Join The Stage At Abu Dhabi - Global Blockchain Show 2026

Professor Ronghui Gu is the Co-founder and CEO of CertiK, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He serves as an International Technology Advisor to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).Professor Gu obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University and his Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his work in systems verification, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a VMware Systems Research Award, three Amazon Research Awards, an OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, an SOSP Best Paper Award, and a CACM Research Highlight.

I’m an entrepreneurial investor passionate about venture investing & building, frontier technologies (AI, blockchain & digital assets, space tech, climate and energy tech, life sciences, neurotech), sustainability, mental health, longevity & wellness, automotive & motorsports, luxury goods, and travel & hospitality.

Currently I’m founder & Managing Partner at Vanquish Venture Partners, a venture capital firm investing in innovators playing to win.

I’m an inveterate connector of extraordinary human beings who frequently colors outside the lines and thrives on helping founders accomplish legendary outcomes while helping investors produce stellar returns & impact.

I manage $1.2B+ in assets across all vehicles to date.

My Limited Partner community includes:

1) C-suites/Managing Partners (current and former) of: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citadel, Bridgewater Associates, Oaktree Capital, Apollo Global, Point72, PayPal, Alibaba, Hillhouse Capital, NBC Universal, General Motors, Swiss Re, Discover, PizzaHut, DoorDash, DocuSign, Sandoz, Gusto, Guinness, Bitmain, Thomson Reuters, Yahoo, Zynga, the Dallas Cowboys, BlockTower Capital, and TopGolf; and

2) Board Members (current and former) of: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, MasterCard, MIO Partners, Fortress, BNY Mellon, RBC, Altria, ARM Semiconductor, SoFi, Warburg Pincus, Kraft, SABMiller, Cognizant, Western Union, Raine Group, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Wharton, and Johns Hopkins University.

Outside of work what energizes me is travel (40+ countries), electronic music, nature, and Burning Man (12x).globalblockchainshow-whiteglobalblockchainshow-white
10-11 Dec, 2025 Abu Dhabi Speakers Agenda Exhibit

As the Global CEO of BitMart, a leading cryptocurrency exchange serving over 12 million users worldwide, Nenter (Nathan) Chow leads the company’s international expansion initiatives. Previously, he was a Partner at Animoca Ventures, spearheading both venture and liquid Web3 investments across Infrastructure, DeFi, and Consumer, including Monad and TON. He played a pivotal role in forging global strategic partnerships across institutional investors, government entities, major Web3 ecosystems, and various Web3 communities. With 17 years in investment banking at firms like JP Morgan and MUFG, Nenter is a professional expert in finance, M&A, investments, trading, and strategy. His extensive experience in traditional finance and Web3, combined with demonstrated global leadership, equips him to drive advancements in digital finance and blockchain innovation

Sunny Lu, CEO, established VeChain in 2015, inspired by the potential he saw in smart contracts to automate processes and vastly increase business efficiency. In the years since, Sunny and VeChain have gone on to amass a multitude of leading enterprise partnerships including, recently, Boston Consulting Group, and has built hundreds of real-world use cases with companies across the world. Accordingly, VeChain has gained notoriety as a trailblazer and guiding force leading the adoption of blockchain technologies. With nearly twenty years of experience as an IT Executive in Fortune 500 companies including Louis Vuitton, where he held the role of CIO following a four-year tenure as CTO, Sunny brings a wealth of knowledge in information systems technology strategy and business management. Through VeBetterDAO, VeChain’s most recent initiative, Sunny’s goal is to take Web3 truly mainstream and unlock the immense value of an emerging multi-trillion tokenization and sustainability market.

Chris Williams is an accomplished entrepreneur and co-founder of Messiah Network, a Node-as-a-Service platform designed to make decentralized infrastructure accessible to everyone. Messiah empowers both individuals and enterprises to deploy, manage, and scale blockchain nodes with ease, driving true decentralisation and accelerating mass adoption of Web3 technology.Before entering the crypto space in 2017, Chris built his career at the intersection of technology, business development, and marketing within the defence and security sector, where he specialised in bringing bleeding-edge innovations to market.Since transitioning into blockchain, he has led marketing and growth strategies for several top-100 crypto projects, including the fastest-growing token project in history, which reached a $1 billion market cap in just three weeks.Chris is passionate about decentralisation, infrastructure sovereignty, and building systems that empower people everywhere to take part in a more open, secure, and censorship-resistant internet.

Kash is responsible for driving Circle’s commercial strategy to advance the future of finance and digital assets. He has deep experience in revenue leadership, business development, and go-to-market execution, and previously served as SVP of Sales for the Americas at Brightcove. With over 20 years in revenue leadership, business development, and go-to-market strategy, Mr. Razzaghi has built and scaled high-performing global teams and forged partnerships that drive transformative growth.

Vineet Budki is CEO and Managing Partner of Sigma Capital and has been a known face in the Web3 Venture Investment Space. Prior to Sigma, he headed Cypher Capital, one of the Biggest Web3 Fund’s Globally with 300+ Investments across 2 funds and having half a billion in AUM.

Vineet has been named in the Top 100 Indians in the Middle East multiple times and was recognized in the Top 10 Crypto Personalities Globally in 2024 by Arabian Business.

A systematic absolute return macro hedge fund, and Capriole Charts, premium suite of alpha signals for navigating markets. Charles has been investing for over 20 years and coding trading algorithms for a decade. He is the creator of renowned on-chain models like “Hash Ribbons” and “Macro Index” and has built proprietary investment models using over 200 macro and crypto data signals. He is one of the leading publishers of on-chain Bitcoin and macro models globally, with his indicators and models featured in the top 10 on TradingView, and also available on Glassnode, CryptoQuant and more. He has created 100+ open-source metrics, authored 10+ research pieces, and regularly shares market insights with his 123,000+ followers on X.com. Charles has been featured in 200+ media articles (including CNBC, Forbes and Bitcoin Magazine), has appeared on 20+ podcasts (including “We Study Billionaires” in 2021, the world’s largest stock investing podcast) and spoken at major conferences such as TOKEN2049 in 2025 (the world’s largest crypto conference). He holds two Dean’s Awards and three scholarships from studies in Australia, London, and Denmark.

Clara Tsao is a founding officer of Filecoin Foundation and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. She is also co-founder and on the board of the Trust & Safety Professional Association and the Trust & Safety Foundation. Clara previously was the Senior Advisor for Emerging Technology (IoT and Blockchain) at the Department of Homeland Security and a Chief Technology Officer focused on countering foreign influence, election security, and homegrown extremism. She has spent a decade working in the technology industry across global teams at Microsoft, Apple, Sony PlayStation, AT&T, and also as a Google and Mozilla Technology Policy Fellow. Clara is also the Board Chair and President of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation and a Senior Advisor at Tech Against Terrorism.

Akshat runs the deal team for Maelstrom across all deal strategies: 1) Venture; 2) Liquid; and 3) Buyouts. He previously led the M&A team at BitMEX before departing in 2022 to co-found Maelstrom. Initially trained as a management consultant, he began his investing career executing LBOs at Granite Creek Capital Partners. Akshat holds a BS in Economics from UPenn’s Wharton School of Business.

Evgeny Gokhberg is the founder of Re7 Capital and brings over 14 years of investment-management experience, including seven years focused on crypto markets. He started investing in digital assets back in 2016, spotting early the potential of DeFi to reshape traditional finance. In 2021, he founded Re7 Capital — and in only four and a half years, he has grown the firm to $1 billion in assets under management.

Marcin leads strategy and go-to-market at RedStone, the fastest-growing blockchain Oracle, and at Credora, the largest DeFi Ratings platform. RedStone holds the top 3 position globally by the number of clients (200+ B2B clients) and Total Value of Assets Secured ($10+ billion). RedStone is the official oracle for Securitize, BlackRock BUIDL, Apollo ACRED, VanEck VBILL, Hamilton Lane SCOPE and other tokenized funds, backed by veterans like Mike Arrington, co-founder of TechCrunch.

Marcin has been in the blockchain industry since 2018, ex-Google Cloud PM with a background in quantitative methods in economics. Co-founder of ETHWarsaw, the largest technical crypto conference in the CEE region. Laureate of Forbes 30 under 30 Poland. Speaker at global crypto events including Consensus, Token2049, ETHcc, ETHDenver, Ethereum Zurich and more.

David is the Chief Degen of the Sui Foundation. Before that he worked at Mysten Labs and was one of the original investors personally into Mysten. Before that he held VC Investor roles at Matrixpot Ventures and Reciprocal Ventures. He also worked at BlackRock. David has a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University and a Masters in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania.

Robin Wingardh is a former professional golfer on the DP world tour. After his professional golf career, Robin has founded and scaled several companies in multiple industries with multiple exits prior to co-founding Wingbits in late 2023

Logan Jastremski is Managing Partner at Frictionless Capital, a thesis-driven venture firm backing technical founders who build with precision and fundamentals. Before Frictionless, he led Product for Tesla’s Supercharging Digital Experience. He also hosts the Frictionless Podcast with technical and investing leaders across crypto and AI.

Mashal Waqar is CMO at Octant, one of Ethereum’s largest public goods funding programs that has given over $15M in grants to projects like the Protocol Guild, Tor Project, and ZachXBT, sustainably through staked ETH rewards and DeFi. She co-authored the State of Web3 Grants reports and was part of the Ethereum Foundation’s inaugural Summer of Protocols cohort. Previously co-founded The Tempest (scaled to tens of millions of views) and 60 Day Startups. Forbes Middle East 30 Under 30, 2x TEDx speaker, and the youngest-ever Young Leader of the Year at the WiL Economic Forum. Mashal has also been featured in BBC, CNN, GQ, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc Magazine, and spoken at renowned conferences including FII (Future Investment Initiative), AWS Summit MENA, Expo 2020, ITC ( joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations), GITEX, Harvard University Business Conference, Stanford MENA Conference, Devcon, and Devconnect.