Aug 27–28/HONG KONG
Co-Founder & Chairman
Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity
Avik Roy is Chief Strategy Officer at Strive (NASDAQ:ASST/SATA), a pioneer in bitcoin-backed digital credit with over $1 billion in bitcoin holdings.
Avik is also the Senior Advisor to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and is Co-Founder and Chairman of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), a non-profit, non-partisan think tank improving the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder using freedom, innovation, and pluralism.
In 2021, he authored the widely-cited essay “Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning,” published in National Affairs, in which he first proposed establishing a U.S. federal bitcoin reserve.
Avik has advised several presidential candidates on policy, including Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. In one of those roles, as Senior Advisor to Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2015, Perry became the first presidential candidate in the U.S. to support Bitcoin, arguing that the protocol offers “the possibility of reducing the cost and improving the quality of financial transactions in much the way that the conventional internet has done for consumer goods and services.”
Avik is well known for his public policy work outside of bitcoin, especially in fiscal and health care policy. National Review has called him one of the nation’s “sharpest policy minds,” while the New York Times’ Paul Krugman concedes, “Roy is about as good as you get in this stuff…he actually knows something.” He serves on advisory boards of the National Academy of Medicine, the Milken Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and other organizations.
Along with Forbes, where Roy served as the Opinion and Policy Editor for a decade, Roy’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Atlantic, among other publications, and he has appeared on numerous national television programs including Meet the Press, Face the Nation, PBS NewsHour, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
Avik previously worked as a hedge fund manager at J.P. Morgan, Bain Capital, and other firms. He was educated at MIT and the Yale School of Medicine.