DCF Leadership

Board of Directors

Zaki Manian

Board Chair

Zaki Manian is a Co-Founder of Sommelier, the most powerful coprocessor yet for DeFi traders and Liquidity Providers. He’s also a Co-Founder of iqlusion, which provides infrastructure like a data center and a Cosmos validator for next-gen crypto technologies. Previously, Zaki helped build the Cosmos ecosystem, including launching the first public Cosmos testnet, and served as a director of Tendermint. Zaki has been a leading developer in the blockchain space since 2014, when he taught himself cryptography and began contributing to projects including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and Tendermint. Having studied history of science at the University of Pennsylvania, Zaki’s skill sets in software engineering, programming, and computer science are largely self-taught.

Jason Potts

Board Member

Jason Potts is an academic economist specializing in the economics of new technology and institutional evolution, and inventor of the field of institutional cryptoeconomics. He is one of the world’s leading innovation economists, winner of the Schumpeter Prize, a member of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia, and an editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics. He is founder and co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society. His extensive academic work is widely cited and influential in policy.

Dean Tribble

Board Member

Dean Tribble co-designed the negotiation process and contract for the first smart contracting system, AMiX. As a Principal Architect at Microsoft, he co-designed the Midori distributed object-capability operating system. As founder and CTO for Agorics (acquired by Microsoft), he architected the brokerage information system for Schwab’s active traders and the WebMart electronic contract system for SunLabs. As CTO of VerifyValid and VP of Deluxe, his echeck systems have carried billions of dollars.

Julian Morris

Board Member

Julian Morris is a successful economist and think-tank entrepreneur. A Senior Fellow at Reason Foundation, a Senior Scholar at the International Center for Law and Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he also sits on several non-profit boards and advisory boards and is involved with several startups. Julian is the author of over 100 scholarly articles on topics ranging from the morality of free trade to the law and economics of NFTs.

Silke Noa Elrifai

Board Member

Silke is a crypto legal engineer and governance researcher with a passion for privacy tech. Silke has advised crypto projects since 2014 focusing on legal product design that is both pragmatic and dispute-resistant. From 2018-2022, she was the CLO of Gnosis, where she spearheaded, among other things, the legal design of Gnosis’ transformation into one of the largest DAOs to date, and the spin-off of CoW DAO and SAFE DAO. Silke’s current focus is supporting privacy activists and researching DAO’s emergent extra-national justice systems. Silke is admitted to practice law in England & Wales, New York and Berlin and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

Executive Team

Ric Shreves

President

Zaki Manian is a Co-Founder of Sommelier, the most powerful coprocessor yet for DeFi traders and Liquidity Providers. He’s also a Co-Founder of iqlusion, which provides infrastructure like a data center and a Cosmos validator for next-gen crypto technologies. Previously, Zaki helped build the Cosmos ecosystem, including launching the first public Cosmos testnet, and served as a director of Tendermint. Zaki has been a leading developer in the blockchain space since 2014, when he taught himself cryptography and began contributing to projects including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and Tendermint. Having studied history of science at the University of Pennsylvania, Zaki’s skill sets in software engineering, programming, and computer science are largely self-taught.