The Stablecoin Privacy Summit
We’re excited to host the inaugural Stablecoin Privacy Summit at the National Press Club in Washington DC on April 7.
We have an incredible lineup of talks and discussions focused on the timely issues of security, user privacy, and illicit finance risk management in stablecoin systems.
On the agenda
Note: Times are approximate and subject to change.
1:30 — Introductory remarks
1:35-1:55 — Why privacy matters for stablecoins
Dante Disparte, in conversation with Michael Mosier
1:55-2:15 — Getting real about business demand for privacy
Kaili Wang, in conversation with Michael Reilly
2:15-2:45 — How private can a stablecoin be?
Matthew Green and Ian Miers, in conversation with Peter Van Valkenburgh
BREAK
3:00-3:15 — What I learned about crypto privacy while working at Treasury
Julie Lascar
3:15-3:45 — Where crypto policy meets national security
Kyle Bligen, Jessi Brooks, and Isaac Patka
Moderated by Mike Orcutt
3:45-4:00 — WTF is zkTLS? And why should you care?
Hersh Patel
4:00-END — Where the rubber meets the road for private stablecoins
Yaya Fanusie, Nikhil Raghuveera, and Nick Gersh
Moderated by Mike Orcutt
Speakers
Kyle Bligen, the Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Decentralization Research Center (DRC), leads the organization’s advocacy before Congress and federal regulators on blockchain, digital asset, and artificial intelligence policy. He previously served as Senior Director of Financial Policy at the Chamber of Progress, advising leading fintech, cryptocurrency, and web3 firms on legislative and regulatory strategy. Earlier in his career, Kyle was Policy Advisor to a U.S. Representative on the House Financial Services Committee and the Congressional Sustainable Investment Caucus. He has also held roles at Cornerstone Government Affairs, the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the House Homeland Security Committee.
Jessi Brooks is GC and CCO of Ribbit Capital, a $16 billion fintech and crypto venture firm. A former federal prosecutor turned crypto investor, she spends her days at the collision point of financial regulation, DeFi market structure, and privacy tech—advising founders on how to build systems that are actually safer than legacy rails without recreating the intermediaries everyone came here to avoid. She co-hosts DEX in the City on Unchained and co-authored a programmable risk management framework focused on the overlap of compliance and privacy in crypto and agentic payments.
Dante Disparte leads global growth and regulatory strategy, public policy, market expansion, international operations, and communications at Circle. He is a key strategic leader building our business, forging government relations and taking us into new markets. He brings decades of experience working in complex global financial and risk issues and most recently served as a founder of the Diem Association.
Yaya J. Fanusie, the Global Head of Policy at Aleo, leads global policy engagement and regulatory strategy to advance privacy-preserving blockchain systems and stablecoin adoption across consumer, enterprise, and institutional markets. A pioneer in assessing the national security implications of digital assets, Yaya previously served as Director of Policy for Anti-Money Laundering and Cyber Risk at the Crypto Council for Innovation, where he remains a Senior Advisor, and earlier spent seven years at the CIA as an economic and counterterrorism analyst.
Matthew Green is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He specializes in applied cryptography, privacy-enhanced information storage systems, anonymous cryptocurrencies, elliptic curve cryptosystems, and satellite television piracy.
Julie Lascar leads global policy at Digital Asset, the creator of the Canton Network. She previously spent over ten years at the U.S. Treasury Department. She most recently served as the Director of the Payments and Innovation team in Treasury’s Office of Terrorist Financing, driving efforts to assess and mitigate illicit finance risks in the digital asset ecosystem through clear and coherent AML/CFT policies and regulations. She also served as the co-chair of the FATF’s Virtual Asset Contact Group, leading multilateral efforts to advance global implementation of the FATF standards.
Ian Miers is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on solving real-world security issues using cryptography. This includes systems for private payments and smart contracts, privacy-preserving identity and moderation systems, and watermarks to detect LLM-generated content. Notably, his work on privacy-preserving payments earned the 2024 IEEE S&P Test of Time Award. He is one of the founding scientists of Aleo and Zcash, startups commercializing his work on privacy-preserving payments and smart contracts. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist. It has also been denounced in at least two op-eds.
Michael Mosier co-founded Arktouros pllc, a boutique law firm of former senior officials and in-house counsel dedicated to emergent technology and civil society. He has been the first in-house counsel at tech companies twice: Chainalysis (blockchain analytics) and EspressoSystems (configurable privacy & cross-chain composability). In public service, Michael served as Acting Director of FinCEN; head of Sanctions Compliance & Enforcement at Treasury’s OFAC; Deputy Chief in the Department of Justice’s Money Laundering Section; and Director at the White House National Security Council.
Isaac Patka leads the Certifications initiative at the Security Alliance (SEAL) and is co-founder of Shield3, a security firm providing technical risk assessments, due diligence, and expert advisory for regulators, financial institutions, and protocol teams engaging with digital assets. He specializes in threat modeling, operational security, and incident response preparedness, working hands-on with teams to implement risk mitigations and operational improvements. Shield3 has worked with major DeFi, stablecoin, and staking protocols.
Hersh Patel has been in crypto since 2013, when he was 16. After years in the trenches trying to build useful things on blockchain, he arrived at a simple thesis for why it keeps falling short: a poverty of verifiability. He cofounded Opacity Labs to fix it. Opacity’s Verified Data Network uses zkTLS to let users prove facts about themselves without centralized intermediaries. Now Opacity is building the infrastructure to enable tokenized securities to trade in DeFi without broker or exchange intermediation.
Nikhil Raghuveera, Co-Founder and CEO of Predicate, a blockchain infrastructure company purpose-built for programmable policy enforcement onchain. Predicate enables major financial technology companies to enforce compliance and business rule requirements for their applications built on public blockchains. Nikhil is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, where he has published research on DeFi, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies.
Peter Van Valkenburgh is Executive Director at Coin Center, the leading non-profit research and advocacy group focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies such as Bitcoin. He is a graduate of NYU Law, as well as a self-taught designer and coder. He has testified before Congress, briefed staff and members of the EU parliament and educated policymakers and regulatory staff around the world on the subject of cryptocurrency regulation and decentralized computing systems. Previously, he was a Google Policy Fellow and collaborated with various digital rights organizations on projects related to privacy, surveillance, and digital copyright law.
Kaili Wang is an engineer focused on stablecoins as the rails for modern money movement. At Privy, a wallet infrastructure company recently acquired by Stripe, she leads the development of enterprise-facing products such as flexible custody wallets. Previously, she was the founding engineering lead at Circle Research, where she co-authored Confidential ERC-20s, Recoverable USDC, Refund Protocol, and CCTP v2. She also was the co-creator of Tutela.xyz in 2022, an anonymity evaluation tool used by Tornado Cash and Ethereum users.
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