Skip to main content

BlogChain

The place where the blog meets the chain

Blockchain summer - the road to mainstream adoption
4 minutes read

Blockchain summer - the road to mainstream adoption

The Kadena Team is excited to present Blockchain Summer!

Please join us as we host a live panel on The Road to Mainstream Adoption with guests such as Elizabeth Polanco formerly of J.P. Morgan, Arianna Simpson from ASP, Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet Networks, and our very own Founder and CEO, Will Martino. Journalist Jon Victor from The Information will moderate the panel.

Stick around after the panel for beer, wine, and Dinosaur BBQ on the terrace. Enjoy evening activities including a Polaroid photo booth, cornhole and much more!

Space is limited, RSVP required.

About our Panelists and Moderator

Will Martino — Kadena Will Martino is Founder and CEO of Kadena. He co-founded the company in 2016 with Stuart Popejoy to provide the fastest, safest, and most scalable smart contracts for entrepreneurs and enterprises. Will’s background has earned him a reputation for delivering unique insights into the world of permissioned and hybrid blockchain. Prior to founding Kadena, Will worked in JPMorgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence along with Stuart, where they spearheaded the company’s first blockchain, Juno.

Tarun Chitra — Gauntlet Networks

Tarun is an alumni of D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES), Vatic Labs, an HFT firm, and Cornell. He fell into the blockchain world in 2011, when he was working on ASICs at DESRES and observed Bitcoin ASIC mining rigs substantially delay DESRES’s ASIC production. He has spent the last seven years working on simulation-based R&D at the intersection of high-performance computing and AI and is applying this knowledge to the blockchain ecosystem.

Elizabeth Polanco — (formerly) J.P. Morgan

Eli Polanco was most recently Executive Director at J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence, leading blockchain product development for the Treasury Services unit. In this role, she launched the J.P.Morgan Interbank Information Network (IIN), the bank’s first live blockchain application. Previously, she led development of data-driven products for J.P. Morgan’s New Product Development lab and held various sales and product roles in the Investment Bank across M&A and Syndicated Leverage Finance.

Arianna Simpson — ASP

Arianna Simpson is an early-stage investor, with close to 40 investments to date. Before she started investing, Arianna was a PM at BitGo, where she was the third employee. Prior to BitGo, she worked at Facebook in Global Marketing Solutions and at Y Combinator-backed Shoptiques, where she ran sales.

Jon Victor — [The Information](http://The Information) (Moderator)

Jon Victor is a reporter at The Information, covering cryptocurrency and blockchain from New York. He has won several prizes and fellowships for his journalism, including an award by the Press Club of Cleveland for breaking news coverage. A native of Montreal, Canada, Jon studied philosophy and literature at Yale, where he served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News.