Around the Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Nimit Sawhney, the Co-Founder and CEO of Voatz, Inc, an elections platform that uses remote identity proofing, biometrics, and blockchain technology to enable end-to-end verifiable and accessible remote voting via smartphones and tablets. Voatz has run more than 90 elections serving 2+ million voters in partnership with major political parties at the state level, as well as with state/county governments, towns, cities, universities, and professional organizations including the first ever mobile app-based voting project in the US with the State of West Virginia in 2018. Nimit is a winner of multiple coding/security hackathon competitions including the SXSW ‘Hack to the Future’ Hackathon in 2014 and the Vantiv Challenge at the Money2020 Hackathon in 2016. Nimit’s background is in mobile security and software development, previously serving as Director of R&D at Oberthur Technologies (now IDEMIA), and prior to that, as Director of R&D at MoreMagic Solutions. Nimit holds a graduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Business Management and is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School’s YALP (Young American Leaders Program) Class of 2019. In his spare time, Nimit actively participates in the development of security tools to help detect and prevent human trafficking.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Morgan McKenney, the CEO of Provenance Blockchain Foundation, the leading public open-source blockchain for financial services, leveraged by over 50 financial institutions and operating at scale today with billions of dollars of digital financial assets transacted across lending, payments and marketplaces.Prior to Provenance, McKenney spent nearly twenty years at Citi in a range of senior executive operating roles globally, most recently as Chief Operating Officer for Global Consumer Banking. With a career leading large payments businesses in the institutional business globally in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, McKenney partnered with banks, corporates, and governments to help them operate their business and enable real-time commerce. McKenney also successfully implemented two blockchain projects with NASDAQ and with Alibaba and Ant Financial, and managed Citi's innovation lab in Singapore.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Jon Lerner, the co-founder and CEO of CoinTracker, the market leader in portfolio tracking and tax compliance for cryptocurrency. At CoinTracker, Jon has had a relentless drive to create a strong, mission-driven company that has a culture of trust, transparency, a long-term mindset, and a high-quality bar. With Jon’s leadership, CoinTracker has emerged as a foundational product in crypto that enables users to track their portfolio and be tax compliant as they transact with crypto - seamlessly and accurately.Before CoinTracker, Jon co-founded and acted as CTO at TextNow, the largest provider of free phone service in the U.S. Jon was recognized by Ernst & Young in 2012 as an Entrepreneur of the Year in the “Young Entrepreneur” in Ontario, Canada. Jon was also a software engineer at Google for several years, and in 2008 helped build and launch the initial Android platform that now powers 2.5 billion mobile devices around the world.Jon received his BASc degree with honors in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Adi Ben-Ari, the Founder & CEO of Applied Blockchain, a fast-growing company of blockchain and cryptography experts founded in 2015 and based in London, UK, and Porto, Portugal. The company has developed and deployed dozens of blockchain applications from NFT marketplaces for famous artists to sophisticated DeFi protocols and Web3 dApps for clients ranging from Shell and Barclays to Chainlink and Algorand. The company is also building two blockchain products, one called SilentData, a privacy-preserving data oracle for off-chain data, and another called London Bridge, a hardware-secured bridge between Algorand, Ethereum, and other EVM chains for cross-chain asset transfers. Prior to this, Adi worked for 20 years as an enterprise architect and technology lead for companies, including Lloyds Banking Group and Vodafone.Adi graduated in Computer Science from the University of Bristol and has an MBA from Tel-Aviv University. Adi is considered a thought leader in blockchain and data privacy and is regularly invited to present to C-level executives and international events, has presented blockchain at the UK Parliament and House of Lords, and lectured at University College London.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Andrew Hoag, Founder and CEO of Teampay, the first purchasing software built for modern, tech-enabled businesses. Prior to founding Teampay in 2016, Andrew Hoag founded or co-founded five companies, including urbantag, which tackled the trillion-dollar online-to-offline commerce market and was acquired in 2012. In addition to these entrepreneurial and leadership roles, he has served as an angel investor and advisor to various other companies, helping them raise venture capital and design product strategy. Before that, he held management roles in customer engineering, product management, internationalization, business development, and marketing at VeriSign. He has also connected and built supercomputers for NASA. Hoag loves to code; in fact, he created the first prototype of Teampay.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Michael Pearl, COO of Kirobo - the safety net for DeFi. Michael is a fintech and blockchain executive with over a decade of experience managing teams and projects. A qualified attorney and former content chief at both Finance Magnates and Natural Intelligence, Michael has driven client outreach, acquisition, and retention in the fields of trading, personal finance, online banking, and blockchain technology. Michael eats, sleeps, and breathes financial technology.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Gabriel Gruber, Founder of Exactly Finance. Exactly is building an open source, non-custodial protocol on Ethereum, that will bring fixed-income solutions for lenders and borrowers. Prior to Exactly Finance, he was a Co-Founder and CEO of Properati (acquired by OLX Group). He ran the Real Estate Startup for five years, launched in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Joel Lin, Contributor at CitaDAO - a marketplace for tokenized Real Estate. Joel is a Real Estate industry veteran with more than 12 years in institutional real estate and structured over $2 billion of deals. He is determined to bridge the real estate world into web3.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Ken Kruger, the founder and CEO of Moon, a crypto challenger bank and banking as a service platform. Prior to starting Moon, Ken ran a software consulting company that helped New York-based venture-backed startups build products. Previously he worked at Lockheed Martin as a software engineer and product manager on classified military projects. Ken has engineering degrees from Columbia University and Cornell University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Michael Messele, a co-founder and CEO of Pillar Project, the leading open source, non-custodial, and community-owned crypto wallet that facilitates seamless access to markets, DEXs, and provides storage for crypto assets across multiple chains. The wallet is powered by Etherspot - Pillar Project’s native SDK. Michael is an experienced campaigner within the technology space of the Financial Services industry coupled with a previous start-up exposure, and he has devoted the last few years to leveraging innovations built on the decentralized economy. Michael has an MBA from Cranfield School of Management.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices