2022 Top 100 Influencers in the Crypto Industry: Which Figures Are Worth Paying Attention To?

Source: Cointelegraph

Compiled by: Linqi, Chain Catcher

Recently, the well-known crypto media Cointelegraph released the list of the top 100 influential figures in the crypto industry for 2022. Below is the specific list (including some industry terms and concepts), and a detailed introduction to some of the notable individuals is provided at the end.

1. Sam Bankman-Fried, Founder of FTX

2. Inflation, the destroyer of purchasing power

3. Devin Finzer, Co-founder and CEO of OpenSea

4. Sebastien Borget, Co-founder of The Sandbox

5. Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink

6. Esteban Ordano, Co-founder of Decentraland

7. Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami

8. Michael Saylor, Founder of MicroStrategy

9. Emilie Choi, Chief Product Officer of Coinbase

10. Shiba dog

11. Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-founder of Solana

12. Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com

13. Erik Voorhees, Founder and CEO of ShapeShift

14. Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of Tesla

15. Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador

16. Beeple, American digital artist

17. Michael Sapir, CEO of ProShares

18. Do Kwon, Co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs

19. Leah Wald, CEO of Valkyrie

20. CryptoPunks

21. Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum

22. Bored Apes Yacht Club

23. Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO and Founder of Chiliz

24. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block

25. The Metaverse

26. Cynthia Lummis, U.S. Senator

27. Trung Nguyen, Co-founder and CEO of Sky Mavis

28. Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs

29. Gary Gensler, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

30. Layne Lafrance, Co-founder of CryptoKitties

31. Yoni Assia, Founder and CEO of eToro

32. PlanB, Creator of the Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow model

33. Snoop Dogg, American rapper

34. Crypto Climate Accord and Climate Chain Coalition

35. Charles Cascarilla, Co-founder and CEO of Paxos

36. Caitlin Long, Founder and CEO of Avanti

37. Tom Brady, NFL superstar

38. Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder of Polygon

39. Anton Bukov, Co-founder of 1inch Network

40. Crypto miners

41. Kristin Smith, Executive Director of the Blockchain Association

42. Barry Silbert, Founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group

43. Gavin Wood, Founder of Polkadot

44. Cathie Wood, Founder and CEO of Ark Invest

45. The Hermitage (Russian Museum of Art and Culture)

46. Mark Cuban, Entrepreneur and TV personality

47. Anthony Scaramucci, Founder of SkyBridge Capital

48. Cobie, Twitter KOL

49. Hayden Adams, Founder of Uniswap

50. Arianna Simpson, Entrepreneur and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

51. Zhao Changpeng, Founder and CEO of Binance

52. Yat Siu, Co-founder and Chairman of Animoca Brands

53. Willy Woo, Market analyst and trader

54. Roneil Rumburg, Co-founder and CEO of Audius

55. Joe DiPasquale, CEO of BitBull Capital

56. Web3 community

57. The Crypto Dog, Trader, Twitter KOL

58. Peng Zhong, CEO of Ignite

59. Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares

60. Michael Egorov, CEO of Curve Finance DEFI

61. Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs

62. Mike Novogratz, Founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital

63. Bob Loukas, Founder of Bitcoin Live, cyclical trader

64. Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius Network

65. Kerry Wong, Head of Investor Relations at Pantera Capital

66. Raoul Pal, Co-founder and CEO of Real Vision

67. Joseph Pallant, Founder and Executive Director of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation

68. Vanessa Grellet, Head of Portfolio Growth at Coinfund

69. Andre Cronje, Founder of Yearn.finance

70. Joseph Lubin, Founder and Chairman of ConsenSys

71. DAOs

72. MMCrypto, Crypto social media brand

73. Serena Tabacchi, Founder and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art

74. Cuy Sheffield, Head of Cryptocurrency at Visa

75. Steven Kokinos, CEO of Algorand

76. CryptoBirb, Founder and CEO of The Birb Nest

77. Dawn Song, Co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs

78. Su Zhu, Co-founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Three Arrows Capital

79. Pat Duffy, Co-founder of The Giving Block

80. Kathleen Breitman, Co-founder of Tezos

81. PancakeSwap Chefs, Developers of PancakeSwap

82. Andrew Bragg, Senator of New South Wales

83. Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of Aave

84. Marwan Alzarouni, CEO of Dubai Blockchain Center

85. Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix

86. DEXs

87. Brittany Kaiser, Co-founder of the Digital Asset Trade Association

88. Antonio Juliano, Founder of dYdX

89. Roham Gharegozlou, Founder and CEO of Dapper Labs

90. Damien Hirst, British visual artist

91. Goguen, Technical concept of Cardano

92. Mark Yusko, Founder of Morgan Creek Capital Management

93. Sanja Kon, CEO of Utrust

94. Michael Shaulov, Co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks

95. Samson Mow, Chief Strategy Officer of Blockstream

96. Robert Leshner, Founder and CEO of Compound Labs

97. Kieran Warwick, Co-founder of Illuvium

98. Teodora Atanasova, Founding team member of Nexo, Head of Business Development and Investor Relations

99. Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of Softbank Group Corp

100. Rekt Capital, Trader and technical analyst

Notable Individuals Introduction

Sam Bankman-Fried

CEO of FTX and Alameda Research

At the relatively young age of 29, SBF runs FTX, the fourth largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, and is also the CEO of Alameda Research, a liquidity provider in the multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency market.

SBF graduated from MIT in 2014 and worked as a trader at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street Capital for three years. He founded Alameda in 2017. Since his college days, SBF has believed in effective altruism.

FTX rapidly grew to an astonishing valuation of $32.5 billion in about three years. SBF is a workaholic and, in his limited spare time, is a passionate philanthropist. He plans to donate most of his eleven-figure fortune. However, it is reported that so far, he has only donated 0.1% of his net worth.

Last year, SBF moved FTX's headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, believing that the cryptocurrency regulatory framework there is better.

Devin Finzer

Co-founder and CEO of OpenSea

When Web2 starts to integrate with Web3, everything will develop exponentially.

Devin Finzer is the CEO of OpenSea, the popular hub for NFT creation and trading throughout 2021. Finzer co-founded this Ethereum-based platform in 2017 with co-founder Alex Atallah.

Finzer studied mathematics and computer science at Brown University. He interned at Google as a software engineer and later worked in the same role at Pinterest.

In 2015, Finzer co-founded a project called Claimdog, aimed at helping people recover debts. Claimdog was acquired by Credit Karma in 2016.

Sergey Nazarov

Co-founder of Chainlink

Sergey Nazarov was born into a Russian immigrant family and is the co-founder of Chainlink. Many in the crypto community consider him a candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims to have worked in the crypto space for over 10 years, around the time of the Bitcoin white paper's release.

Nazarov and his family immigrated to New York in the 1990s, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and management from New York University. Before starting his own crypto-related business, Nazarov held various assistant positions to learn how to run a company.

Michael Saylor

Founder, President, and CEO of MicroStrategy, Bitcoin advocate

Michael Saylor is an American entrepreneur and business executive who co-founded MicroStrategy at the age of 24 after graduating from MIT in 1989.

In his youth, he had a strong passion for technology as well as aeronautics and astronautics, which were the main focuses of his dual degree, along with science, technology, and society.

Additionally, he completed flight officer training in Texas and was appointed as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force in 1987.

Emilie Choi

President and COO of Coinbase

This year is definitely a breakthrough year for the crypto space, and it feels cool to see how everything is evolving. Becoming the first publicly traded large crypto company is a watershed event for the entire crypto community.

Emilie Choi is an American entrepreneur who has long operated one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase. She joined Coinbase in early 2018 as Vice President of Business and Data and gradually rose to become the exchange's President and COO. Choi graduated with a degree in economics from Johns Hopkins University and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Before building Coinbase with Brian Armstrong, Choi held significant leadership positions at several industry giants, including Warner Bros, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Naspers.

Anatoly Yakovenko

Co-founder of Solana

I can't imagine Solana's success being due to the failure of eth2.

Anatoly Yakovenko is a Russian computer engineer and co-founder of Solana. He wrote the Solana white paper. He grew up in the Soviet Union and became fascinated with computers at the age of five before moving to the United States.

Yakovenko attended the University of Illinois, where he earned a degree in computer science. He then moved to San Diego to work at Qualcomm as the head of operating system development. Yakovenko also led the development of distributed systems and compression technologies at Mesosphere and Dropbox.

Elon Musk

CEO of Tesla, Founder and CEO of SpaceX, Founder of Boring Company

Cryptocurrency has great potential, but please invest cautiously!

Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and developed a strong interest in everything related to computers at a young age. In 1984, at just 12 years old, he created a video game and sold it to a PC magazine for several hundred dollars. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in physics and economics, Musk began seeking opportunities in the internet space.

Musk co-founded the software company Zip2, PayPal, created SpaceX, and entered Tesla as an investor, becoming its CEO in October 2008.

Beeple

American digital artist

I believe NFTs are a digital art revolution. I truly believe this is the beginning of a new chapter in art history.

Michael Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, is an American digital artist who creates a wide variety of artworks, from illustrations and short videos to AR and VR pieces.

As one of the biggest visionaries in the NFT space, Beeple made history. He sold several artworks in NFT form for tens of millions of dollars. Beeple's NFT collage "Everydays: the First 5000 Days" was sold at a record-breaking $69.3 million at a Christie's auction in March 2021. This auction reportedly made Beeple the third most expensive artwork sold by a living artist.

Do Kwon

Co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs

Do Kwon is a South Korean entrepreneur in the crypto industry who co-founded Terraform Labs in January 2018 and serves as its CEO. Terraform Labs operates the Terra blockchain ecosystem, powered by its native LUNA token. Kwon graduated from Stanford with a major in computer science.

Before Terraform Labs, Kwon was the founder and CEO of Anyfi and worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and Apple. Kwon was also involved in the development of projects like Anchor Protocol and Mirror Protocol. Kwon earned a spot on Forbes' 2019 "30 Under 30" list, becoming an influential figure in finance and venture capital.

Vitalik Buterin

Co-founder of Ethereum

The biggest difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is a platform, and the value of the ecosystem comes from the value of the currency, but in Ethereum, the value of the currency comes from the value of the ecosystem.

Vitalik Buterin is one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain and its associated cryptocurrency, Ether. Born in Russia in 1994, he moved to Canada as a child and excelled academically. Buterin became interested in Bitcoin in 2011, diving deep into cryptocurrency research during the early days of the industry.

The Ethereum blockchain was launched in 2015, solidifying its position as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Buterin created the Ethereum white paper, but the project's creation also drew on the ideas of many others before its launch. Buterin has been involved in building the Ethereum community for years and holds a significant position in the development of Ethereum and the broader crypto space.

Jack Dorsey

CEO of Block

The world will eventually unify currency, and the internet will also unify currency. I personally believe it will be Bitcoin.

Jack Dorsey is an American entrepreneur, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. He also founded the mobile payment company Block Inc. (formerly Square) and serves as its CEO.

Dorsey hails from St. Louis, Missouri, and in 2000, inspired by LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger, he conceived the idea of an instant messaging service, which five years later resulted in Twitter. In May 2010, he and Jim McKelvey launched the payment platform Square, which reached a market valuation of $3.2 billion within two years and went public on the NYSE in 2015.

Dorsey has been a supporter of Bitcoin, believing it could be the internet's native cryptocurrency. Square has been involved in developing related technologies and has directly funded Bitcoin core developers.

2020 was a turning point for Square and Dorsey. Square Financial Services launched and received FDIC approval. Square also established a cryptocurrency division to support Bitcoin adoption through infrastructure building, protocol development, and user experience design.

Trung Nguyen

Co-founder and COO of Sky Mavis

Trung Nguyen is a Vietnamese programmer who founded Sky Mavis, the team behind the P2E game Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity is an Ethereum-driven DApp with its own sidechain, Ronin.

Nguyen is a hardcore strategy game player, and after trying CryptoKitties, he was inspired by his childhood favorite game to create a blockchain-based game.

Emin Gün Sirer

Founder and CEO of Ava Labs

Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist, software engineer, and thought leader. For the past 20 years, his research has focused on network security, operations and distributed systems, and digital currencies. As early as 2003, he designed the first PoW-based cryptocurrency, Karma, six years before Bitcoin. He also proposed major protocols for on-chain and off-chain scaling.

Sirer served as an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University for 14 years. He is also a co-director of the university's cryptocurrency and smart contract initiative. During this time, Sirer and his PhD student team founded Ava Labs and incubated the Avalanche project, aiming to develop an alternative blockchain technology for the financial industry.

Sandeep Nailwal

Co-founder of Polygon

Sandeep Nailwal is a software developer from Delhi, India, who began his IT career in 2010 as a software engineer at Computer Sciences Corporation. In 2014, he joined Deloitte as a consultant, working in management consulting and project management. From 2015 to 2016, Nailwal served as CTO and CSCO of the Welspun Group.

In March 2016, Nailwal launched ScopeWeaver as CEO but soon became interested in AI and blockchain technology. In 2017, Nailwal joined Polygon (formerly Matic Network) as a co-founder and CEO.

Anton Bukov

Co-founder of 1inch Network

The treasure of the crypto space is innovation and projects!

Anton Bukov is a Russian software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded 1inch Network with Sergej Kunz in 2019 after becoming passionate about blockchain and cryptocurrency. They developed a prototype of a decentralized exchange aggregator at a hackathon in New York City, which later became the foundation of 1inch Network.

His career includes C++ and iOS software development, as well as machine learning, until he became a blockchain developer for BitClave in 2017. Before 1inch Network, Anton was the chief blockchain engineer at MultiToken and a senior smart contract engineer at Near Protocol.

Barry Silbert

Founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group

Barry Silbert is an American businessman from Maryland who graduated from Emory University's Goizueta Business School in Atlanta in 1998 with a degree in finance. He initially worked in investment banking before selling his Second Market to Nasdaq in 2015 and starting his career in cryptocurrency.

Silbert made his first Bitcoin purchase in 2012 and quickly became one of the most passionate cryptocurrency investors. In 2015, he founded Digital Currency Group, a partnership consisting of five subsidiaries focused on crypto and blockchain: Genesis, Grayscale, Coindesk, Foundry, and Luno.

His cryptocurrency investment giant Grayscale Investments manages $28 billion in digital assets, including Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies. The company created the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in 2013, the first publicly traded security whose value is derived from Bitcoin's price, with a total managed asset value of $40 billion.

Gavin Wood

Co-founder of Ethereum, Creator of Polkadot and Kusama

Gavin Wood is a computer scientist and co-founder of Ethereum, who helped establish the network's 1.0 version in 2014 alongside Vitalik Buterin and other founders. In 2016, Wood left the team to found Ethcore, building Ethereum software for clients. The company eventually rebranded to Parity Technologies, where Wood remains the Chief Network Officer.

Wood founded the Web3 Foundation, a non-profit organization that funds the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. This computer scientist created Polkadot, utilizing the PoS consensus mechanism to address Ethereum's scalability issues.

Cathie Wood

Founder and CEO of Ark Invest

We believe people should invest for the future, not for short-term gains.

Cathie Wood is the founder and CEO of Ark Invest, an investment firm that manages several exchange-traded funds. She has a high reputation in the investment community, and in 2020, Bloomberg's editor-in-chief named her the best stock picker of the year. Wood holds a bachelor's degree in economics and finance from the University of Southern California.

Cathie Wood has over thirty years of experience in finance. She entered the capital markets in 1977 while working at Capital Group as an assistant economist. Since then, she has held finance-related positions at well-known companies such as Jennison Associates, Tupelo Capital Services, and AllianceBernstein, eventually founding Ark Invest in 2014. The company typically employs a thematic investment strategy to optimize returns. Wood has long been bullish on the Bitcoin market, believing it will surpass $1 million by 2030.

Cobie

Twitter personality

Cobie is a well-known anonymous figure in crypto tweets and the broader crypto space. In 2021, he changed his Twitter name and account from "Crypto Cobain."

Some users in the crypto industry operate under pseudonyms, much like "Satoshi Nakamoto." Cobie's real name is Jordan Fish, and he often packages his insights with humor on Twitter, sharing numerous opinions on the crypto industry. He has over 500,000 followers on Twitter. In addition to Twitter, Cobie writes blog posts and co-hosts a podcast called UpOnly, where he shares content with some crypto experts.

Hayden Adams

Founder of Uniswap

Hayden Adams is a computer engineer from New York who founded Uniswap. After graduating from college, Adams worked as an engineer at Siemens but was laid off a year later. In 2017, he discovered the crypto industry through a Reddit post written by Vitalik Buterin.

Adams taught himself programming, and his friend Karl Floersch, who worked at Ethereum, assured him that smart contract development was a viable career path. Adams then built Uniswap using AMM. He later met Buterin through Floersch and applied for a $65,000 grant from the Ethereum Foundation to conduct a comprehensive audit of his code.

Zhao Changpeng

Founder and CEO of Binance

Zhao Changpeng, born in 1977 in China and known as "CZ," is the founder and CEO of Binance. With his experience studying at McGill University in Canada, CZ has held various jobs, including working at the cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin.

In 2017, CZ founded Binance and helped the company grow into a giant in the crypto industry. The company has continuously evolved into a comprehensive brand covering multiple crypto industry solutions. CZ learned about the crypto industry during a poker game in 2013, and within a decade, he became one of the richest people in the world.

Yat Siu

Co-founder and President of Animoca Brands

Yat Siu is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He was born in Vienna, Austria, and moved to Hong Kong in 1996, founding Hong Kong Digital City, the first company in Asia to provide free web and email services.

In 2014, Siu founded Animoca Brands, a company derived from Animoca's licensing and publishing division, which develops mobile products like The Sandbox using technologies such as blockchain and AI. It is also the official distributor of CryptoKitties in China.

The Crypto Dog

Trader, market analyst, and Twitter personality

As a regular figure in crypto tweets, The Crypto Dog, a popular Bitcoin market analyst and digital asset advocate, believes that government-issued identities are unnecessary for building a meaningful community in the Web3 era.

This Twitter influencer is known for his incisive comments on the Bitcoin market, maintaining a long-term bullish outlook on cryptocurrency regardless of market challenges. He also states that 90% of his followers "should not trade, should not learn how to short, should not get addicted to technical analysis, should not get addicted to order flow, and should not get addicted to all that nonsense."

Michael Egorov

CEO of Curve Finance

Michael Egorov is the CEO of Curve Finance. Based on Ethereum, Curve Finance is a decentralized exchange liquidity pool.

Egorov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, with a career as a physicist and scientist. He also conducted research in quantum computing and cryptography during his university years. He is also a co-founder and former CTO of NuCypher.

Mike Novogratz

Founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital

Michael Novogratz is a cryptocurrency investor who began his involvement in the industry in 2013. He founded the cryptocurrency investment company Galaxy Digital Holdings in 2018. Before entering the cryptocurrency investment field, he was a hedge fund manager at Fortress Investment Group and a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Raoul Pal

Co-founder and CEO of Real Vision

Raoul Pal is the CEO of Real Vision, a company he co-founded in 2014. Pal has worked at companies like Goldman Sachs and GLG Partners. In 2005, he founded a research publication called Global Macro Investor.

Pal has over 800,000 followers on Twitter. In interviews and tweets related to him, cryptocurrency is often a focal topic. Among many other topics, Real Vision also focuses on cryptocurrency.

Andre Cronje

Independent DeFi developer, Founder of Yearn.finance

Andre Cronje is best known for his work in creating Yearn.finance and Keep3rV1. He has also been involved in other well-known DeFi projects, such as Sushiswap and Cream v2. Cronje is a software architect with over 20 years of development experience. He completed a three-year computer science course in just five months and was asked to stay on as a lecturer at the computer training academy education group. Additionally, Cronje holds a law degree from Stellenbosch University. Before delving into cryptography and mobile security, he developed big data and high-transaction-volume infrastructure for the telecommunications industry.

He has recently been busy building fintech solutions and using blockchain technology to provide DeFi products and services for the unbanked in Africa. He is currently a technical advisor for the DAG-based smart contract platform Fantom.

Joseph Lubin

Co-founder of Ethereum, Founder of ConsenSys

Joseph Lubin was born and raised in Toronto and educated at Princeton University. He served as the technical vice president of private wealth management at Goldman Sachs before establishing his own hedge fund.

He became fascinated with blockchain technology and Bitcoin, ultimately collaborating with Vitalik Buterin after reading the Ethereum white paper. In 2014, Lubin became a key figure in the creation and launch of Ethereum. He is also a co-founder of the Ethereum Foundation and the Chief Operating Officer of Ethereum Switzerland. In 2015, he established the decentralized Ethereum development studio ConsenSys. ConsenSys has incubated over 50 projects, including key infrastructure elements of the Ethereum network, such as MetaMask, Infura, and Alethio.

Dawn Song

Co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs

Dawn Song is a serial entrepreneur. In addition to being the co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs, Song is also a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Song is a member of the Human-Compatible AI Center, Berkeley Deep Drive, and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at UC Berkeley. Her research and interests include security and blockchain, applied cryptography, deep learning, computer security, and privacy.

Su Zhu

Co-founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Three Arrows Capital

Su Zhu is the co-founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Three Arrows Capital. Su Zhu co-founded the company in 2012 with his high school classmate Kyle Davies.

Zhu earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Columbia University in New York and graduated with honors. Before going independent, Zhu and Davies worked as traders at Credit Suisse. In 2012, Zhu also had a brief stint as a trader at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong.

Stani Kulechov

Founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend

Stani Kulechov is the founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend. He is an experienced entrepreneur with extensive knowledge in cryptocurrency, blockchain, and fintech.

Kulechov earned a master's degree in law from the University of Helsinki in 2018 and worked in the legal field until the end of 2017. ETHLend, which Kulechov founded in 2017, is a peer-to-peer lending network for digital assets and one of the first decentralized platforms. It was rebranded to Aave in 2018, shifting its focus from lending to Ethereum. The Aave protocol was officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet in January 2020.

Kain Warwick

Founder of Synthetix

In February 2018, Kain Warwick, born in Australia, established the stablecoin project Havven through an initial coin offering (ICO). Havven was later renamed Synthetix and became a significant player in the decentralized finance market.

He is also a co-founder and CEO of Blueshyft, a retail payment network in Australia that serves over 1,200 locations. Blueshyft is Australia's most well-known cryptocurrency payment gateway.

Antonio Juliano

Founder of dYdX

Antonio Juliano is an American software engineer and the founder of the decentralized exchange dYdX. After earning a degree in computer science from Princeton University in 2015, Antonio began working as a software engineer at Coinbase, where he learned about cryptocurrency and blockchain. He became fascinated with this new technology, especially after hearing lectures from some of the most well-known figures in the field at Coinbase, such as Vitalik Buterin and Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of Polychain Capital.

After just a year at Coinbase, he was ready to start his own venture while also working as a software engineer at Uber. He initially built a search engine called Weipoint for decentralized networks, but it nearly failed. He followed the framework of decentralized exchanges Kyber and 0x, adding derivatives to his product. In 2017, dYdX was launched and quickly became one of the fastest-growing decentralized exchanges in the world.

Roham Gharegozlou

Founder and CEO of Dapper Labs

Roham Gharegozlou is an entrepreneur born in Iran who spent his childhood in Dubai, Paris, and Canada before settling in California. There, he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in biological sciences.

In 2013, he co-founded Axiom Zen, focusing on developing new platforms and emerging technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. In 2018, building on Axiom Zen, he founded Dapper Labs, a blockchain and software development company. After launching the Flow blockchain in 2019, Dapper Labs created NBA Top Shot, its most successful product to date.

Samson Mow

CEO of Pixelmatic, Chief Strategy Officer of Blockstream

You think you are investing in Bitcoin, but you are actually investing in freedom.

Samson Mow is the CEO of the game development company Pixelmatic, which he co-founded in 2011 with peers from Activision Blizzard, Relic, and Electronic Arts. A Canadian of Chinese descent, Mow was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and graduated from Simon Fraser University with a bachelor's degree in business administration.

Pixelmatic's development center is located in Shanghai, with a support team in Vancouver. Mow is also the Chief Strategy Officer of Blockstream, a blockchain technology provider that offers a range of services for companies deploying new blockchain networks.

Mow was previously the Chief Operating Officer of BTCC, one of the world's largest mining pools and Bitcoin exchanges. He managed the exchange and mining pool business units, overseeing the company's daily operations. Mow also served as a production director and executive producer at Ubisoft, leading the company's expansion of web-based, social, and mobile games into the Asian market.

Robert Leshner

Founder and CEO of Compound Labs

Robert Leshner is an innovator and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, a Chartered Financial Analyst, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics.

Safe Shepherd was his first project, aimed at helping users manage private security information. In August 2017, Leshner co-founded Compound with Geoff Hayes. Its two rounds of financing raised over $33.2 million.