Andreas Veneris is a Connaught Scholar and Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, cross-appointed with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In the past, he held joint faculty positions with the Athens University of Economics and Business (Dept. of Informatics, 2006-16) and with the University of Tokyo (Dept. of ECE, 2010-11). For more than 20 years he worked in the field of CAD for VLSI synthesis, verification and debugging using formal methods where he published more than 120 conference/journal papers. Today, he focuses on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), mechanism & system design, distributed oracles, formal methods for smart contract verification, IoT and distributed systems, techno-legal blockchain matters and crypto- economics. Prof. Veneris has received a 10-year Best Paper Retrospective Award, three other best paper awards and he holds many patents. He was member of the team in the first webcast ever (37th Grammy Awards, 1995), an event acknowledged by the American Congress. In February 2021 his work with the Bank of Canada became public proposing Canada’s Central Bank Digital Loonie — the first work of its kind that presents a comprehensive technological, regulatory/legal and economic model for a central bank digital currency. In 2021 he was honored to be given the opportunity to comment on a classified report by the Hoover Institution, edited by Darrell Duffie & Elizabeth Economy, prefaced by Condoleezza Rice, and co-authored by an extensive list of prominent world-thinkers. This report was released March 1, 2022 and it is titled “Digital Currencies: The US, China, And The World At A Crossroads”. On March 8, 2022 the US President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order following most of the recommendations of this report.