Garfield Ivy Maitland is the founder of Ivy, Fintech Consulting LLC., a consulting startup focused on lowering blockchain barriers to entry and educating clients on how to use cryptocurrencies and DLT. In 2017, Ivy attended Harvard Business School’s pre-MBA program and used the formal business training he received to scale his startup and serve over 21 clients while still an undergraduate. In December, Ivy was inducted into the Fortis Society and co-hosted ‘Blockchain Revolution’, a 3 hour blockchain workshop with an Ethereum researcher at the Royaumont Abbey in Paris, France.

Ivy, immigrated from the Caribbean island of Jamaica to Queens, New York at the age of 7 in search of more opportunities. In New York, Ivy graduated in the top 1% from Aviation High School and landed his first internship at Delta Air Lines at JFK airport as an FAA certified Aircraft Maintenance Technician. After fixing hydraulic lines, Pratt & Whitney engines, and the avionics bays of Airbus A350s, Boeing 737s and 767s he applied to university.

In 2014, he was accepted and matriculated into Cornell University to study ILR and CS. As a sophomore, Ivy wrote a 15-page research paper about Bitcoin and was immediately fascinated by the disruptive capabilities of blockchain technology. Since then, he started consulting peers, family, and professors on what the technology is and why it is revolutionary. After attending ‘Scaling Bitcoin’ at Stanford University, where he learned of all the layer 2 and layer 3 technologies being built on Bitcoin, and Ethereum, Ivy took a leave of absence from Cornell University to pursue his own music based blockchain project whose objective is to empower people of color and content creators.