Kevin Rusher is the Founder and CEO of RAAC, a protocol that enables real estate tokenization, lending, and borrowing. It connects DeFi with real-world assets (starting with real estate), allowing users to tokenize properties, use them as collateral, and participate in DeFi activities.

RAAC (Regnum Aurum Acquisition Corp.) is a next-gen DeFi platform that fuses real-world assets (RWAs) like real estate and gold with blockchain technology. RAAC does this by tokenizing physical assets — for example, turning a property into a digital NFT (called Regna Minima) that comes with real legal rights. These tokenized assets can then be used as collateral for borrowing and lending stablecoins, giving asset owners a way to unlock liquidity without selling their holdings. It’s a smart idea, solving one of the biggest problems traditional finance still struggles with: making illiquid assets liquid.

RAAC has launched a $235 million testnet for a gold-backed RWA platform, signaling they’re serious about bridging mining, real-world commodities, and crypto. They’ve also joined Chainlink’s BUILD program, meaning they now have top-tier oracle support for securing real-time, tamper-proof data — essential when you’re tying digital assets to physical gold bars or apartment buildings. The platform appeals to institutions wanting yield, to DeFi users who want more real-world asset exposure, and to developers looking to build cool things with tokenized assets.

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Harsehaj Singh is the CEO and co-founder of Avantis, an on-chain exchange for trading and market-making cryptocurrencies, forex, and commodities.

Built on Coinbase’s Layer 2 chain, Base, Avantis is designed to offer traders permissionless access to crypto, forex, metals, and real-world commodities—all directly from their wallet. It's backed by serious players like Pantera Capital, Founders Fund, and Galaxy Digital. Unlike typical decentralized exchanges that just handle crypto, Avantis allows you to trade a wide array of assets with leverage—up to 100x on forex and commodities, and 50x on crypto—making it an ambitious bridge between traditional finance and DeFi.

The trading experience itself is designed to be more user-friendly and risk-aware. Avantis has baked in features like loss rebates, which can return up to 20% of a trader's losses under specific conditions, and incentives for positive slippage that make getting in and out of trades potentially smoother and more profitable. For liquidity providers, the platform offers USDC vaults with junior and senior tranches, giving LPs control over their risk exposure and rewards. LPs can also time-lock their deposits to earn additional yield and XP rewards. It’s a system that balances the need for deep liquidity with the safety of the capital involved, which is crucial in high-leverage environments.

What makes Avantis stand out is its focus on engagement through gamified incentives. Their XP rewards program gives users points for trading, providing liquidity, and referring others. These XP points can lead to future perks, governance rights, and seasonal leaderboard rewards, making it feel more like participating in a game or social network than using a traditional exchange. Between the wide range of tradable markets, its advanced risk tooling, and this immersive rewards system, Avantis is building something that feels like the future of trading—accessible, global, and defi-native.

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Srini Parthasarathy is the CTO of Shardeum - an EVM-based autoscaling blockchain. Shardeum's architecture addresses the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, scalability, and security.

​Shardeum is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed to tackle the blockchain trilemma—scalability, decentralization, and security—without compromise. Utilizing dynamic state sharding, Shardeum achieves linear scalability, meaning that each additional node increases the network's transaction throughput. This architecture ensures consistently low gas fees, even as the network grows.

The platform employs a hybrid consensus mechanism combining Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-Quorum (PoQ), enhancing security and decentralization. Transactions are processed individually at the transaction level rather than in blocks, allowing for faster and more efficient processing.

Shardeum's native token, SHM, serves multiple purposes within the ecosystem, including transaction fees, staking, governance, and rewards. The tokenomics are designed to support the network's sustainability and growth.

The project boasts a robust and growing ecosystem, with over 150 projects and counting. These include decentralized exchanges like Tegro, NFT marketplaces like Zezu, and infrastructure tools like NodeOps. ​

Shardeum is community-driven, with over 1.3 million community members and more than 400 Proof of Community events across 19 countries. The mainnet launch is scheduled for May, 2025, marking a significant milestone in its development.

For developers, Shardeum offers comprehensive resources, including detailed documentation, a testnet for experimentation, and support for Solidity and Vyper smart contracts. The platform's design ensures that building and deploying decentralized applications is both accessible and efficient. ​

Shardeum presents a compelling solution to the scalability challenges faced by blockchain networks, combining innovative technology with a strong community focus to pave the way for broader adoption of decentralized applications.

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Ciarán Murray is the founder and CEO of Olas, an open protocol for sharing, interrogating, and aggregating trustworthy information.

Olas is an ambitious open protocol aiming to revolutionize how we produce, verify, and consume information online. Unlike traditional media platforms driven by advertising and subscriptions, Olas operates as a decentralized, ownerless network designed to foster trust and accuracy through innovative economic and technological frameworks.​

At its core, Olas seeks to address the shortcomings of current media incentives. Traditional models often prioritize clicks and subscriptions, which can compromise content quality. Olas introduces a subsidy-based economic model, leveraging quadratic funding and tipping mechanisms to reward contributors directly. This approach ensures that high-quality information remains free to access while providing fair compensation to content creators.

Olas employs a combination of markets and reputation systems to maintain content integrity. Prediction markets, including opinion markets utilizing the Bayesian Truth Serum algorithm, incentivize honest reporting by rewarding accurate, albeit unpopular, viewpoints. Reputation scores track contributors' historical performance, guiding readers toward reliable sources.

To prevent manipulation and ensure accountability, Olas implements a decentralized identity layer. Users undergo Proof of Unique Human verification, confirming their authenticity while allowing for pseudonymity. This system safeguards against Sybil attacks and maintains the platform's integrity.

Contributors on Olas can publish various content types, from news articles to scientific research. They have the opportunity to receive funding through donor contributions and quadratic funding mechanisms. Additionally, creators can earn royalties from their work, especially when their content is reused or cited, ensuring ongoing compensation.

Olas features a sophisticated tagging system, enabling efficient content organization and discovery. Both system-generated and user-generated tags contribute to a comprehensive knowledge graph, facilitating easy navigation and searchability across the platform.

By reimagining the economics and governance of information dissemination, Olas presents a compelling alternative to traditional media systems. Its decentralized, incentive-driven approach aims to elevate content quality, promote transparency, and empower both creators and consumers in the digital information landscape.

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Constantine Zaitcev is CEO at dRPC.org - a new generation web3 infrastructure and data service that combines the advantages of distributed systems with first-class UX and support.

​dRPC (decentralized Remote Procedure Call) is a protocol designed to facilitate secure and efficient communication between decentralized applications (dApps) and blockchain networks. It enables dApps to interact with blockchain nodes in a decentralized manner, reducing reliance on centralized infrastructure and enhancing the resilience and censorship resistance of blockchain ecosystems.​

Traditional RPC systems depend on centralized servers to handle requests from clients to blockchain nodes. This centralization can introduce single points of failure and potential vulnerabilities. dRPC addresses these issues by distributing the RPC infrastructure across multiple nodes, ensuring that dApps can access blockchain data and services even if some nodes become unavailable.​

The dRPC protocol incorporates mechanisms for node discovery, load balancing, and failover, allowing dApps to dynamically select the most appropriate nodes for their requests. This dynamic selection enhances performance and reliability, as dApps can route requests to nodes with the lowest latency or highest availability.​

Security is a core focus of dRPC. The protocol includes authentication and encryption features to protect data integrity and confidentiality during communication between dApps and nodes. By leveraging decentralized identity systems and cryptographic techniques, dRPC ensures that only authorized parties can access and interact with blockchain services.​

The dRPC ecosystem is designed to be interoperable. It supports multiple blockchain networks and can be integrated with various dApp frameworks and development environments. This flexibility allows developers to build cross-chain applications and services that can interact with different blockchains through a unified interface.​

dRPC provides a decentralized, secure, and efficient mechanism for dApps to communicate with blockchain networks. By eliminating centralized intermediaries and enhancing the robustness of RPC infrastructure, dRPC contributes to the scalability and sustainability of decentralized applications and services.

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Ryan is the Head of Product at Stabull Finance, a Stablecoin and tokenized RWA DEX on Ethereum and Polygon. Stabull Finance is the new home for non-USD, fiat-backed stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, providing crypto and forex traders with access to 24/7/365 FX markets.

Stabull is a next-generation Decentralized Exchange (DEX) built to become the central source of liquidity for all local stablecoins and tokenized Real World Assets (RWAs).

Stabull Finance addresses a critical, underserved niche within the expanding DeFi landscape - to provide a specialized, efficient, secure platform for swapping non-USD stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets.

Stabull uses a 4th Generation AMM designed for the nuances of stablecoin and RWA swaps. This builds upon the lessons learned from previous AMM models. Its core innovation lies in how it dynamically concentrates liquidity around an off-chain FX or commodity oracle price.

Stabull’s AMM is described as “proactive”. Instead of passively waiting for arbitrage traders to correct price differences between Stabull and other markets (which drains value from LPs), Stabull actively uses the oracle feed to keep its internal pricing aligned, providing better rates for traders and protecting LPs. It strikes a balance, avoiding the pitfalls of a purely flat curve (vulnerable to oracle manipulation or draining if the peg breaks) while still offering much better pricing than general-purpose AMMs for its target assets.

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Barna Kiss is a co-founder of Malda, a decentralized lending protocol for individuals, institutions, and protocols to access financial services.

Malda is a Unified Liquidity Lending protocol on Ethereum and Layer 2s, delivering a seamless lending experience through global liquidity pools, all secured by zkProofs.

Malda is the first DeFi protocol built on a zkCoprocessor technology to create unified pools within the Ethereum ecosystem that act in sync to provide uninterrupted money market services, solving the problem of liquidity fragmentation.

Malda is a next-gen lending protocol that will use the power of zero-knowledge proofs to provide unparalleled services via off-chain computations, but remain fully verifiable. Malda’s position is that future applications will only use blockchains as an anchor for verified state but all computation will happen off-chain.

The next step in building the first truly scalable money market DeFi protocol is to outsource all the interest rate and balance calculations into a zkVM.

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Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki is the CEO of Concordium, a secure, scalable, regulatory-ready blockchain designed for real-world applications. With its built-in ID layer, predictable fees, and high-performance smart contracts, developers can build with confidence while ensuring compliance and privacy.

Concordium is a public Layer 1 blockchain platform that integrates identity verification at its core, aiming to balance privacy with regulatory compliance. Founded in 2018 by Lars Seier Christensen, Concordium embeds encrypted identity into every transaction at the protocol level. This design ensures accountability while preserving user confidentiality, addressing a significant challenge in the blockchain space where anonymity often clashes with regulatory requirements.

What sets Concordium apart is its use of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), allowing users to verify specific identity attributes without revealing unnecessary personal information. This means that while every user undergoes an identity check before account activation, their personal data remains private unless a legitimate legal request necessitates disclosure. Such a framework not only fosters trust among participants but also aligns with global regulatory standards, making it particularly appealing for businesses and institutions seeking compliant blockchain solutions.

Concordium is making waves in the stablecoin arena by integrating compliance directly into its blockchain infrastructure. Unlike traditional stablecoins that rely on potentially vulnerable smart contracts, Concordium issues these digital assets at the protocol level, enhancing security and reducing risk. This approach not only streamlines compliance for issuers but also instills confidence in institutional adopters. By embedding identity at the protocol level, Concordium enables seamless adherence to regulatory standards without compromising user privacy. This design facilitates advanced functionalities like geofencing, allowing issuers to restrict token access based on verified user attributes such as citizenship. Such capabilities are invaluable for ensuring cross-border compliance and simplifying international finance.

Moreover, Concordium's architecture supports sophisticated payment mechanisms, including programmable money features like scheduled payments and automated financial operations. These innovations position Concordium's stablecoin framework as a robust solution for businesses seeking secure, compliant, and efficient digital payment systems.

Its native cryptocurrency, the CCD token, serves multiple functions within the ecosystem, including facilitating transaction fees, staking, and rewarding node operators. This combination of speed, security, and integrated compliance positions Concordium as a robust platform for developing decentralized applications that require both efficiency and adherence to regulatory frameworks.

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