Bill Barhydt

Bill Barhydt is founder and CEO of Abra, a global crypto-wallet and exchange network. Abra’s breakthrough is its synthetic currency technology based on crypto smart contracts.

Bill’s passion is information technology and how it can be used to improve lives. He is an advisor and investor in many companies in the payments, telecom and consumer Internet sectors and in 2011 gave the first-ever TED talk on Bitcoin. He has also consulted to federal and international regulators on the impact of digital currencies and decentralized transaction systems.

For the past 15 years, Bill has worked as an executive and investor in the mobile industry including industry changing banking, gaming and IoT investments across the telecom and IT sectors.

Bill was an early employee of Netscape, where he worked on the first design and deployments for SSL and the X.509 digital certificate standard as well as designing early .com era services. He worked for Goldman Sachs designing trading systems and was a researcher for NASA and the CIA. In 2000, Barhydt received the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum for his work in online collaboration and Internet Technologies.

Bill is an avid mountain trail runner and crossfit games competitor who has completed several tough mudder races.