Bill Barhydt

Bill Barhydt – born in New York City, and currently residing in Silicon Valley – is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in Internet technologies for over 30 years.

Bill is the founder and CEO of Abra, a leading digital assets investment platform for high net worth investors and institutions including trading, custody, high yield interest accounts, borrowing and lending.

Before starting Abra, Bill spent 15 years working on mobile money and financial inclusion projects throughout the world and consulted to many governments, aid agencies and telecoms on mobile banking deployments. Bill started Boom Financial, now part of Digicel, to bring mobile banking and microfinance to every corner of the world. This led Bill to Bitcoin in 2011. As one of the early team members of Netscape, Bill was involved in building some of the core infrastructure that helped grow the consumer Internet we all know and use everyday. Bill started his career working in R&D at the CIA and NASA managing the pre-commercial Internet.  Bill also spent several years working at Goldman Sachs in bond trading and Fixed Income markets.

As a globally recognized expert in Internet and Mobile technologies Bill has presented at over 100 conferences including The World Economic Forum, The US State Department, The Mobile World Congress and TED where he gave the first ever TED Talk on Bitcoin in 2011 when bitcoin was trading at $3.