Technology Zone

Bryan Pellegrino is co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, the leading omnichain interoperability protocol. Crypto native since 2013, Bryan has spent many years developing in the space, has co-published academic research with Noam Brown and Facebook AI Research, has sold ML models to pro MLB teams, and has ranked among the best poker players in the world.

Carrie Suen is the Senior Advisor at Ant Group, where she is responsible in driving Ant’s global strategies and thought leadership to bring more inclusive, green and sustainable changes to the ecosystem globally.

Carrie is a seasoned lawyer and has experience in wide range of subject matters ranging from fintech regulatory, corporate governance, M&A, equity offerings to listed companies compliance. Since joining Ant in 2014, Carrie has been at the forefront of the global digital payment and regulatory development, where she accumulated practical insight of the market pain points. Under her leadership, Ant’s International Legal team grew fourfold from 2017-2020, supporting over 100 markets/regions. 

Carrie is a member of the Technical Governance Board of Mojaloop Foundation, a charity organization in promoting financial inclusion through open-source interoperable payments systems. Carrie also sits on the advisory board of the Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA) and represents EPAA on G20/FSB led cross-border payments - legal, regulatory and supervisory (LRS) taskforce.

David LEE Kuo Chuen is a Professor of Financial Technology and Blockchain at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), a Distinguished Professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), a Council Member of the British Blockchain Association, and Editor-in-Chief or Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Fintech and Annual Review of Fintech.

Meanwhile, Professor LEE is also an internationally renowned scholar and industry opinion leader in the field of blockchain, an expert in the development of WEB3 and Artificial Intelligence (AI) application scenarios, the Chairman of the Global FinTech Institute (GFI), a co-founder of the Singapore Blockchain Association, a co-founder of the Blockchain Security Alliance, a CBDC advisor to the Asian Development Bank, Vice Chairman of the Economic Society of Singapore (ESS), a cryptocurrency advisor to the Asian Institute of Digital Finance (AIDF) of NUS, an advisor to the SUSS Node for inclusive FinTech (NiFT), an independent director of several listed companies in Singapore, an angel investor in blockchain, WEB3, inclusive finance and AI innovation, a senior advisor and Investment Committee member of Artichoke Capital which is backed by institutional limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds.

Professor LEE previously served as a Senior Advisor to the President of Singapore Management University (SMU), Dean of the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economic (SKBI) in Singapore, a member of the Research Council of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of Ping An OneConnect, an independent director of Lu Global in Singapore, and long taught at the Mayor's Class in Singapore. In addition, Professor LEE served as an international consultant to the Distributed Trust Research Project at Stanford University, CEO of listed companies OUE Enterprise and Auric Pacific, a researcher at Harvard University - National University of Singapore (1991-1993), a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University in 2015, the founder of hedge fund Ferrell Asset Management, and the founder of real estate developer Ferrell Residences.

Emily Parker is CoinDesk’s executive director of global content and a TV anchor on CoinDesk TV. Previously, Emily was a member of the Policy Planning staff at the U.S. State Department, where she advised on Internet freedom and digital diplomacy. Emily was a writer/editor at The Wall Street Journal and an editor at The New York Times. She is the co-founder of LongHash, a blockchain startup that focuses on Asian markets. She is the author of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground.” Her book has been assigned at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Tufts, UCSD and other schools. She lived and worked in Asia and speaks Chinese and Japanese. Emily has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, BBC and other television and radio shows.

Fernando Luis Vázquez Cao is an open-source software industry veteran with over 20 years of experience across technology innovation and governance, capital markets and digital assets. Fernando holds unparalleled knowledge of the Asian financial services sector from both a business and technical perspective. He is currently CEO of SBI Digital Asset Holdings, a company that oversees and operates digital asset-related businesses, under the umbrella of SBI Holdings. Fernando started his career in academia where he became deeply involved with the Linux community. This led him to the corporate world with a number of roles at the Japanese NTT Group. Fernando has held different roles at SBI Group, including Director of SBI VC Trade, CTO of Japannext, CEO of SBI DigiTrust and CEO of SBI Security Solutions.

Sheel Mohnot is Co-Founder and GP of Better Tomorrow Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund investing in fintech companies globally. His own startup experience includes 2 successful fintech exits — a payments company and a high-stakes auction company — and he’s GP of the 500 Fintech fund. He formerly worked as a financial services consultant at BCG and started his fintech career at the non-profit p2p lender, Kiva.

Dr Yuhui Yao, PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI), is the Group Chief Data Officer at FWD. Based in Singapore, he is currently leading FWD’s Big Data, AI and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With over 20 years of Big Data Management and Analytics experience, Dr Yao has served in multinational companies including PingAn, UOB, IBM and Cisco to drive data-driven decision. In addition, he has published more than 15 research papers on the topic. The excellent work has earned him accolades and industry-wide recognition, and he has participated as a speaker in many conferences such as The Economist, FST Media’s Future of Financial Services, ASEAN and Insurance Analytics & AI Innovation Asia Pacific, to name a few.

Alon Halevy is a director at Meta’s Reality Labs Research, where he works on Personal Digital Data, the combination of neural and symbolic techniques for data management and on Human Value Alignment. Prior to Meta, Alon was the CEO of Megagon Labs (2015-2018) and led the Structured Data Group at Google Research (2005-2015), where the team developed WebTables and Google Fusion Tables. From 1998 to 2005 he was a professor at the University of Washington, where he founded the database group. Alon is a founder of two startups, Nimble Technology and Transformic (acquired by Google in 2005). Alon co-authored two books: The Infinite Emotions of Coffee and Principles of Data Integration. In 2021 he received the Edgar F. Codd SIGMOD Innovations Award. Alon is a Fellow of the ACM and a recipient of the PECASE award and Sloan Fellowship. Together with his co-authors, he received VLDB 10-year best paper awards for the 2008 paper on WebTables and for the 1996 paper on the Information Manifold data integration system.

Bryan Pellegrino is co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, the leading omnichain interoperability protocol. Crypto native since 2013, Bryan has spent many years developing in the space, has co-published academic research with Noam Brown and Facebook AI Research, has sold ML models to pro MLB teams, and has ranked among the best poker players in the world.

Carrie Suen is the Senior Advisor at Ant Group, where she is responsible in driving Ant’s global strategies and thought leadership to bring more inclusive, green and sustainable changes to the ecosystem globally.

Carrie is a seasoned lawyer and has experience in wide range of subject matters ranging from fintech regulatory, corporate governance, M&A, equity offerings to listed companies compliance. Since joining Ant in 2014, Carrie has been at the forefront of the global digital payment and regulatory development, where she accumulated practical insight of the market pain points. Under her leadership, Ant’s International Legal team grew fourfold from 2017-2020, supporting over 100 markets/regions. 

Carrie is a member of the Technical Governance Board of Mojaloop Foundation, a charity organization in promoting financial inclusion through open-source interoperable payments systems. Carrie also sits on the advisory board of the Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA) and represents EPAA on G20/FSB led cross-border payments - legal, regulatory and supervisory (LRS) taskforce.

David LEE Kuo Chuen is a Professor of Financial Technology and Blockchain at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), a Distinguished Professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), a Council Member of the British Blockchain Association, and Editor-in-Chief or Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Fintech and Annual Review of Fintech.

Meanwhile, Professor LEE is also an internationally renowned scholar and industry opinion leader in the field of blockchain, an expert in the development of WEB3 and Artificial Intelligence (AI) application scenarios, the Chairman of the Global FinTech Institute (GFI), a co-founder of the Singapore Blockchain Association, a co-founder of the Blockchain Security Alliance, a CBDC advisor to the Asian Development Bank, Vice Chairman of the Economic Society of Singapore (ESS), a cryptocurrency advisor to the Asian Institute of Digital Finance (AIDF) of NUS, an advisor to the SUSS Node for inclusive FinTech (NiFT), an independent director of several listed companies in Singapore, an angel investor in blockchain, WEB3, inclusive finance and AI innovation, a senior advisor and Investment Committee member of Artichoke Capital which is backed by institutional limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds.

Professor LEE previously served as a Senior Advisor to the President of Singapore Management University (SMU), Dean of the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economic (SKBI) in Singapore, a member of the Research Council of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of Ping An OneConnect, an independent director of Lu Global in Singapore, and long taught at the Mayor's Class in Singapore. In addition, Professor LEE served as an international consultant to the Distributed Trust Research Project at Stanford University, CEO of listed companies OUE Enterprise and Auric Pacific, a researcher at Harvard University - National University of Singapore (1991-1993), a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University in 2015, the founder of hedge fund Ferrell Asset Management, and the founder of real estate developer Ferrell Residences.

Emily Parker is CoinDesk’s executive director of global content and a TV anchor on CoinDesk TV. Previously, Emily was a member of the Policy Planning staff at the U.S. State Department, where she advised on Internet freedom and digital diplomacy. Emily was a writer/editor at The Wall Street Journal and an editor at The New York Times. She is the co-founder of LongHash, a blockchain startup that focuses on Asian markets. She is the author of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground.” Her book has been assigned at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Tufts, UCSD and other schools. She lived and worked in Asia and speaks Chinese and Japanese. Emily has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, BBC and other television and radio shows.

Fernando Luis Vázquez Cao is an open-source software industry veteran with over 20 years of experience across technology innovation and governance, capital markets and digital assets. Fernando holds unparalleled knowledge of the Asian financial services sector from both a business and technical perspective. He is currently CEO of SBI Digital Asset Holdings, a company that oversees and operates digital asset-related businesses, under the umbrella of SBI Holdings. Fernando started his career in academia where he became deeply involved with the Linux community. This led him to the corporate world with a number of roles at the Japanese NTT Group. Fernando has held different roles at SBI Group, including Director of SBI VC Trade, CTO of Japannext, CEO of SBI DigiTrust and CEO of SBI Security Solutions.

Sheel Mohnot is Co-Founder and GP of Better Tomorrow Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund investing in fintech companies globally. His own startup experience includes 2 successful fintech exits — a payments company and a high-stakes auction company — and he’s GP of the 500 Fintech fund. He formerly worked as a financial services consultant at BCG and started his fintech career at the non-profit p2p lender, Kiva.