Dr Akihiro Fujihara is a full professor with the Department and Graduate School of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, Chiba Institute of Technology. He received a Doctor of Science degree from Yokohama City University in 2006. He is also a member of the IEEE and IEICE. He has authored or co-authored over 50 publications of research articles on stochastic processes, human mobility and communication behavior patterns, IoT, and blockchain. His research interests include blockchain interoperability and the applications of blockchain technology to smart city services. He was a recipient of the IEEE COMPSAC Best Paper Award of 2014. He serves as a guest associate editor for Frontiers in Blockchain and also a technical committee on Information Network study group of IEICE Communications Society.

André Augusto is a Ph.D. student at Técnico Lisboa working in blockchain interoperability. In 2022, André was involved in a CBDC-related project in the context of a Hyperledger Mentorship project. He is an active contributor to Hyperledger Cacti, a project focused on blockchain interoperability. In addition, he participates in the “Secure Asset Transfer Protocol” working group in the Internet Engineering Task force, paving the way for standardization in inter-blockchain communication. André’s research is now moving towards security and privacy in interoperability solutions.

Dušan Morháč is a student and researcher at Slovak University of Technology. He completed the Polkadot Blockchain Academy 2023 in Buenos Aires.

Kjell-Erik Marstein is part of the Research & Development team at Quant Network, contributing to development of the Overledger DLT interoperability gateway. Research interests include interoperability, digital assets and tokenisation. He is currently working with permissioned and permissionless blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Prior to joining Quant, he worked for the University of Bergen, Norway, creating blockchain systems for securing electronic health records and ecological data.

Takaaki Yanagihara is a PhD candidate at Chiba Institute of Technology. His research focuses on crosschain communication protocols for realizing scalable and interoperable blockchains.

Dr Willem Olding is a PhD graduate of the University of Tasmania. After starting in the field of communication systems and signal processing he now works in applied cryptography and blockchain research. His research interests include provable computation, state channels and economic game design. Willem is employed by ChainSafe Systems.

Dr Antonella Del Pozzo is a research engineer at CEA-List. She has a joint PhD in distributed system from Sapienza University of Rome and Sorbonne University of Paris. Her research focuses on the blockchain as a distributed object, formalizing its properties and solvability. She is an expert in the so-called classical BFT-Consensus algorithms. She worked on the correctness analysis of the Tendermint Core consensus algorithm and collaborated with Nomadic Labs for the Tenderbake specification (now run in the Tezos blockchain). Besides consensus, her research spans over other blockchain topics, such as accountability, fairness, interoperability, and web3.

Arjun Chand is the Head of Research at LI.FI. Over the past few years, he has dedicated his time to learning about blockchain bridges, multi-chain applications, and gaining a comprehensive understanding of the cross-chain niche. He is passionate about exploring the potential of cross-chain technology to drive innovation and unlock new opportunities within the world of blockchain.

Dr Ermyas Abebe is currently a consultant at Uniwap Foundation working on cross-chain communications. Prior to Uniswap he worked at ConsenSys and IBM Research. At IBM Research he led a team of researchers and engineers that explored the potential of Distributed Ledger Technologies to transform industries, economies and governments. He worked with businesses and governments across different geographies to conceive and build blockchain-based solutions for scenarios such as cross-border payments, trade finance, trade logistics and decentralised identity. His primary research focus has been to advance the state of blockchain technologies across the dimensions of scalability and interoperability. He co-led the creation of Hyperledger Weaver, which is a decentralised interoperability protocol for enterprise blockchains. Ermyas has published numerous academic papers and filed over 30 patents.

Hiroki Yasui is a software developer at Datachain which focuses on cross-chain solutions. He’s been worked various projects in his career as developer. First blockchain related project was the development of a cryptocurrency exchange in 2018 at one of Fin-Tech company. he got interested in cross chain technology due to DeFi service is getting practical day by day. Then he’s working on various PoC for finance industry after joined at Datachain in 2021.

Theo Gauthier is the founder and CEO of Toposware, a consensusless, trustless interoperability protocol establishing a transformative infrastructure standard for Web3. Theo founded Toposware in 2019 after proactively identifying the need for improved protocol functionality within the decentralized ecosystem and pursuing an all-encompassing solution. As CEO, he leads distributed systems research and design to improve protocol functionality, alongside a range of business-focused initiatives. Theo is an alumni of the university of Paris in mathematics and computer science.

Dr Weijia Zhang is the Vice President of Engineering at Wanchain and Regional Head China for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. He is co-chair of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Crosschain Interoperability Task Force.