Keynote Speaker
Crypto Journalist; Host of "Unchained" Podcast; Author
A no-hype resource for all things crypto from former Forbes senior editor, Laura Shin, the first mainstream media reporter to cover crypto full-time.
Laura Shin'S SPEAKING FEE Under $25,000
Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, founder, and CEO of crypto news site Unchained, and author of The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze (PublicAffairs, 2022). During the course of writing her book, she and her sources uncovered who they believe was behind the biggest whodunnit in crypto — the 2016 DAO attack on Ethereum. She is now working on a book about the collapse of FTX.
Formerly a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full-time, and her podcasts and videos have had 25 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University, and the Oslo Freedom Forum.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and has a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.
What exactly happened at the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX remains to be determined by the legal process. However, there are some basic concepts around how crypto exchanges should work, how they differ from banks, and how FTX's relationship to trading firm Alameda that help elucidate what went wrong at FTX. Did FTX get taken down by Binance? What was Sam Bankman-Fried saying during his media tour? And what does the whole debacle say about crypto?
The year of 2022 saw a number of bankruptcies in the crypto industry: from Terra/Luna to Three Arrows Capital to FTX and Alameda. And that doesn't even mention multiple bankrupt crypto lenders. What went wrong? And what does this mean for crypto? We'll look at how 2022 showed how parts of the crypto industry diverged from crypto's original promise of decentralization and trustlessness.
FTX was the biggest collapse in crypto history. Co-founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and three colleagues are alleged to have perpetrated a massive fraud that took billions of dollars from customers. And since SBF and his deputies were among the biggest political donors in 2020 and 2022, politicians connected to them have egg on their faces. How has this affected the overall attitude toward crypto in Washington? Will stepped-up regulatory enforcement against entrepreneurs and businesses the industry deems to be good actors drive crypto innovation offshore? Or will crypto adapt to a more intransigent stance by Washington?
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