Jonathan M. Padilla is a native of the Great State of California. He is currently Head of Blockchain Strategy at PayPal and the Deputy Director at Stanford’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative. He has served in a number of diverse positions ranging from time in the White House during the first term of President Obama to time at Google where he worked on clean energy at Google.org to working in venture capital outfits in California and in East Africa. He has additionally run political campaigns and operations at the U.S. federal, state, and local levels. He formerly served as a member of the Democratic National Committee. Jonathan graduated from Harvard College with a degree in government and from Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government with a Masters of Public Policy. He was a 2018 Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University where he studied economics and business.