Jon Matonis

Jon is currently Director and Chief Economist for Cypherpunk Holdings Inc., a public company listed in Canada, with a particular focus on non-political digital currencies and privacy technology. His career has included senior influential posts at VISA, VeriSign, Sumitomo Bank and Hushmail.

Jon also served as Executive Director and Founding Board Member for the Bitcoin Foundation, Inc. (2012-15) and Editorial Board Member for CoinDesk, which was acquired by Digital Currency Group in 2016. As a global e-Money specialist and editor of The Monetary Future, he regularly advises companies in the emerging cryptocurrency space focusing on Bitcoin, Blockchain applications, mobile payments, and gaming.

Jon advocates on bitcoin to a wide variety of audiences, including the the Bank of England, the Department of Justice, and many more major financial institutions, regulatory bodies, mobile money issuers, iGaming operators, security firms, hedge funds & family offices.

Prior to that, Jon was CEO and Board Director of Network Inference, Ltd., a Nokia Ventures company in the business intelligence software space. From 2002 to 2004, Jon took Network Inference from a three-person startup in Manchester, UK to a credible entity operating in both Europe and North America thereby increasing the commercial value of the company’s intellectual property.

From 2000 to 2002, Jon was CEO and Board Director of Hush Communications, the global leader in secure Internet communications. Under his tenure at Hush Communications, the company’s technology became the de facto standard for end-to-end encrypted messaging.

Prior to Hush Communications, Jon was Director of Financial Platform Sales for VeriSign from 1995 to 1998, and led the domestic and international sales effort of VeriSign’s security solutions to the financial services industry, including commercial banks, brokerages, and payment associations.

This resulted in the winning of early-stage contracts for VeriSign that generated its first $5m in revenue.

Prior to VeriSign, Jon was the Chief Foreign Exchange Dealer for VISAInternational and directed the Card Issuer Profitability Program from 1990 to 1995. He managed the foreign exchange trading division for 155 different currencies and over $30 billion in annual turnover.

In 1993, Jon successfully championed a landmark bank interchange fee restructuring which was passed by the Board of Directors and gave VISA a competitive advantage in the expanding worldwide ATM marketplace.