libra.

Theodore T. Miller Career Development Professor at MIT, and Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management, MIT Sloan School of Management (on leave)

Christian's main areas of interest are the economics of digitization, entrepreneurship, and science. His research focuses on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, the economics of equity crowdfunding and startup growth, and the economics of scientific collaboration. Christian is one of the principal investigators of the MIT Digital Currencies Research Study, which gave access to all MIT undergraduate students to Bitcoin in the Fall of 2014. He is also part of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the recently launched Digital Currency Initiative. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management), and MSc (summa cum laude) in Economics and Management of New Technologies from Bocconi University, Milan. In 2009-10 he was a visiting student at Harvard University. His work has been featured in Nature, Science, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, WIRED, NPR, Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, VICE news and the Washington Post among others.