Real-World Assets on the Blockchain

David Yermack is the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1994. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at the NYU School of Law, Director of the NYU Pollack Center for Law and Business, and a Research Associate of the NBER Law and Economics program.

In 2014, Professor Yermack began teaching a full-semester course at NYU on Digital Currency and Blockchains with his Law School colleague Professor Geoffrey Miller. The course was the first in the world on this topic taught at a major research university. Professor Yermack has presented his fintech research at numerous international universities and regulatory bodies, including the United Nations, Bank for International Settlements, OECD, U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Three-time entrepreneur, lifelong investor, and now operator, John Wu is the president of Ava Labs, a software services company behind the Layer 1 blockchain Avalanche. In this role, he leads commercial and product teams building tools for technology, finance, consumer, and gaming verticals to develop blockchain-based solutions.

Mr. Wu has over 20 years of experience as a fintech executive and technology investor running Sureview Capital, a global hedge fund backed by the Blackstone Group, and previously managing a global technology portfolio at Kingdon Capital. He began his investment career at Tiger Management.

With a B.S. from Cornell and an MBA from Harvard, Mr. Wu enjoys working with his alma maters, mentoring the next generation of builders. He is an advisor to the Cornell Blockchain Club and regularly supports students through his family scholarship trust.

For almost 30 years, Rob Krugman has been focused on creating new companies, innovating new solutions, and defining business models that enable organizations to get the most out of emerging digital technologies. Today, as Chief Digital Officer for Broadridge, Mr. Krugman leads digital strategy and innovation. 

Mr. Krugman and his team work to define and iterate transformative digital strategies, research and incubate new products, and create disruptive client experiences on behalf of their clients. By leveraging new technologies and supplementing traditional channels with new and emerging digital approaches toward execution and engagement, they help businesses disrupt business models, reduce costs, improve customer relationships, and make every touchpoint a meaningful interaction.

Mr. Krugman enjoys speaking about what’s happening in digital assets, digital transformation, the API economy, identity management, omnichannel communications, and the digitization of the customer experience.

Susan Joseph is Executive Director of Fintech at Cornell, an initiative of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. Ms. Joseph is a J.D./MBA; the founder/CEO of HealthTrends.ai; an NSF grant awardee focusing on public health informatics using blockchain; and principal at Susan Joseph LLC, consulting for the mining industry in climate, digitization, and blockchain. She is Executive Director of Diversity in Blockchain, a 501(c)(3) entity providing education and resources to support diversity and inclusion in the blockchain space.

For the past several years, Ms. Joseph has been consulting and advising in law, blockchain, and fintech in the areas of digital assets, cryptocurrencies, insurance, enterprise distributed ledgers, ESG (climate and diversity), identity and privacy, and other issues across financial services, insurance, and supply chain. She has worked for and represented insurance consortia, including RiskStream and B3i North America, and she created and ran Blockchain Working Groups for Global Insurers.The first Executive Director of ID2020, Ms. Joseph is a part of the World Economic Forum Expert Network and runs the womeninfintech network on LinkedIn.