May 7, 2025
CRA Office
1828 L Street, NW, Suite 800
Event Contact
Helen Wright
hwright@cra.org
Event Type
Event Category
Behind the headlines around blockchain and cryptocurrencies, application of blockchain
technology in industry is growing rapidly. These applications go beyond “fintech” and
“decentralized finance” to include supply chain, product-provenance tracking to combat
counterfeits, certification of sustainability practices, record-keeping for real-world assets, and
improvements to the infrastructure of traditional financial systems. Looking further ahead,
researchers see blockchain technology as a means of developing decentralized AI models as an
alternative to the current monolithic systems.
This roundtable brings together leaders in this revolution to discuss both applications and the
enabling technology itself. Each has a distinctive background in the innovative use of
blockchain technology in industry. Attendees will hear not only about emerging trends in
industry, but also alternative approaches to the deployment of this technology. Collectively,
the panelists bring experience in real-world industrial deployment of enterprise blockchain
systems along with insight into the global regulatory environment that is increasingly
supporting of responsible use of blockchain technology.
Panelists
| NamE | BiO | Picture |
|---|---|---|
| Paul Brody | Paul Brody is the Global Blockchain Leader at EY (Ernst & Young) since 2015, overseeing the firm’s blockchain strategy and solutions, including the OpsChain tokenization platform and Blockchain Analyzer analytics tools.
As a prominent advocate for public blockchains and privacy technology, Paul has led EY to develop the Nightfall privacy-enabled Ethereum Layer 2 network and the Starlight zero-knowledge compiler, both contributed to the public domain and the Ethereum community. Before joining EY, Paul held various roles at IBM, including Electronics Industry Vice President. He began his career at McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles and holds a degree in Economics and a certificate in African Studies from Princeton University. |
 |
| Elizabeth Kukka | CEO at Purpose for Profit |  |
| Mark Rakhmilevich | Mark Rakhmilevich is Vice President of Product Management and Development at Oracle and is responsible for Fintech, Blockchain, and Transaction Management product portfolio. He leads the technology, strategy, and product development of Oracle Blockchain Platform, Blockchain App Builder, Oracle Database Blockchain Tables, Tuxedo, Transaction Manager for Microservices, and Fintech Data Platform in the cloud and on-premises. Mark’s focused on the needs of enterprise and government customers for scalable, secure, production-ready enterprise-oriented solutions. He leads the strategy for Oracle’s blockchain and digital assets technology and guides customers and partners around the world in applying it to deliver on key business outcomes – accelerating growth and innovation, deepening customer engagement, reducing costs and friction in business ecosystems, reducing risk and fraud, and bringing to market innovative solutions that solve real-world societal challenges. Mark facilitates customers’ blockchain and digital assets journey from rapid experimentation to live production through discovery, sharing industry use cases and best practices, advising on deployment models and integration architectures. He leads Oracle blockchain strategy and drives innovation for Digital Assets, Decentralized/ Self-Sovereign Identity, scalable Swarm AI, and genAI-assisted blockchain application development. |  |
| Antonio Senatore |
Antonio Senatore is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at VeChain Foundation, leading a fully remote team of over 70 developers across Ireland, the UK, Italy, UAE, Portugal, Spain, Romania, and Brazil. Over three years, he has built and scaled this global team to drive innovation in blockchain technology. Elected as a Steering Committee member in March 2023, Antonio brings extensive expertise in software engineering, big data, AI, Web3, crypto, and blockchain. He holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and previously served as Global Blockchain CTO at Deloitte. Originally from Southern Italy, Antonio lived in Dublin from 2007 before recently relocating to Dubai. |
 |
| Kevin Worth | Kevin is known as a strategic and growth-minded operating executive who has led both entrepreneurial and large companies to innovate new products and scale revenues. He has twice led successful exits for his investors. He is currently serving in board & operating advisory roles for investment funds and companies within the crypto / digital asset ecosystem as well as media & event companies. Kevin is experienced to serve on several board committees including executive strategy, marketing, finance & audit, compensation and general governance. |
 |
Moderator
Hank Korth is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University and Director of the Blockchain Lab in the Center for Financial Services within Lehigh’s College of Business. He also holds a courtesy professor appointment in the Decision and Technology Analytics department. He leads Lehigh’s interdisciplinary program of research and courses in blockchain. Current research foci include (1) accelerating zero-knowledge proofs on parallel computing architectures, (2) blockchain system benchmarking, (3) hierarchical consensus for global digital currencies. See https://blockchain.cse.lehigh.edu/ for full details.
Korth’s earlier research focused on database systems, information systems and distributed systems. He is co-author of Database Systems Concepts, now in its seventh edition; and of over 100 journal and conference publications. Previously, Korth was Director of Database Principles Research at Bell Laboratories. Korth is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. At the 1995 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, his paper “A Model of CAD Transactions” was chosen as “Most Influential Paper from the Proceedings of Ten Years Ago.”
Hank Korth
Professor
Lehigh University
Leader of Lehigh Blockchain
Helen Wright
Manager
CRA-Industry
