About Our Speaker:
David Pelleg is a finance professional with 30 years in banking, trading, corporate finance, and structured derivatives, as well 4 years additional experience teaching finance and fintech at the university level.
His career started as a credit analyst. After earning an MBA in Analytic Finance and Statistics at the Booth School at the University of Chicago, he moved into hedge funds and derivatives trading at UBS and then PlusFunds (where he helped design the SPhinX, one of the first investable hedge-fund indices). Next, he pivoted to blending his credit analysis and structuring skills with his hedge fund and trading experience as a financial engineer working on hedge-fund-linked structured products (both on the “sell-side” at Zurich Capital Markets and Bank of America Securities, and the “buy-side” at Ivy Asset Management, a unit of BNY Mellon).
In 2007, he returned to Cleveland, Ohio to create an exit for his family’s 35-year-old health IT / Revenue Cycle Management business, raising equity capital, restructuring credit facilities, and reengineering the core operations. After engaging, negotiating, and closing a sale to a strategic buyer, he focused on his core strength of breaking down complex topics for non-experts, stepping into a role as a full-time finance professor at Kent State University.
In 2017, with the emergence of Bitcoin and other digital currencies as an emerging institutional-quality asset, David became involved in the emerging industry working on projects to create an institutional/hedge-fund trading infrastructure, acting as an expert witness in Bitcoin-exchange litigation and designing/teaching a university-level course on Bitcoin/Blockchain/Fintech.
About the Presentation:
The Crypto Conundrum - Breaking Down Bitcoin Basics talk will trace the evolution of digital currencies and their importance in our modern digital world. It will cover Bitcoin's history, blockchain technology, and its decentralized nature. The chat also discusses mining, security, and privacy aspects. The discussion examines Bitcoin's advantages, risks, and drawbacks, as well as its impact on the economy and society. We will also explore the potential effects of widespread adoption on traditional banking systems and peer-to-peer transactions.