Source: CoinDesk; Translation: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
CoinDesk has selected 50 individuals who defined the cryptocurrency space in 2024;
These names come from finance, technology, policy, and more;
Politics and regulation are a major theme of 2024;
Big trends: prediction markets, ETFs, AI, DePIN, and Bitcoin's dominance.
Welcome to this year's most influential list.
It has been an extraordinary year. The gloom that began in 2024 has finally dissipated.
Following the approval of Bitcoin ETFs in January and Donald Trump's re-election in November, sentiment around everything cryptocurrency has shifted. New investors are entering the market, and capital is flowing across categories.
Bitcoin occupies a supreme position, soaring to $100,000 last December. Bitcoin's dominance exceeds 70%. The U.S. president-elect has also promised to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, potentially purchasing up to 5% of the total supply of Bitcoin for the U.S.
The issuance of Bitcoin ETFs has been the most successful in history, having attracted $145 billion in investments. Bitcoin has found a widely recognized role as 'digital gold,' increasingly resembling the foundational layer of a new financial system.
Critics complain about Ethereum's lengthy development roadmap and poor performance (compared to Solana and other new layer 1s), with Ethereum crashing (at least that’s what they say). Nevertheless, Ethereum has risen by 58% (in contrast, Bitcoin's year-to-date increase is 120%), and over 500 layer-2s have also blossomed. Particularly, Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum have gained traction in the real world.
Solana's market cap has increased by 111% year-to-date, filled with meme coins and many less fleeting projects. Telegram is now a legitimate blockchain player, marketing click-to-earn games that attract hundreds of millions of players worldwide. DePIN (or decentralized physical infrastructure) has taken off as a category, promising to realize real-world infrastructure (telecommunications, electricity, maps, etc.) and a different form of crypto adoption. Polymarket shows that prediction markets may be better than polls and just as relevant to crypto traders and ordinary people alike. AI is becoming part of everything.
Stablecoins remain the most popular form of cryptocurrency (by transaction volume), looking more like a global payment layer. USDT dominates, and with profitable margins, Tether has invested in a series of non-USDT projects, hoping to one day trade legally in the U.S.
Cryptocurrency has demonstrated real political power, helping Trump and over 50 other congressional candidates get elected. Political action committees like Fairshake seem well-suited for 2026.
Europe, while not as vibrant as Asia and the U.S., has implemented MICA, becoming the first region to have a comprehensive policy framework. Hong Kong and Singapore are leading in the Asia-Pacific.
Here are the top ten figures to watch in the crypto industry in 2024.
Andy Ayrey, Creator of Truth Terminal
Andy Ayrey, a 34-year-old AI researcher from New Zealand, describes himself as a 'performance artist'. His AI robot demonstrates how decentralized AI can encrypt, build communities, and even turn stories into reality. Andy Ayrey created Truth Terminal. In a sense, Truth Terminal has influenced the real-world dynamics of humanity, currency, and cryptocurrency. By creating GOAT, Truth Terminal transformed a mundane joke into a billion-dollar fortune, embodying the narrative of the 'AI agency economy', representing greater hope for the burgeoning space of 'crypto + AI' in many ways.
Ansem, Meme coin KOL
During this cycle, he made substantial returns using Solana and a series of meme coins (the exact amount he is reluctant to disclose). His tweets on tokens to watch garnered hundreds of thousands of views. His musings on Solana earned him titles like 'Solana Guy.'
As early as 2020, Ansem began tweeting about token purchases when he had only 100 followers. As some of his bets started to yield noticeable returns, followers began to flock to him. He became a minor celebrity known for his early involvement in Solana, Avalanche, and other assets. Today, he is perhaps most closely associated with Dogwifhat, which he began promoting when its market cap was $100,000 (now over $3 billion).
Cynthia Lummis, U.S. Congresswoman
Lummis is Congress's most important advocate for cryptocurrency, a major supporter of establishing strategic Bitcoin reserves and a leading advocate for stablecoin legislation in the Senate. With the Republican Party controlling all three government branches in 2025, both issues are likely to be on the agenda this year.
She has held Bitcoin since 2013 and has a unique understanding of its importance. 'We need a store of value that is decoupled from the economy.' This year, she proposed stablecoin legislation with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D), hoping to become a key advocate on the issue.
Donald Trump, next U.S. president
Since Trump won his second term in office, Bitcoin's price has skyrocketed in the past month, rising by over $30,000, a nearly 45% increase. It is widely believed that Bitcoin's rapid rise to three digits is a direct result of Trump's victory. The crypto industry hopes that with Trump taking office in the White House next year, the crypto industry will finally gain regulatory clarity, paving the way for further growth and expansion of the digital asset sector. 'If cryptocurrency is to define the future, I hope it is mined, minted, and manufactured in the U.S.'
Fairshake, PAC
Fairshake is the largest player in U.S. political corporate funding. Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and cryptocurrency investment firm a16z have created Fairshake from the ruins of the industry's latest campaign mechanisms. Fairshake is a brand new initiative that 'truly brings together the elite and blue-chip firms of the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.'
Jing Wang, Co-founder of Optimism
In 2024, Kraken, Uniswap, World Network (formerly known as Worldcoin), and Sony's blockchain lab have all used Optimism's technology to create their own scalable blockchains. The 'textbook' project she began focusing on is Plasma, an expansion design that predates rollups, which eventually became the forerunner to Optimism today. After the Plasma Group was formed, she discovered that people really wanted a Layer 2 that was cheaper and faster, so they made adjustments and sketched out the optimistic rollup.
Optimism adopted this technology to package large amounts of transaction data into digestible batches, making its transaction costs lower than Ethereum. Since Optimism's launch, rollups have become so popular that they have received widespread application. Other notable projects include Arbitrum, Blast, zkSync, Polygon, Starknet, and Scroll.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock
In 2023, the world's largest asset management company, BlackRock, applied to create a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, shocking the investment and cryptocurrency world. With the financial giant's unexpected entry into the cryptocurrency space, the price of BTC surged. In 2024, BlackRock and several other issuers received permission from U.S. regulators. Many are skeptical that BlackRock's strong support for Bitcoin ETFs may help influence the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to Coinmarketcap data, the market cap of cryptocurrencies has grown from about $1 trillion when BlackRock submitted its Bitcoin ETF filing to nearly $3.6 trillion now.
Waiting for the best moment may be Fink's secret. He believes the difference between a great company and a good one is not in being the earliest adopter of new trends but in their ability and openness to reinvent themselves in a constantly changing world. BlackRock did not invent ETFs. Others invented ETFs in 1993. But 15 years ago, Fink's company achieved tremendous success in this field by acquiring iShares. This year, iShares launched BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF.
ETF expert Nate Geraci, closely following the development of cryptocurrency ETFs, stated, 'The support of one of the most powerful and influential figures in finance for cryptocurrency ETFs clearly changes the game.'
Shayne Coplan, Founder of Polymarket
In 2024, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan transformed it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, becoming a popular indicator of political sentiment, referenced by media outlets from Donald Trump to CNN.
Coplan has brought unprecedented attention to a long-standing academic argument: that the combination of collective wisdom and vested interests can yield more accurate predictions—if not at least more accurate sentiment measures—compared to traditional experts or polls.
During this year's U.S. presidential election cycle alone, Polymarket's trading volume reached $3.6 billion, accounting for 74% of the market share. In previous election cycles, the entire prediction market industry's trading volume never exceeded $1 billion.
Sreeram Kannan, Founder of EigenLayer
Kannan views EigenLayer as a 'spirited startup.' Over the past 12 months, EigenLayer (which allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum's robust security) has evolved from a relatively obscure company to an industry giant. The platform has raised over $100 million from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and even attracted hundreds of millions in deposits from crypto users seeking extra yield before its full launch. Many are incentivized by a viral points program, with investors hoping it will translate into lucrative token airdrops in the future.
EigenLayer's success during the bear market is remarkable, and Kannan's role in revitalizing decentralized finance on Ethereum may be greater than any other entrepreneur's. In addition to operating Eigen Labs, he still serves as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, where his 're-staking' theory (allowing people to use re-staked Ethereum assets to secure other networks) has sparked a wave of innovation and imitation. 'Blockchain is the greatest advancement in human civilization since the U.S. Constitution.'
Tigran Gambaryan, Executive at Binance
After spending a long and painful eight months in a Nigerian prison, Gambaryan has finally returned home to Atlanta, recovering from his ordeal. A series of illnesses he contracted during his time in Kuje prison, including malaria, double pneumonia, and a herniated disc, caused him excruciating pain and made walking difficult.
Nigerian officials have also dropped money laundering charges against him that had been pending since March, after the Nigerian government accused Binance of helping to transfer about $23 billion in untraceable funds in 2023, contributing to the devaluation of the naira.
Gambaryan is not just an ordinary U.S. executive being extorted for ransom—he is a former federal agent who served as an IRS investigator and was part of the federal government's early elite cryptocurrency tracking team. During his tenure at the IRS, Gambaryan played a central role in some of the biggest cryptocurrency crime busts in the industry's history, including the takedown of the child sexual abuse video network Welcome to Video and the dark web marketplace Alpha Bay, recovering nearly 70,000 bitcoins stolen from Silk Road and 650,000 bitcoins stolen from Mt. Gox. Gambaryan played a 'significant role' in pushing the IRS-CI to become the leading federal agency in cryptocurrency investigations.
Here are 40 other influential figures:
Adam Sullivan, CEO of Core Scientific
2024 will be a transformative year for Bitcoin miners, many of whom are investing heavily in operating AI (AI) data centers. However, no company has been as successful as Core Scientific (CORZ), which emerged from bankruptcy in January under CEO Adam Sullivan's leadership and subsequently struck a multi-billion dollar deal with long-term business partner AI hyperscale provider CoreWeave. Core Scientific is the first mining company to massively enter the AI computing space, bringing renewed attention to the mining industry.
Arthur Hayes, Founder of 100X, Bitmex
Hayes's family office Maelstrom has made dozens of high-profile investments since its founding last year. However, this year, the investment that has truly captured the market’s attention is Ethena, or USDe. Unlike the two leading players, USDC or USDT, it maintains its $1 value by using staked Ether as support and offsetting price changes with short positions on ETH, while earning from staking rewards and market fees.
USDe also perfectly embodies Hayes's skeptical worldview of fiat currency—it provides a synthetic dollar alternative that is entirely independent of the traditional banking system. Hayes believes that decentralized finance (including digital assets like USDe) is essential to counter the continuous depreciation of value inherent in fiat systems.
Avery Ching, Co-founder of Aptos
In 2024, Aptos has made significant progress in collaborating with both crypto and traditional financial institutions, whether in terms of technology or with products like the digital asset management platform Aptos Ascend aimed at financial institutions, as well as new integrations with Stripe, Circle, and Tether. Companies like Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and Libre have deployed tokenized assets on Aptos.
Balaji Srinivasan, Creator of The Network State
The Network State is a plan for technology utopians to abandon outdated nation-states and establish geographically decentralized technocratic sovereignty. As political debates focus on those investing in existing institutions versus those wanting to create new ones, 'The Network State' has rapidly gained popularity as a primary exit strategy.
Brian Nelson, U.S. Treasury official
By the end of this year, Nelson will leave the U.S. Treasury to become a leading figure in the cryptocurrency space for Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. Nelson previously served as the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury responsible for terrorism and financial intelligence, playing a significant role in the cryptocurrency domain, leading efforts against digital asset mixing services and connections with terrorists, and attempting to expand the federal government's influence in the field.
Nelson focuses on the darker side of cryptocurrency, believing that cryptocurrency technology could become a tool to fund international terrorism and criminal groups, considering anonymous services like Tornado Cash as a means for bad actors to transfer cash with impunity. To this end, Nelson attempts to change government measures to prevent the technology's development.
David Tse, Co-founder of Babylon
The Babylon protocol is one of the most important projects in the emerging field, aiming to introduce practicality to the world's oldest blockchain, which is commonly found in other networks. While the Bitcoin network itself does not allow staking (as it is a proof-of-work blockchain), Babylon's protocol allows users to stake BTC to secure other chains, thereby providing the original cryptocurrency's security for the broader crypto world.
2024 is a brilliant year for Babylon's development, raising $70 million in a funding round in May and receiving an enthusiastic response from stakers when the mainnet launched in August. For security reasons, the mainnet launch cap was set at 1,000 BTC, which was achieved in just over an hour. The protocol started its second round of funding in October, raising 24,000 BTC in about an hour and 40 minutes.
Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, Bloomberg analysts
Balchunas and Seyffart are at the forefront of social media, telling those unreliable people and professionals whether they might 'favor' or 'oppose' these highly anticipated products. Balchunas had long anticipated the heated discussion around Bitcoin ETFs; back in 2013, he tweeted: 'It's crazy: just the registration application for a Bitcoin ETF has garnered more media attention and tweet engagement than dozens of new useful ETFs combined.'
Eric Semler, Chairman of Semler Scientific
In 2024, the first U.S. publicly traded company owner attracted by Bitcoin is Eric Semler, whose medical technology company Semler Scientific has chosen Bitcoin as its primary reserve asset.
Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer, Francisco Alarcon, Founders of Taproot Wizards
Taproot Wizards is a collection of 2,108 JPEG images inscribed on Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol, which raised $7.5 million in seed funding in 2024. Taproot Wizards was founded by Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer, and Francisco Alarcon, with the mission to 'make Bitcoin magical again.' The project is now focusing on using the proposed OP_CAT protocol to upgrade Bitcoin itself, a protocol originally built into Bitcoin by Satoshi but removed due to concerns over excessive memory usage and potential vulnerabilities.
Erik Voorhees, Founder of Venice.AI
The representative of 'crypto + AI' is Erik Voorhees. His career spans multiple eras. In 2012, when Voorhees launched the blockchain-based gambling game 'Satoshi Dice'—which accounted for half of Bitcoin's total trading volume—he pioneered a new use case for cryptocurrency.
He is now applying the spirit of Bitcoin to the next wave of AI, launching Venice.AI, which has the humble goal of 'unconstrained civilizational progress.' On May 10, Vorhees explained upon announcing Venice's launch that the application resembles ChatGPT or Claude, but Venice will not censor conversations or 'inject biases, safetyism, or political propaganda.'
Evan Cheng, Founder of Mysten Labs
The Sui created by Evan Cheng is not just building another blockchain. He has designed a paradigm shift. Over the past year, due to market confidence in its new infrastructure developments, such as improvements to the underlying Move programming language and the launch of Circle's on-chain USDC, Sui has emerged as one of the darlings of the bull market, with its total locked value (TVL) skyrocketing from over $200 million at the beginning of the year to over $1.5 billion.
Cheng learned lessons from Meta's (then Facebook) troubled Diem project, creating a first-layer blockchain that is not only faster and cheaper but fundamentally different from other first-layer blockchains. With these lessons, Cheng and his team created Move, making coding more efficient and streamlined. 'The most successful projects on Sui are not clones of existing DeFi protocols; they are native products that cannot be built elsewhere.'
Frank Mong, COO of Helium
As thousands of DePIN projects flourish in 2024, they should particularly thank a decentralized physical infrastructure network for pointing the way: Helium. 'We see that in 2024, new companies will emerge with a wide variety of ideas and use cases, making Helium's economic model truly power real-world physical infrastructure. It's amazing.'
Fred Thiel, CEO of MARA
Under the leadership of Fred Thiel, MARA Holdings (MARA), formerly Marathon Digital Holdings, has become not only one of the largest Bitcoin miners globally but also the second-largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, with roughly $3.9 billion in value on its balance sheet.
Under Thiel's leadership, MARA has fully committed to Bitcoin, becoming the first miner to follow the footsteps of MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor by making large purchases of digital assets in the spot market. The company recently even successfully raised $1 billion to buy more Bitcoin, and Thiel may be the Michael Saylor of the Bitcoin mining industry.
Greg Osuri, Co-founder of Akash
Akash can be seen as an open-source 'supercloud' that allows people to buy and sell computing, which is now a coveted resource in the age of AI. This is the core concept of decentralized physical infrastructure (also known as DePIN)—using blockchain technology to organize inherently decentralized resources (in this case, computing). Akash aims to serve as a long-term alternative to centralized chips from Nvidia, making computing costs more affordable for individual users. 'Akash empowers you with the right to compute, freedom from censorship, and the liberty of free thought.'
Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald, Bitwise executive
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and CIO Matt Hougan have worked tirelessly over the past seven years to bring institutional capital into the cryptocurrency space and finally secured approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum earlier this year. This digital asset management company launched funds for both assets, managing over $10 billion, while the third ETF for Solana may also be coming soon.
But their efforts in the cryptocurrency space go far beyond that, as the two frequently share insights on their work with their large social media followings, pushing large banks, multi-family offices, and other highly relevant institutional investors to 'work to open access to Bitcoin.' Hougan stated, 'We are entering the golden age of cryptocurrency.'
IIlia Polosukhin, Co-founder of NEAR
Long before co-founding the decentralized application blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked as an AI researcher at Google and co-authored the groundbreaking paper 'Attention Is All You Need' in 2017, widely regarded as a precursor to 'Transformer' technology that powers popular large language model (LLM) AI applications like ChatGPT. His credentials in AI are impeccable.
'AI is indeed a powerful force,' Polosukhin pointed out in 2023, 'but we don't want it to be controlled and biased by a single company.' Therefore, Polosukhin is now combining his initial passion (AI) with NEAR's decentralized mission, working to create a complete ecosystem for decentralized AI, from computation to training to agency. 'AI is right on NEAR.'
Johnny Ng, Hong Kong lawmaker
As Hong Kong moves to embrace cryptocurrencies and Web3, he has also become a leading advocate for the industry within the government, inviting companies like Coinbase to apply for regulation (which they declined) and calling for the launch of cryptocurrency ETFs in Hong Kong (which received approval in April). Last November, he appealed to the Nobel Committee to consider Satoshi Nakamoto as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize or the Nobel Prize in Economics. 'The emergence of Bitcoin based on blockchain technology is addressing inflation issues in some countries and providing economic solutions for poorer regions. It is also radically changing the way global payments work, reflecting the current state of the global economy.'
Julia Leung, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission
Leung Fung-yi, CEO of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), noted: 'While debates over Bitcoin's intrinsic value will continue, the fact is that Bitcoin has undergone multiple cycles of boom and bust over the past 15 years, clearly demonstrating its resilience as an alternative asset. More definitively, the underlying technology of Bitcoin—distributed ledger technology (DLT)—will persist.'
Justin Sun, Founder of TRON
By market capitalization, TRON is the third-largest blockchain project globally, yet its founder prefers to ignore criticism and focus on building. Justin Sun's cryptocurrency holdings have increased by nearly $700 million this year, from $1.5 billion at the start of the year to now $2.2 billion, making him the richest person in the cryptocurrency space. This is largely due to the rapid growth of TRX and the surge of stablecoins issued on-chain, which has now exceeded $60 billion. For a brief moment, USDT on TRON surpassed that on Ethereum.
Keone Hon, Co-founder of Monad
In early 2022, during the cryptocurrency winter, Hon left Jump and co-founded Monad Labs with others. This vision attracted $225 million in funding in 2024, one of the largest cryptocurrency financings of the year. Monad's technical specifications say it all: Ethereum processes 15 transactions per second (TPS) at fees of $10 to $50, while Solana processes 2,600 TPS at under a cent, and Monad aims to execute 10,000 transactions at only $0.001 each. Currently, the daily trading volume in DeFi still reaches billions, just a small fraction of traditional finance's daily trillion-dollar trading volume.
Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation
The two-year recovery story of the Solana blockchain may have peaked in late November as SOL hit an all-time high. Liu has shifted the industry's focus from Solana itself to the entrepreneurs building permissionless financial systems on it, from stablecoins to gaming, among others. This could bring significant changes in the race to prove the utility of blockchain.
Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins
Luca Netz recently announced plans to launch his own PENGU token on Solana in 2025. About a quarter of the tokens will be reserved for the project's NFT holders, while the rest will be reserved for Solana and Ethereum users.
Pudgy's success proves Netz's efforts; he acquired the Pudgy Penguins NFT series in April 2022 after a bidding war with Web3 influencers like BeanieMaxi. Netz maintained the brand's relevance, selling 1.5 million plush toys at Walmart and Target. Pudgy has a loyal online fan base, with 2 million followers on Instagram, 520,000 on TikTok, and 205,000 on X (formerly Twitter). Videos of the penguin characters have garnered 32 billion views on Giphy.
Luuk Strijers, CEO of Deribit
Luuk Strijers stated: 'It feels like stepping into this rebellious crossroads—Kafka's struggle against systemic constraints resonates in today's digital asset revolution.' Under Strijers's leadership, Deribit has solidified its dominance in the cryptocurrency derivatives space, capturing 80% of the global cryptocurrency options market share. Daily trading volume exceeds $1.3 billion, far surpassing competitors like Binance, OKX, and CME.
Mahesh Ramakrishnan, key figure at EV3 Ventures
DePIN is one of the biggest news stories in the crypto space for 2024. From telecommunications and energy to maps and weather data, DePIN has emerged to provide useful services for end-users via blockchain, tokens, and smart contracts.
Ramakrishnan believes the success of DePIN stems from several factors. First, governments, traditional finance, and conventional companies are unable to meet the enormous demand for new infrastructure. Second, DePIN networks have begun to demonstrate superior economics and functionality compared to centralized systems, with telecommunications being a notable example. Ramakrishnan sees DePIN as part of a larger shift away from traditional governmental structures following the 2008 financial crisis. DePIN is designed fundamentally differently, where users share services and receive direct rewards for participation in the form of tokens. It's a shared economy where incentives and rewards are widely distributed.
Matthew Long, Director of Payments and Digital Assets at the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
Long oversaw a strict regime requiring companies to comply with anti-money laundering rules, resulting in only four cryptocurrency companies being authorized to operate in the UK in 2024. Overall, out of 365 applicant companies, 48 received approval. Leading the policy development of the cryptocurrency industry, Long held a series of roundtable meetings earlier this year about the UK's upcoming cryptocurrency regime. The FCA also indicated its intention to publish a series of documents to gather industry views on stablecoins, trading platforms, staking, and more, aiming to finalize the industry's rules by 2026.
Michael Saylor, CEO of Microstrategy
Since 2020, Michael Saylor has paved the way for companies to purchase Bitcoin. Through massive securities sales, he successfully raised funds for MicroStrategy to buy tens of billions worth of Bitcoin. Whether in a bull or bear market, Saylor has bought large amounts of BTC.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether
Paolo Ardoino is the CEO and spokesperson of stablecoin giant Tether, which maintains its dominance in the cryptocurrency market this year. The company's flagship token USDT was the first and remains the only stablecoin to exceed a market capitalization of $100 billion, holding a 70% market share of this rapidly growing asset class. 2024 is expected to be a breakthrough year for stablecoins. But under Ardoino's leadership, Tether has begun to bet on the next big event. The company is converting its profits into venture capital in payments, telecommunications, AI, and Bitcoin mining. It has also made significant strides into commodity trade financing, recently launching a tokenized platform—another hot trend in crypto.
Patrick McHenry, Chairman of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee
In 2022, he began fighting for an industry that had just suffered massive destruction and reputational damage, embarking on a tough battle. He believes that digital asset regulation is a goal worth investing significant political capital, and he has engaged in intense battles with congressional committees, parties, and chambers, ultimately submitting his (21st Century Financial Innovation and Technology Act) (FIT21) for review by the House in May 2024.
Pavel Durov, Founder of Telegram
Pavel Durov only came into the public eye on August 24, 2024. The global 120th richest person, with a fortune of $15.5 billion (according to Forbes), is not only notable for that. Durov's achievements in social media are what truly set him apart—his outspoken stance in support of internet freedom highlights his active role in this world.
Durov's early success in social media came in Russia when he co-founded the social networking site VKontakte (VK) in 2006. The controversies sparked by the site, along with subsequent government intervention in Russia, forced Durov to leave his homeland in 2014, just a year after he co-developed the groundbreaking social site Telegram with his brother Nikolai. In 2017, the company relocated its headquarters to the United Arab Emirates. This year, Durov was arrested. To him, the internet is freedom. The exchange of ideas should be encouraged, not suppressed. His arrest was essentially the result of a long-term joint surveillance operation between the French government and the UAE, both governments wanting the key to Durov's encryption codes.
Pump.fun, Memecoin launchpad
Solana's status as the top memecoin chain is largely attributed to its rising launch platform, Pump.Fun. Pump.Fun redefined how cryptocurrency investors create and bet on joke cryptocurrencies in 2024. In the process, it earned its founding team hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since its debut in the UK at the beginning of 2024, Pump.Fun has launched over 4 million memecoins.
Ray Chan, CEO of Memeland
Ray Chan merges humor and culture with blockchain using his expertise, bringing the meme culture he helped create in Web2 to Web3. Chan sees Web3 as an opportunity to redefine the interaction between fans and creators through a 'fan-proof' model, where creators can engage with fans while building an ownership layer, something impossible in the Web2 world.
Richard Teng, CEO of Binance
Since taking office last November, Teng has been dedicated to transforming Binance from a founder-led organization (like during Changpeng Zhao's six years as CEO) into a board-led organization. He has also made Binance comply with a range of global regulations, invested heavily in developing compliance personnel for the cryptocurrency exchange, and secured regulatory approvals from authorities worldwide. Under Teng's leadership, Binance's management team has ambitious expectations for the future of cryptocurrency exchanges: 'This is really about building a sustainable business that not only succeeds in the coming years but continues to thrive for the next 50 to 100 years.'
Robin Linus, Founder of BitVM2
In October 2023, Robin Linus published a white paper introducing a theoretical method to make Bitcoin more programmable, shaking the cryptocurrency development field. The well-known 'BitVM' was subsequently iterated again in August 2024 as 'BitVM2', revealing improvements that could bring this concept closer to realization. The BitVM proposed by him is hailed as a breakthrough as it requires no changes to the Bitcoin code. The initial release of Linus's designed BitVM sparked enthusiasm for building projects on Bitcoin.
Rune Christensen, Co-founder of Maker/Sky
This year is a pivotal one for Rune Christensen's bold plan to transform MakerDAO, the largest and oldest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol. The platform has been renamed Sky—although the process has not been smooth—and he has also launched a new stablecoin and governance token.
The protocol announced a 'tokenized prize,' investing a stablecoin reserve worth $1 billion into tokenized real-world assets (RWA), attracting interest from dozens of issuers, including BlackRock's tokenized money market BUIDL.
Satoshi Nakamoto
As Bitcoin's price surged in 2024, traditional media outlets took on the unrealistic mission of finding Satoshi Nakamoto, 13 years after his disappearance. HBO heavily promoted 'The Mysterious Case of Bitcoin,' with several industry figures suspected of being Satoshi.
Sergio Demian Lerner, Founder of Rootstock
Sergio Demian Lerner is a programmer from Buenos Aires known for his early research on Satoshi's mining activities and later contributions to Ethereum development. Rootstock is currently working on its 'BitVMX' project, which aims to enhance Bitcoin's programmability by leveraging the BitVM design released by Robin Linus at the end of 2023. The project's white paper states: 'The BitVMX framework provides the foundation for running any CPU on Bitcoin.' The goal of BitVMX is to bring Linus's BitVM paradigm into practice by creating a framework to run programs on Bitcoin and further develop sidechains and layer 2.
Steve Yun, President of the TON Foundation
TON is experiencing explosive growth, now exceeding a market cap of $17 billion, making it the 13th largest project in the entire cryptocurrency space. After U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler announced plans to resign early next year, Yun tweeted, 'TON is going to the U.S.'
Yat Siu, Co-founder of Animoca
The total market capitalization of Animoca Brands' portfolio companies is $35.6 billion, having increased nearly 37% in just the past 30 days. Siu believes, 'Digital ownership can provide the foundation for a more equitable society.' 'Ownership and capitalism are the foundation for achieving democracy.' Siu expects substantial progress in developing regulations governing digital asset ownership around the world by the end of next year. He explains, 'This will empower users with clear rights over their digital assets, granting them power—these rights are already realized through blockchain technology, but remain less understood in many jurisdictions.'
ZachXBT, Blockchain detective
Since 2021, anonymous blockchain detective ZachXBT has built an unparalleled reputation for relentlessly pursuing cryptocurrency thieves and scammers. He has 700,000 followers on X and 45,500 followers on Telegram.
