L2 ITERATIVE VENTURES - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Managing Partner
- Technical Partner
Dennis is a Managing Partner at L2 Iterative Ventures. Prior to L2 Iterative, Dennis was one of the founding members of Harmony Protocol, an open and decentralized layer 1 blockchain that runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. As the Core Protocol Lead at Harmony, Dennis led the research and development of the decentralized sharding and consensus mechanisms that power the fundamentals of the high-throughput, low-latency, and low-fee consensus mechanism. →
Dennis also has a background with Ethereum Foundation through his Ethereum Protocol Fellowship where he conducted research and development of interoperability and layer 2 rollup technologies, building his in-depth expertise in the area of zero knowledge proof (ZKP). Dennis started his career at Meta, where he spent four years leading the Facebook Virtual Reality infrastructure team with his focus on distributed systems and computer vision technology.
With his technical background, Dennis has been heavily participating in the education and onboarding of engineers onto Web 3. At L2 Iterative, Dennis currently leads its developer relations initiatives as the community-driven web 3 development gateway, running bootcamps, workshops and incubation programs for developers and teams in the San Francisco Bay area and South Korea. Dennis has also been a tech advisor for multiple Web 3 projects.
Dennis holds a Bachelor of Science with Honors from Stanford University where he focused on Deep Learning and distributed systems engineering research under the advisory of Professor Andrew Ng. Show more
Kevin is a Managing Partner at L2 Iterative Ventures. He is also a Partner and Co-Founder of L2 Capital, a global multi-strategy asset manager based in Hong Kong, and Chief Financial Officer of Magnum Opus Acquisition Limited (NYSE: OPA). Prior to co-founding L2, Kevin was an Investment Director in the venture capital arm with Gallant Investment Partners, where he focused on early and growth stage investments in the FinTech, SaaS and Gaming verticals. During his time at Gallant, he also took up a lead → ership role and acted as CEO of Genesis, a portfolio company in the global interactive gaming space, where he oversaw corporate strategy, sales, product development and operations. He transformed the company from an independent games studio to a full fledged enterprise software provider, and successfully led its trade sale to an European strategic buyer. Prior to his role at Gallant, Kevin was a Vice President at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong, covering Financial Sponsors in the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on take-private and growth capital transactions in Greater China. Previously, he was in Leveraged Finance and Mergers & Acquisitions with Citi and BMO Capital Markets, respectively.
Kevin's prior notable investments include GoJek, Klook, StashFin, DeSyn Protocol and Animoca Brands.
Kevin holds a Bachelor of Commerce with Honors from the University of British Columbia, a Masters of Finance with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and a Masters of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Northwestern University. He also holds a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) designation from Canada. Show more
Kony Kwong is an Investment Analyst at L2 Iterative Ventures. Previously, Kony was an Investment Analyst for the Strategic Mergers & Acquisitions team at Huobi Global. He was responsible for sourcing and evaluating potential investment opportunities with synergistic and strategic benefits globally to Huobi. He sourced and evaluated investment and M&A opportunities in DeFi, NFT marketplaces, crypto exchanges, fintech companies, fan tokens platform, media & advertising, gaming & esports, and other secto → rs.
Liliy Liu is a Senior Advisor at L2 Iterative Ventures and a long-time web3 entrepreneur and investor. She is the Co-Founder of Anagram, a blockchain venture building and investment firm and the President of the Solana Foundation. She is also a founding team member of Osmosis.
Previously, Lily co-founded Earn.com, which was acquired by Coinbase in 2018. She was also the CFO of the Chinaco Healthcare Corporation, where she built a 500-bed private hospital in China.
Lily also worked at KKR in New Yo → rk as well as McKinsey in New York and Beijing.
Lily holds a BA in Economics and International Relations from Stanford University, and studied East Asian Studies at Harvard University. Show more
Job Titles:
- Programmer
- Venture Partner
Sam Thapaliya is an entrepreneur, programmer, AI infrastructure & blockchain engineer from Nepal. He is the founder of Zebec, a Continuous Settlement Protocol on Solana. He is also one of core contributors of Nautilus, payments focused modular EVM Chain.
Since its inception in 2020, Zebec has raised over $35M in funding. Sam recently went on to execute Zebecs modular roll-up chain powered by Eclipse.
Sam started out with an understanding of information systems and became the founding advisor of Ce → dro and Eclipse. Companies he has advised has went on to raise millions of dollars.
Sam completed his Bachelors degree at Menlo College in information systems, during which he has published 2 US patents on models for monetization of videos. Show more
Job Titles:
- MPC & ZKP Researcher
- Research Partner
Weikeng Chen is an MPC & ZKP researcher active in many areas of zero-knowledge proofs, including hardware acceleration, customized and application-specific proof systems, privacy and anonymous payments, and cryptographic engineering.
Job Titles:
- Senior Advisor
- Co - Founder of SETBIT Labs
Yu Guo is the Co-Founder of SETBIT Labs, a team focusing on smart contract auditing, formal verification, and zero-knowledge proofs.
He spent ten years as an associate professor specializing in formal verification, particularly operating system verification, at the University of Science and Technology of China. Yu also worked for one year as a research scientist at Yale University, where he helped build certified operating systems. He is currently working on improving the security of blockchain infr → astructure using interdisciplinary approaches such as logical reasoning and zero-knowledge proofs.
Yu is also the research lead of ZKCPlus protocol, a decentralized fair data trading system on the blockchain.
Yu holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China. Show more