The Blockchain Scholars Book

Daniel is a Pracademic. As a practitioner, he is the Founder of Lightbulb Capital in Hong Kong and Singapore. Previously, he was the CIO of the Modular Blockchain Fund at Modular Asset Management and the COO of HSBC Securities in Singapore. As an academic, he also was a Lecturer for Digital Platforms and FinTech in ESSEC’s top-ranked Master in Finance program.

Previously, he was a visiting professor at IE business school, where he received the teaching excellence award. His research work investigates blockchain in the financial markets context and has been published in various academic journals by Springer and MIT Press. Dan also was the founding Associate Editor-in-Chief of World Scientific Annual Review of Fintech journal. He is completing his PhD in Finance at Erasmus University and holds Master’s degrees in Innovation (SMU) and Finance (IE).

Simon is an Assistant Professor of Econometrics and Data Science at the Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam (UvA). Before joining UvA, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Management Sciences at the College of Business, City University of Hong Kong. He conducted his PhD studies at the Humboldt-University at Berlin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and afterwards he was employed as a Research Fellow for two years at the National University of Singapore.

He defended his PhD thesis with the title “Statistics of Digital Finance” in 2018 and was awarded his doctorate with summa cum laude. Simon’s work focuses on high-dimensional data analysis, with which he tackles specific problems arising in social media, the cryptocurrency markets, and blockchain. A notable output of his work is the CRIX index, one of the leading cryptocurrency market indices. Developed as part of Simon’s PhD thesis, the index was sold to an asset manager and is now used by them for investment purposes.

Simon serves on the editorial board of various journals and is the maintainer of various software packages. He is a program manager for the AI4FinTech initiative at UvA, one of the founders of the yearly Hong Kong FinTech conference for Big Data in business, and a co-organizer of the Frontiers in DeFi conference series.