The credentials behind the conviction.

The Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones — 18 years

Before anyone was taking blockchain seriously, before most audiences had heard the word cryptocurrency, Michael was covering global financial markets and economic disruption for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires — eighteen years in a variety of leading roles: bureau chief, managing editor, senior columnist, TV and podcast host. He learned how to find the real story inside a complicated one. That skill is the foundation of every speech he gives.

MIT Digital Currency Initiative

Michael spent four years at MIT as a senior staffer at the Digital Currency Initiative within the MIT Media Lab — one of the world's leading technology research centers—where he dug deeply into the technologies underpinning decentralized identity, privacy-preserving data systems, and blockchain infrastructure. Meanwhile, at MIT Sloan School of Management, he co-taught courses with Simon Johnson, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, on the economic implications of digital currency and blockchain technology.

Six acclaimed works

Michael is the author of six books, including The Age of Cryptocurrency (2015), The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything (2018), and Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age (2024, with Frank McCourt, Crown/Penguin Random House). Endorsers of his most recent book include Bruce Springsteen, Walter Isaacson, Jonathan Haidt, Tristan Harris, and Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation.

Consensus and beyond

As Chairman of CoinDesk's Consensus conference, Michael helped scale the event from a 5,000-person gathering to a 20,000-person mega-event in Austin, Texas — one of the largest technology conferences in the world. He now serves as Chief Content Officer of the Real World Asset Summit, which brings together the leading figures of the fast-growing tokenization industry.

Advanced AI Society

Michael is Chairman and Co-founder of the Advanced AI Society, a non-profit building the governance frameworks that will keep enterprises in genuine control of their AI future — not dependent on black-box platforms they cannot audit or exit.

Podcasting and broadcast

For four years Michael co-hosted Money Reimagined with Sheila Warren (former Head of Blockchain at the World Economic Forum), one of the most listened-to podcasts in the blockchain and digital finance space. He has appeared regularly on television, radio, and in print as an analyst of technology, finance, and the digital economy.

H2H Intelligence

Michael is also the founder and CEO of H2H Intelligence PBC, a consent infrastructure company that uses the architecture of professional events — real people, real conversations, real consent — to build the world's first verifiably human data corpus for AI training. It is a live expression of the argument he makes from the stage: that human agency and economic value creation are not in conflict. They are the same thing.