CoinDesk has selected 50 figures who defined the cryptocurrency space in 2024.
These names come from finance, technology, policy, and other fields.
Politics and regulation are a major theme in 2024.
Major trends: prediction markets, ETFs, artificial intelligence, DePIN, and Bitcoin's dominance.
Welcome to this year's most influential list.
It has been an extraordinary year. The gloom at the start of 2024 has finally lifted.
With the approval of Bitcoin ETFs in January and Donald Trump’s re-election in November, the sentiment around everything cryptocurrency has shifted. New investors are entering the market, and funds are flowing across categories.
Bitcoin has maintained its supreme position, soaring to $100,000 in December last year. Bitcoin's dominance exceeds 70%. This U.S. president-elect has also promised to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, potentially purchasing up to 5% of Bitcoin's total supply for the U.S.
The issuance of Bitcoin ETFs has been historically successful, having garnered $145 billion in investments. Bitcoin has found a widely recognized role—digital gold—appearing increasingly as a foundational layer of a new financial system.
Critics complain about Ethereum's lengthy development roadmap and poor performance (compared to Solana and other new l15), claiming Ethereum has collapsed (at least that's what they say). Nonetheless, Ethereum is up 58% (compared to Bitcoin's year-to-date increase of 120%), and over 500 layer-2 solutions have also borne fruit. Notably, Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum have gained traction in the real world.
The market cap of Solana has increased by 111% year-to-date, filled with meme coins and many less ephemeral projects. Telegram has now become a genuine blockchain player, attracting hundreds of millions of players worldwide with its click-to-earn games. DePIN (or decentralized physical infrastructure) as a category has taken off, promising to realize real-world infrastructure (telecommunications, power, mapping, etc.) and a different form of crypto adoption. Polymarket indicates that prediction markets may be better than opinion polls and are just as relevant to cryptocurrency traders and the general public. Artificial intelligence has become part of everything.
Stablecoins remain the most popular form of cryptocurrency (by trading volume), appearing more like a global payment layer. USDT dominates, and amid lucrative profits, Tether has invested in a series of non-USDT projects, hoping one day to trade legally in the U.S.
Cryptocurrency has shown real political power, helping Trump and over 50 other congressional candidates to be elected. Political action committees like Fairshake seem well-positioned for 2026.
Europe, while not as vibrant as Asia and the U.S., has implemented MICA, becoming the first region with a comprehensive policy framework. Hong Kong and Singapore are leading in the Asia-Pacific region.
Here are the top ten influential figures to watch in the cryptocurrency industry in 2024.
Andy Ayrey, Creator of Truth Terminal
AI researcher Andy Ayrey from New Zealand (34 years old), who describes himself as a 'performance artist.' His AI robots showcase how decentralized AI can be leveraged for encryption, building communities, and even turning stories into reality. Andy Ayrey created Truth Terminal. In some sense, Truth Terminal has influenced the real-world interaction between humanity, currency, and cryptocurrency. By creating GOAT, Truth Terminal has turned a mundane joke into a billion-dollar fortune, embodying the narrative of the 'AI agent economy,' in many ways representing greater hope for the burgeoning space of 'Crypto + AI.'
Ansem, Meme Coin KOL
During this cycle, he made substantial returns using Solana and a series of meme coins (though he is reluctant to disclose specifics). His tweets on tokens to watch garnered hundreds of thousands of views. His ramblings on Solana earned him titles like 'Solana Guy'.
Back in 2020, Ansem began tweeting about purchasing tokens when he had only 100 followers. As some of his bets started to show significant returns, followers began to flock to him. He became a somewhat famous personality known for his early involvement with Solana, Avalanche, and other assets. Today, he may be closest to Dogwifhat, which he began promoting when its market cap was $100,000 (now over $3 billion).
Cynthia Lummis, U.S. Congresswoman
Lummis is the most important advocate for cryptocurrency in Congress, a primary supporter of establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and a key proponent of stablecoin legislation in the Senate. With Republicans controlling all three branches of government in 2025, these two issues are likely to be pushed to the forefront this year.
She has held Bitcoin since 2013 and has a unique understanding of its significance. 'We need a store of value that is decoupled from the economy.' This year, she introduced stablecoin legislation alongside New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D) and is expected to become a major advocate on the issue.
Donald Trump, Next President of the United States
Since Trump won his second term as U.S. President, Bitcoin's price has soared over the past month, rising more than $30,000, an increase of about 45%. It is widely believed that Bitcoin’s rapid rise to three-digit figures is a direct result of Trump's victory. The crypto industry hopes that with Trump returning to the White House next year, there will finally be regulatory clarity for the industry, paving the way for further growth and expansion in the digital asset sector. 'If cryptocurrency is to define the future, I want it mined, minted, and made in the U.S.'
Fairshake, PAC
Fairshake is the largest corporate funding player in U.S. politics. Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and cryptocurrency investment firm a16z have created Fairshake from the ruins of the industry's latest campaign mechanisms. Fairshake is a new attempt that 'truly brings together the elites and blue-chip companies in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.'
Jing Wang, Co-founder of Optimism
In 2024, Kraken, Uniswap, World Network (formerly Worldcoin), and Sony's blockchain lab all utilized Optimism's technology to create their own scalable blockchains. The 'textbook' project she began focusing on is Plasma, a scaling design that predates rollups, ultimately becoming the predecessor of what is now Optimism. After forming the Plasma Group, she discovered that people indeed wanted a Layer 2 with lower fees and faster transaction speeds, so they made adjustments and proposed the optimistic rollup sketch.
Optimism adopted the technology to package large volumes of transaction data into digestible batches, making its transaction costs lower than Ethereum's. Since Optimism launched, rollups have become so popular that they have seen widespread application. Other notable projects include Arbitrum, Blast, zkSync, Polygon, Starknet, and Scroll.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock
In 2023, BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, applied to create a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, shocking the investment and cryptocurrency communities. As the financial giant unexpectedly entered the cryptocurrency space, BTC's price surged. In 2024, BlackRock and several other issuers received approval from U.S. regulators. Many suspect that BlackRock's strong support for Bitcoin ETFs may influence the SEC. According to Coinmarketcap, 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 right moment may be Fink's secret. He believes the difference between a great company and a good company is not whether they are the earliest adopters of new trends, but their ability and openness to reinvent themselves in a constantly changing world. BlackRock is not the inventor of the ETF; others created the ETF in 1993. But fifteen years ago, Fink's company achieved tremendous success in this space by acquiring iShares. This year, iShares issued BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF.
ETF expert Nate Geraci, closely monitoring the development of cryptocurrency ETFs, stated: 'The support of one of the most powerful and influential figures in finance for cryptocurrency ETFs is clearly a game-changer.'
Shayne Coplan, Founder of Polymarket
In 2024, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan will turn it into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, becoming a popular indicator of political winds, cited by everyone from Donald Trump to media outlets like CNN.
Coplan has brought unprecedented attention to a long-held academic viewpoint: that a combination of collective wisdom and vested interests can make more accurate predictions—or at least serve as more accurate measures of sentiment than traditional experts or opinion polls.
During this year's U.S. presidential election, Polymarket's trading volume reached $3.6 billion, capturing 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 unknown company into an industry giant. The platform raised over $100 million from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, attracting hundreds of millions in deposits from crypto users seeking additional yields even before its full launch. Many were motivated by viral incentive programs, hoping that these would translate into future profitable token airdrops.
EigenLayer's success during the bear market is remarkable; Kannan's role in revitalizing Ethereum's decentralized finance may be greater than that of any other entrepreneur. In addition to operating Eigen Labs, he continues to serve as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, where his 're-staking' theory (allowing people to use staked Ethereum assets to secure other networks) has sparked a wave of innovation and imitation. 'Blockchain is the greatest advancement of human civilization since the U.S. Constitution.'
Tigran Gambaryan, Binance Executive
After spending a long and painful eight months in a Nigerian prison, Gambaryan has finally returned home to Atlanta, recovering from his ordeal. During his time at Kuje prison, he suffered from a series of illnesses, including malaria, bilateral pneumonia, and herniated discs in his back, which left him in severe pain and difficulty walking.
Nigerian officials have also dropped money laundering charges that had been brought against him since March, as the Nigerian government accused Binance of facilitating the transfer of approximately $23 billion in untraceable funds in 2023, leading to the depreciation of the naira.
Gambaryan is not just an ordinary American executive who is a victim of ransomware—he is a former federal agent who served as an investigator for the IRS and was part of the federal government's early elite cryptocurrency tracking team. During his tenure at the IRS, Gambaryan played a pivotal role in some of the largest 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, seizing nearly 70,000 Bitcoins stolen from Silk Road and recovering 650,000 Bitcoins stolen from Mt Gox. Gambaryan played a 'key role' in pushing IRS-CI to become the leading federal agency in cryptocurrency investigations.
Here are 39 other influential figures:
Adam Sullivan, CEO of Core Scientific
2024 is a year of transformation for Bitcoin miners, many of whom are pouring resources into operating 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, subsequently securing a multi-billion dollar deal with its long-time business partner, AI mega-provider CoreWeave.
Core Scientific is the first major mining company to enter the AI computing space, drawing investors' attention back to the mining industry.
Arthur Hayes, Founder of 100X and Bitmex
Hayes' family office Maelstrom has made dozens of high-profile investments since its founding last year. However, the investment that truly captured market attention this year is Ethena, also known as USDe. Unlike the two major players, USDC or USDT, it uses staked Ether as collateral and offsets price changes through short positions in ETH, maintaining its $1 value while earning from staking rewards and market fees.
USDe also embodies Hayes' worldview of skepticism towards fiat currency—offering a synthetic dollar alternative that is entirely independent of the traditional banking system. Hayes believes that decentralized finance (including digital assets like USDe) is crucial to resisting the inherent devaluation of 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 technology or in products like the digital asset management platform Aptos Ascend aimed at financial institutions, with many successful 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 technoutopianists to abandon outdated nation-states and establish geographically dispersed, technocratic sovereignty. As political debates focus on those investing in existing systems versus those wanting to create new systems, '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 is leaving 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 Deputy Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, playing a significant role in combating digital asset mixing services and ties to terrorists, and attempting to expand the federal government's influence in this area.
Nelson focuses on the dark side of cryptocurrency, believing that cryptocurrency technology could become a tool for funding international terrorism and criminal groups, viewing anonymous services like Tornado Cash as means for bad actors to transfer cash with impunity. To this end, Nelson seeks to change government approaches to hinder the development of this technology.
David Tse, Co-founder of Babylon
The Babylon protocol is one of the most important projects in the emerging field, aimed at bringing utility to the oldest blockchain in the world, which is commonly used in other networks. While the Bitcoin network itself does not allow staking (as a proof-of-work blockchain), Babylon's protocol enables users to stake BTC to secure other chains, thereby providing security for the broader crypto world with the original cryptocurrency.
2024 is a brilliant year for Babylon, 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 reached in just over an hour. The protocol kicked off its second round of financing 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, informing those unreliable individuals and professionals whether they might 'support' or 'oppose' these highly anticipated products.
Balchunas foresaw the hype surrounding Bitcoin ETFs early on, tweeting in 2013, 'It's crazy: just the registration application for a Bitcoin ETF has gotten more media attention and tweets than the release of dozens of new useful ETFs combined.'
Eric Semler, Chairman of Semler Scientific
In 2024, the first U.S. publicly listed company 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. Founded by Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer, and Francisco Alarcon, its mission is 'to make Bitcoin magical again,' and the project is now focusing on using the proposed OP_CAT protocol to upgrade Bitcoin itself, which was originally built into Bitcoin by Satoshi but removed due to concerns about excessive memory usage and potential vulnerabilities.
Erik Voorhees, Founder of Venice.AI
'Crypto + AI' representative Erik Voorhees has had a career spanning multiple eras. In 2012, when Voorhees launched the blockchain-based gambling game 'Satoshi Dice'—which accounted for half of Bitcoin's total transactions—he pioneered a new use case for cryptocurrency.
He is now applying the spirit of Bitcoin to the next wave of artificial intelligence, launching Venice.AI, whose humble goal is 'unfettered civilizational advancement.' On May 10, Voorhees explained that the application, similar to ChatGPT or Claude, would not censor conversations or 'inject bias, safetyism, or political propaganda.'
Evan Cheng, Founder of Mysten Labs
Evan Cheng's Sui is not just 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 a darling of the bull market, with its total locked value (TVL) skyrocketing from over $200 million at the start of the year to over $1.5 billion.
Cheng learned from the troubled fate of Meta's (then Facebook) ill-fated Diem project, creating a first-layer blockchain that is not only faster and cheaper but fundamentally different from other first-layer blockchains. Drawing on 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
With thousands of DePIN projects flourishing 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 variety of ideas and use cases, allowing Helium's economic model to truly power physical infrastructure in real life. This is truly amazing.'
Fred Thiel, CEO of MARA
Under Fred Thiel's leadership, MARA Holdings (MARA), formerly Marathon Digital Holdings, has not only become one of the largest Bitcoin miners globally but also the second-largest corporate owner of Bitcoin, with a balance sheet value of approximately $3.9 billion.
Under Thiel's leadership, MARA has fully invested in Bitcoin, becoming the first miner to follow MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor's lead by buying digital assets in bulk on the spot market. The company recently even raised $1 billion to purchase 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 'super cloud' that allows people to buy and sell computing, which is now a coveted resource in the AI era. This is the core concept of decentralized physical infrastructure (also known as DePIN)—using blockchain technology to organize resources that would otherwise be decentralized (in this case, computing). Akash aims to serve as a long-term alternative to Nvidia's centralized chips, enabling personal users to afford computing costs more easily. 'Akash empowers you with the right to compute, freedom from censorship, and freedom of thought.'
Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald, Bitwise Executive
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan have tirelessly worked for the past seven years to bring institutional funds into the cryptocurrency space, finally receiving approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this year for the spot ETFs of Bitcoin and Ethereum. This digital asset management company has launched funds for both assets, bringing its assets under management to over $10 billion, while a third ETF for Solana may also be coming soon.
But their efforts in the cryptocurrency space go far beyond that; the two frequently share insights from their work with their large social media followings, pushing the narrative that large banks, family offices, and other highly relevant institutional investors 'are working to open access to Bitcoin.' Hougan stated, 'We are entering the golden age of cryptocurrency.'
Ilia 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 the 'Transformer' technology that underpins popular large language model (LLM) AI applications like ChatGPT. His credentials in AI are impeccable.
'Artificial intelligence is indeed a powerful force,' Polosukhin stated 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 (artificial intelligence) with NEAR's decentralized mission to create a comprehensive ecosystem for decentralized artificial intelligence, ranging from computation to training to agents. 'AI is at NEAR.'
Johnny Ng, Hong Kong lawmaker
As Hong Kong turns to embrace cryptocurrency 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 were approved in April). Last November, he called on the Nobel Prize 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 revolutionizing global payment methods, reflecting the state of the global economy.'
Julia Leung, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission
CEO of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, Laura Liang, pointed out: 'While the debate over Bitcoin's intrinsic value will continue, the fact is that Bitcoin has experienced multiple cycles of boom and bust over the past 15 years, clearly demonstrating its durability as an alternative asset. More clearly, the underlying technology of Bitcoin—distributed ledger technology (DLT)—will continue to exist.'
Justin Sun, Founder of TRON
By market capitalization, Tron is the third-largest blockchain project globally, and its founder tends to ignore criticism, focusing on building. Justin Sun's cryptocurrency holdings have increased nearly $700 million this year, from $1.5 billion at the beginning of the year to $2.2 billion now, making him the richest person in the cryptocurrency field. This is largely due to the explosive growth of TRX and the surge in stablecoins issued on-chain, which now exceeds $60 billion. There was a brief period when 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 crypto financings of the year. Monad's technical specifications speak volumes: Ethereum processes 15 transactions per second (TPS) at costs of $10 to $50, while Solana processes 2,600 transactions at less than a cent, and Monad aims to execute 10,000 transactions at just $0.001 each. Currently, daily DeFi transaction volumes still reach billions of dollars, but only a small fraction of the trillions traded daily in traditional finance.
Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation
The two-year recovery story of the Solana blockchain may have peaked in late November with SOL reaching an all-time high. Liu has shifted the focus from Solana itself to the entrepreneurs building permissionless financial systems on top of it, from stablecoins to gaming and more. This could lead to significant changes in the race to prove the utility of the blockchain.
Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins
Luca Netz recently announced that he will launch his own PENGU token on Solana in 2025. About a quarter of the tokens will be reserved for NFT holders of the project, while the remaining tokens will be reserved for Solana and Ethereum users.
Pudgy's success proves Netz's efforts; after a bidding war with Web3 influencers like BeanieMaxi, he acquired the Pudgy Penguins NFT series in April 2022. Netz has kept the brand relevant, selling 1.5 million plush toys at Walmart and Target. Pudgy boasts a loyal online fanbase, with 2 million followers on Instagram, 520,000 on TikTok, and 205,000 on X (formerly Twitter). Videos of the penguin character have garnered 32 billion views on Giphy.
Luuk Strijers, CEO of Deribit
Luuk Strijers said: 'It feels like stepping into this rebellious crossroads—Kafka's struggle against systemic constraints resonates in today's digital asset revolution.' Under Strijers' leadership, Deribit has solidified its dominance in the cryptocurrency derivatives space, capturing 80% of the global cryptocurrency options market. Daily trading volume exceeds $1.3 billion, far surpassing competitors like Binance, OKX, and CME.
Mahesh Ramakrishnan, Core figure in EV3 Ventures
DePIN is one of the biggest news in the crypto space in 2024. From telecommunications and energy to mapping and weather data, DePIN has emerged to provide useful services to end-users through blockchain, tokens, and smart contracts.
Ramakrishnan believes that the success of DePIN is driven by various factors. First, the massive demand for new infrastructure cannot be met by governments, traditional finance, and conventional companies. Second, DePIN networks are beginning to demonstrate superior economics and functionality compared to centralized systems, with telecommunications being a prominent example. Ramakrishnan sees DePIN as part of a larger shift away from traditional government structures post the 2008 financial crisis. The design of DePIN is entirely different, where users share services and receive direct participation rewards in the form of tokens. It is a sharing economy where incentives and rewards are widely shared.
Matthew Long, Director of Payments and Digital Assets at the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
Long has overseen a strict regime requiring companies to comply with anti-money laundering rules, resulting in only four cryptocurrency companies being permitted to operate in the UK in 2024. Overall, out of 365 applicant companies, 48 received approval. Long, who leads policy-making in the cryptocurrency industry, held a series of roundtables earlier this year on the imminent cryptocurrency regime in the UK, and the FCA has also stated its intention to release a series of documents to gather industry views on stablecoins, trading platforms, staking, and other matters, with the aim of determining the final rules for the industry by 2026.
Michael Saylor, CEO of Microstrategy
Since 2020, Michael Saylor has paved the way for corporations to buy Bitcoin. Through massive securities sales, he successfully raised funds for MicroStrategy to purchase billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Whether in a bull or bear market, Saylor has amassed a significant amount of BTC.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether
Paolo Ardoino is the CEO and spokesperson for stablecoin giant Tether, which continues to hold its dominant position in the cryptocurrency market this year. The company's flagship token USDT is the first and so far the only stablecoin to exceed a market cap of $100 billion, commanding 70% of this rapidly growing asset class. 2024 is poised to be a breakthrough year for stablecoins. However, under Ardoino's leadership, Tether has begun betting on the next big event. The company is transforming its profits into venture capital in payments, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and Bitcoin mining. It has also made significant strides into commodity trade finance, recently launching a tokenization platform—another hot trend in cryptocurrency.
Patrick McHenry, Chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee
In 2022, he began to fight for an industry that had just suffered massive destruction and reputational damage, embarking on a tough battle. He sees digital asset regulation as a worthy target for significant political capital, engaging in intense negotiations with various congressional committees, parties, and chambers, ultimately submitting his (21st Century Financial Innovation and Technology Act) (FIT21) for consideration in the House in May 2024.
Pavel Durov, Founder of Telegram
It wasn't until August 24, 2024, that Pavel Durov entered the public eye. This global billionaire, with a fortune of $15.5 billion (according to Forbes), is notable for more than just this. Durov's achievements in social media are what truly set him apart—his public stance in support of internet freedom highlights his active role in this world.
Durov's initial success in social media came in Russia, where he co-founded the social networking site VKontakte (VK) in 2006. The controversy sparked by the site and subsequent intervention by the Russian government forced Durov to leave his homeland in 2014, just a year after he co-developed the groundbreaking social networking 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 a space for freedom. The exchange of ideas should be encouraged, not suppressed. His arrest was, in fact, the result of a long-term joint surveillance operation by the French government in collaboration with the UAE. Both governments sought to obtain the keys to Durov's encrypted code.
Pump.fun, Memecoin launchpad
Solana's status as the top memecoin chain is largely due to the rise of its launch platform Pump.Fun. Pump.Fun redefined how cryptocurrency investors create and bet on joke cryptocurrencies in 2024. In the process, it has earned its founding team hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since its debut in the UK in early 2024, Pump.Fun has launched over 4 million memecoins.
Ray Chan, CEO of Memeland
Ray Chan blends humor and culture with blockchain, bringing the meme culture he helped create in Web2 to Web3.
Chan believes that Web3 is an opportunity to redefine the interaction between fans and creators through 'fan proof,' where creators can interact with fans while building ownership layers that were impossible in the Web2 world.
Richard Teng, CEO of Binance
Since taking office last November, Teng has worked to transform Binance from a founder-led organization (like during the six years Changpeng Zhao was CEO) to a board-led organization. He has also made Binance comply with a range of global regulations, investing heavily in compliance personnel for cryptocurrency exchanges and gaining regulatory approvals from authorities around the world.
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 succeeds not only 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, shocking the cryptocurrency development community. The well-known 'BitVM' was then iterated in August 2024 with 'BitVM2', revealing some improvements that bring this concept closer to realization. The BitVM proposed by Linus has been hailed as a breakthrough since it requires no changes to the Bitcoin code. The initial release of BitVM designed by Linus has sparked enthusiasm for building projects on Bitcoin.
Rune Christensen, 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 rebranded as Sky—though not without its bumps—and he has also launched a new stablecoin and governance token.
The protocol announced a 'tokenized prize' that will allocate a $1 billion reserve of stablecoins to tokenized real-world assets (RWA), attracting interest from dozens of issuers, including BlackRock's tokenized money market BUIDL. Sky's new USDS stablecoin has also expanded from its long-standing home on Ethereum to the hot Solana blockchain, which Christensen previously expressed admiration for and suggested creating a custom chain for Maker/Sky using Solana's underlying technology.
Satoshi Nakamoto
As Bitcoin prices surge in 2024, traditional media outlets have taken on the unrealistic mission of finding Satoshi Nakamoto, 13 years after his disappearance. HBO has heavily promoted (Currency: The Bitcoin Mystery), with several industry figures being suspected to be Nakamoto.
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 basis for running any CPU on Bitcoin.' BitVMX aims to put into practice the theory behind Linus's BitVM paradigm by creating a framework for running programs on Bitcoin and achieving further development of sidechains and Layer 2.
Steve Yun, President of the TON Foundation
TON is experiencing explosive growth, now with a market cap exceeding $17 billion, making it the 13th largest project in the entire cryptocurrency space. After SEC Chairman Gary Gensler announced plans to resign early next year, Yun tweeted, 'TON is coming to America.'
Yat Siu, Co-founder of Animoca
Animoca Brands portfolio companies have a total market value of $35.6 billion, having risen nearly 37% in just the past 30 days. Siu believes, 'Digital property rights can provide the foundation for a fairer society.' 'Property rights and capitalism are the foundation for achieving democracy.' Siu anticipates significant progress in the development of regulations governing digital asset ownership worldwide by the end of next year. He explains, 'This will grant users clear rights over their digital assets, empowering them—rights that are already realized through blockchain technology but are still relatively unknown in many jurisdictions.'
[Disclaimer] Markets are risky; investing requires caution. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article align with their specific circumstances. Investment decisions are made at the user's own risk.
