The Speakers

David M. Alderstein

David M. Adlerstein is counsel in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. His practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, capital-raising transactions, corporate governance, and other corporate and securities law matters, with a focus on financial institutions and technology transactions. He recieved his J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2002.

Mr. Adlerstein is a member of The Economic Club of New York and The Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and is Chair of the Financial Services Technology Joint Subcommittee of the ABA Business Law Section’s Commercial Finance Committee and Private Equity & Venture Capital Committee.

Samantha M. Altschuler

Samantha Altschuler is a law clerk in Wachtell Lipton’s Corporate Department.

Samantha received her B.A. magna cum laude in Political Science from Brown University. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as a Co-President of Harvard’s Blockchain & FinTech Initiative and was the Operations Chair of the Harvard Business Law Review.

Foteini Baldimtsi

Foteini Baldimstsi is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at George Mason University. My research interests are in cryptography, security and data privacy with a special focus in signature schemes, accumulators, ZK proofs, private authentication techniques and blockchain technologies. Her research is supported by NSF (including an NSF CAREER award), NSA, DHS, CCI and faculty research awards from Google, Facebook and IBM.

Benedikt Bünz

Benedikt was a PhD student at Stanford and was advised by Dan Boneh. He is interested in applied cryptography, consensus and game theory, especially as it relates to cryptocurrencies. His work focuses on enhancing the privacy, usability and security of blockchain protocols. He is the cofounder and chief scientist of Espresso Systems. And he will be joining NYU Courant as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the fall of 2023.

Alin Tomescu

Alin Tomescu is currently a Research Scientist at Aptos Labs. Prior to joining Aptos Labs, Alin received his PhD from MIT. His broad research interests lie in cryptography and its practical applications. Currently, his main research focus is on efficiently storing authenticated dictionaries on disk, so as to remove the main bottleneck of block validation in blockchain systems. In general, he is very interested in authenticated data structures, especially if based on more exotic primitives, such as constant-sized polynomial commitments.

Fan Zhang

Fan Zhang is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department of Yale University. His research focuses on solving security problems in real-world systems with cryptography. In particular, he is interested in decentralized systems such as blockchains, anonymous communication, and trusted execution environments (TEEs). He received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, advised by Prof. Ari Juels. He is also a faculty advisor at Chainlink Labs.

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