My name is Daniel Marquez, and I was born in Colombia and grew up in the United States. I call myself a techno-humanitarian because my aim is to empower humans with technology, and what interests me most is the application of emerging technologies, or what happens once they reach people. Today, that means working on privacy technology and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) in Latin America.

I started out as a software engineer and spent five years at it, and along the way, I sold educational books door to door in Kentucky, helped build a school in Malawi, and tried to make a golf cart drive itself.

In 2019, I went to the MIT Media Lab to study how cryptocurrencies could be applied in the real world, and I graduated in 2021 with a master's in Applied Cryptocurrencies. For my thesis, I worked with the United Nations' Multi-Partner Trust Fund for Sustaining Peace on an attempt to democratize how social movements allocate resources, using decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

In 2022, I co-founded Koyamaki Ventures, a crypto venture fund named after the Japanese umbrella pine, with a thesis that fit the name: invest in anything under the crypto umbrella with a strong team, idea, and market fit. For me, it was a way to invest in the same thing I had studied, the technology applied, and we looked to Latin America to do it. We made 16 investments, and half of our portfolio is Brazilian. That is no coincidence, since Brazil wrote clear regulations, and once the rules were clear, real institutions showed up. We stopped deploying at the end of 2025 and now manage the portfolio.

Since the beginning of 2026, I have been the Head of LATAM for the Midnight Foundation, the organization behind Midnight, a blockchain built for privacy, where I work on scaling privacy technology across Latin America. Between privacy and tokenized assets, I am still doing the same thing I have been doing since MIT, which is taking a technology and applying it in the region where I was born.