The TRON Grand Hackathon 2022 announces the first list of new partners joining for Season 2

Geneva, Switzerland, June 16 – TRON DAO and BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) are thrilled to announce Mirana, Binance Custody, FalconX, Bittrex Global, APENFT Marketplace, Voxels, Tacen, Ankr, Velas, SwissBorg Ventures, and the lead author of the ERC-721 Standard, William Entriken, as partners and judges for the TRON Grand Hackathon 2022, Season 2. They will be joining our permanent judging panel alongside our highly esteemed partners from Season 1.

The partners will serve on our distinguished panel as judges for the Hackathon Season 2 projects built on TRON or BTTC. In addition, each of the partners may consider individual grants for projects that display growth potential. Winning projects may have the chance to work with our partners on potential future listings and may be invited to integrate with some of their blockchains.

Meet our Partners and Judges

Mirana

Sean Tan is the Head of Asset Management at Mirana Asset Management, a venture, trading, and asset management firm which currently manages one of the largest proprietary digital asset portfolios globally. Previously, he was a Portfolio Manager at Tower Research Capital and contributed to its high-frequency cryptocurrency trading business.

Binance Custody

Cathy Yu, Head of Binance Custody, is also joining our judging panel. Binance Custody is an institutional-grade custody platform, regulated, insured, and integrated with the Binance ecosystem, all backed by an advanced and proven security structure. Cathy has extensive experience in the banking industry; she previously specialized in cross-border payments and global OTC trading. She has been leveraging her traditional finance background to serve the crypto industry since 2017.

FalconX

David Streltsoff, Senior Sales Executive is representing FalconX on our panel for Season 2. FalconX is a reliable Institutional Crypto Trading Platform built for financial institutions. Restructuring business processes and pioneering sales/marketing strategies are Davids’s core areas of expertise. As a seasoned sales/business development leader, he carries a solid history of building and leading teams, overachieving quota, re-establishing business vision, and tapping into new markets.

Bittrex Global

Chris Sinkey from Bittrex Global is the Listing Director and Chief Business Officer. Bittrex Global operates as a US-based blockchain digital asset trading platform designed for customers who demand lightning-fast trade execution, dependable digital wallets, and industry-leading security practices

APENFT Marketplace

Sydney Xiong, the Director of APENFT Foundation, will also be joining the panel. APENFT Marketplace is a multichain NFT trading platform built on BSC, TRON, and Ethereum layer-1 protocols with BTFS decentralized storage and made interoperable via BitTorrent Chain. They are also the official supporter of the NFT track for the Season 2 of The TRON Grand Hackathon. In addition to managing art collections of APENFT, Sydney initiated the “Second Life” Art Dream Fund and APENFT GameFi Hackathon, curated Digital Wanderlust NFT shows, led the team to make investments in more than 20 NFT and metaverse projects, and recently launched APENFT Marketplace.

Voxels

Charles Karpati, a Software Developer for the Voxels metaverse is representing Cryptooxels, a virtual world, and metaverse powered by the Ethereum blockchain. In his current role, Charles helps create new features for landowners to build their properties with, addresses bugs, steadily improves the user interface, and serves as a point of communication between the team and user base.

Tacen

Clarence Liu, the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Tacen, one of the leaders in crypto compliance, is also joining our illustrious panel. As a technical expert in blockchain with over five years of experience on the road advocating for blockchain adoption, Clarence continues to push the frontiers of blockchain technology and governance at Tacen.

Ankr

Also on the panel is Gregory Gopman, CMO at Ankr, a decentralized Web3 infrastructure provider that helps developers, decentralized applications, and stakers interact easily with an array of blockchains. Gregory is also the CEO at Mewn Marketing and co-Founder of Akash Network. He has spent 15 years in startups, 10 years in Silicon Valley, and five years in Web3.

Velas

Farhad Shagulyamov, CEO of Velas, a next-generation blockchain ecosystem project that implements an AI-powered Delegated Proof-of-Stake (AIDPOS) consensus mechanism for improved scalability, high security, and interoperability. Farhad’s path to the blockchain niche started in 2016 when he became a cryptocurrency investor and started a technology company in China. This invaluable experience allowed him to make a considerable contribution to developing the idea of Velas and establishing the project.

SwissBorg

SwissBorg Ventures takes a vertical-agnostic approach to investing on behalf of SwissBorg in the most promising early-stage blockchain projects. They focus on empowering founders with the capital and expertise to build and scale the next generation of Web3 applications.

We also welcome José Fernando Pereira, an Investment Analyst at SwissBorg Ventures with experience in early-stage investments, particularly looking at tokenomics frameworks and their integration into sustainable business models.

ERC721 Standard

Last but not least, joining us is William Entriken, lead author of the ERC-721 Standard, General Manager at Pacific Medical Training, and Advisor at Arianee, Area world.

As part of the Hackathon, we will be hosting a few of our judges and partners on the Around the Block podcast series, streamed live on the TRON DAO Youtube channel and on DLive Protocol (the truly decentralized live streaming platform).

For eligibility, rules, criteria, and further details, please visit the TRON DAO Forum, TRON.Devpost.com/rules, and TRONDAO.org/hackathon.

About TRON DAO

TRON is dedicated to accelerating the decentralization of the internet via blockchain technology and decentralized applications (dApps). Founded in September 2017 by H.E. Justin Sun, the TRON network has continued to deliver impressive achievements since MainNet launch in May 2018. July 2018 also marked the ecosystem integration of BitTorrent, a pioneer in decentralized Web3 services boasting over 100 million monthly active users. The TRON network has gained incredible traction in recent years. As of June 2022, it has over 98 million total user accounts on the blockchain, more than 3.3 billion total transactions, and over $8.7 billion in total value locked (TVL), as reported on TRONSCAN. In addition, TRON hosts the largest circulating supply of USD Tether (USDT) stablecoin across the globe, overtaking USDT on Ethereum since April 2021. The TRON network completed full decentralization in December 2021 and is now a community-governed DAO. Most recently, the over-collateralized decentralized stablecoin USDD was launched on the TRON blockchain, backed by the first-ever crypto reserve for the blockchain industry – TRON DAO Reserve, marking TRON’s official entry into decentralized stablecoins.

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