Bill Barhydt

Bill Barhydt is founder and CEO of Abra, a peer-to-peer digital money-transfer network, and chairman of Boom Financial, which offers mobile banking for the unbanked, replacing cash services with a federally insured, smartphone-based bank account. Barhydt'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 2012 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. Barhydt was an early employee of Netscape, where he designed hosted systems for telecom companies and retail banks. He worked for Goldman Sachs designing trading systems and was a research engineer for NASA and the CIA. In 2000, Barhydt received the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum for his work in online collaboration at WebSentric, the world's first online meeting service.