Featured Speakers
Our speaker lineup is taking shape. For privacy reasons, we will not list them here until we’ve reached an agreement about the sessions.
We’ve invited more than 20 featured speakers – leading experts in their respective KERISuite fields – and are currently aligning them across one or more of our conference tracks.
Additional speakers will be announced soon. Follow us on social media for updates!
Confirmed Speakers
Sam Smith
Sam Smith, the inventor of KERI.
Samuel received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1991. He spent 10 years at Florida Atlantic University, reaching full professor status before retiring to become an entrepreneur.
Dr. Smith is a serial entrepreneur and an active participant in open standards development and governance.
He has over 100 refereed publications in the areas of machine learning, autonomous vehicle systems, automated reasoning, and decentralized systems. He was principal investigator on numerous federally funded research projects.
Philip Feairheller
Phil Feairheller is the CTO and Co-Founder of healthKERI, healthcare’s only True Zero-Trust Data Exchange. Prior to starting healthKERI he was the vLEI Architect at GLEIF responsible for the technical architecture and development of the Verifiable LEI (vLEI) ecosystem.
He has over 30 years of experience building bleeding edge technology platforms and protocols for startup companies combined with an in-depth knowledge of architecting meta-cryptographic systems. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the KERI Stack Working Group and the did:webs Task Force at Trust Over IP.
Daniel Hardman
Daniel is the CTO and CISO at Provenant, a startup working on verifiable communications based on KERI and ACDCs. He is a co-inventor of DIDComm, a contributor to the W3C DID and VC specs, and is currently consulting on an eIDAS-centric citizen wallet initiative that uses SD-JWT and ISO mDL.
He served on the Utah State Auditor’s Commission on Digital Privacy in 2020, and helped launch Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Indy, the Sovrin network, and the Trust Over IP Foundation. He is a member of GLEIF’s vLEI Technical Advisory Board and also spent significant time working on central bank digital currency initiatives.
George McEwan
George McEwan is a multi-disciplined engineer, inventor, and the Privacy Architect for the State of Utah. Drawing on his diverse background as a soldier, pilot, and published author, George works to unlock the value of digital government.
He previously served as Chief Strategy Officer for Utah’s Division of Technology Services and as IT Director for the Department of Health during the pandemic, where he saw the impact of the digital divide firsthand.
Today, George leverages his expertise to advocate for government transparency and the national adoption of privacy-preserving verifiable digital credentials.
Ari Argoud
Ari Argoud is a full-stack machine learning engineer focused on building KERI-secure, production systems at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, healthcare, and health science.
Recent works include developing a zero-trust LLM-driven sec-ops agent, a KERI identity and credential wallet, and cloud-provisioned SaaS infrastructure servicing various healthKERI applications and projects.
Thomas A. Mayfield
Thomas A. Mayfield is the Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions at the Cardano Foundation and holds a BSc. Honours Degree in Computer Security and Digital Forensics. Thomas is currently a PhD candidate specialising in decentralized technologies with his novel research contribution Edge Layer IoT Trustless Environments.
At the Cardano Foundation, his team is actively developing Veridian, an innovative open source decentralized identity solution designed for individuals and organisations leveraging protocols and technologies including Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI), and Trust Over IP’s Authentic Chained Data Container (ACDC).
Thomas’ work drives enhanced authenticity, trust, and interoperability for verifiable identity across digital ecosystems with an emphasis on future-proof solutions supporting quantum resistance, verifiable data, and real-time compromise detection and recoverability.
Jonathan Rayback
Jonathan began his career at Motorola, where he developed his expertise as an engineer and engineering manager. In 2018, he joined Evernym, eventually serving as Head of Engineering and Technical Operations and acting CISO. At Evernym, he led the development of Verity, an early decentralized identity platform, and contributed to key SSI libraries like Hyperledger Indy and Aries.
Following a successful exit from Evernym, Jonathan led engineering efforts at Avast (now Gen) as Head of Technology in the US for digital identity, where he oversaw the development and launch of the Midy digital wallet.
Currently, Jonathan owns Future Forge Innovation, a technology firm focused on open-source contributions, thought leadership, and technical consulting in the decentralized identity space. He chairs the DID Methods Working Group at the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and is doing specification and implementation work for DID methods like did:webs and did:scid. He is the founder of the Simple SSI movement and has made contributions to Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI).
Jonathan holds a Master’s Degree from Dartmouth College, and is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect. He has additional certifications in Agile Software Development and Reactive Architecture. He is based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Kent Bull
Kent Bull is The Identity Bull, a vLEI and KERI Evangelist, software developer with significant expertise in KERI, ACDC, CESR, and the current GLEIF and WebOfTrust codebase for the vLEI and KERI. As a husband and a father of two Kent enjoys playing piano duets with his wife and wrestling with his two adorable sons. Based in St. George, Utah, Kent enjoys the beautiful red rocks of the desert and the multiple national parks within driving distance, and the cleanest air Utah has to offer.
Kent currently works for GLEIF as a software developer on the vLEI technical team. He is more than grateful and excited to see you on the journey to use KERI and the vLEI. Ask him any questions about either vLEI or KERI whether architectural, product based, or deeply technical.
Ned Smith
Ned is a prolific inventor, author, and industry expert in trusted computing. He has over 35 years industry experience at Sequent and Intel in trusted systems, cryptography, virtualization, manageability, and hardware roots of trust. He has more than 500 granted US patents and 9 Intel Top Inventor awards. He co-authored “Demystifying Internet of Things Security” and published papers related to hardware virtualization, disk encryption, decentralized trust, public key infrastructure, and attestation.
Ned drives industry standards including Trusted Computing Group (TCG) where he developed Device Identity Composition Engine (DICE) for constrained environments and attestation infrastructure for Trusted Platform Module (TPM). He wrote the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) security specification and contributes to several internet drafts in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He currently co-chairs the TCG Attestation Workgroup and the IETF Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) workgroup. He has computer science degrees from Brigham Young University and Portland State University.
Cole Davis
A legal entrepreneur with expertise in corporate law, media and entertainment, and emerging technology, Cole Davis seamlessly bridges the gap between law and innovation. As the founder and CEO of Switchchord, a legal technology and digital identity company, he pioneered solutions that streamline rights management and automate legal workflows in the music industry.
Prior to launching Switchchord, Cole spent years in private practice advising public and private companies on mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, corporate governance, finance, entertainment law, and intellectual property strategy.
Alan Davies
Alan Davies is a seasoned entrepreneur, founding several IT businesses, including publicly-listed Gresham in the UK, Credential Master (acquired by Salesforce), and now Digital Trust Foundry, a platform based on the KERI and ACDC specifications, designed to make any digital content trustable.
Speaker confirmations are ongoing, and as participation is secured, confirmed speakers will appear below. We look forward to introducing a strong and inspiring lineup.