Leadership
Founder John Wooten
John closed down his hedge fund after its best year ever to research distributed-ledger solutions for the transfer agent market.
He experienced the pain of snails-pace agents firsthand when a transfer that arrived four days late cost the fund a million dollars.
Anchored in digital assets, John founded his first blockchain startup over half a decade ago. He published his first book on asset management in high school.
Advisors
Dr. Vlad Kolesnikov
Vlad's researched advanced cryptography for nearly three decades. He wrote the book on secure multiparty computation, now adopted into courses at Stanford, Brown, Berkeley, GWU, and more. Much of his early work ran parallel to some of the best-known cryptographers today. His more recent work paves the way for the next generation of secure cryptographic communication.
Outside of academics, Vlad developed cutting-edge network-based cryptosystems at Bell Labs for over a decade. Nowadays, Vlad mentors one of his nearly 20 Ph.D. students and was recently awarded the prestigious James D. Lester Endowment Award from the Dean of Computing at Tech.
Jerry Perullo, MBA
Jerry's practiced cybersecurity for nearly three decades. Under Georgia Tech, he wrote the book on modern cybersecurity and risk management. Much of his earlier work was used as the basis for Congressional cyber regulations of futures clearinghouses.
Outside of academics, Jerry built ICE's cybersecurity operations from the group up at the end of the dot-com era, running them firsthand until 2022. He oversaw the adaptation of these systems to the NYSE, Euronext, and more. For over a decade, Jerry sat on (and eventually chaired) the board of FS-ISAC, the most-highly-respected cybersecurity group in global financial markets.
