Hanieh Sadat

Ward Hendon

Dmitry Gorilovskiy

Blockchain technology has captivated our imagination in a way that few technologies had since the birth of the Internet 30 years ago. There is a feverishness in the press about distributed ledgers and their applications, from crypto-currencies to crypto-kitties. Everyone seems to have an opinion on where this ecosystem of technologies and networks can take us, either "To the Moon" or "Rekt." But is there a pathway and application for the blockchain ecosystem to help solve some of humanity’s most difficult problems?

In this talk, we will provide a broad overview of the blockchain ecosystem, discuss what stands between the blockchain and mainstream adoption, and help isolate problems that blockchains are uniquely qualified to solve. We will highlight the relationship between impact and the blockchain by exploring how blockchains have the potential to solve "tragedy of the commons" problems through incentive mechanisms. We will show that there is reason to believe that blockchains, while not a silver bullet, could one day play a vital role in helping to solve big, seemingly intractable problems facing humanity.

Hanieh Sadat spent the past 12 years in private wealth management , most recently as a VP at Morgan Stanley. She managed portfolios for high net worth families, institutions, foundations and endowments. She is a managing partner at GenesysOne Capital, a hybrid venture capital fund that invests in digital assets. She is also the founder of ImpactX Labs, an accelerator for impact blockchain projects, and the treasurer of the American Renewable Energy Institute.

Ward Hendon is an entrepreneur, attorney, teacher and investor. After practicing corporate law with King & Spalding, he co-founded Axiom Law, which grew into the world’s largest provider of tech-enabled legal services. He has spent the past three years as an adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson Business School and active angel investor in impact projects.

Dmitry Gorilovskiy is a hardware technology entrepreneur and founder of Moeco, a blockchain platform for IoT connectivity, and Woodenshark an IoT hardware manufacturing company which builds consumer gadgets. He founded AINTSYS in 2006, which is a private scientific research institute focusing on computability theory, quantum computing, and multi-agent systems.