Source: CoinDesk; Compiled by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

CoinDesk selected 50 in 2024 People who defined the field of encryption;

These names come from finance, technology, and other fields;

And supervision is a major theme in 2024;

Big trends: Prediction markets, ETFs, artificial intelligence, DePIN and Bitcoin dominance.

Welcome to this year's most influential list.

This is an extraordinary year. The gloom at the beginning of 2024 has finally dissipated.

With the Bitcoin ETF approved in January and Donald Trump re-elected in November, all things crypto sentiment All have changed. New investors enter the market and money flows across categories.

Bitcoin reigns supreme, surging to $100,000 last December. Bitcoin dominance is over 70%. The US president-elect has also pledged to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, potentially purchasing up to 5% of the total supply of Bitcoin for the United States.

The issuance of the Bitcoin ETF is the most successful in history, with $145 billion in investment already received. Bitcoin has found a widely recognized role as digital gold and looks increasingly like the foundational layer of a new financial system.

Critics complained about Ethereum's lengthy development roadmap and poor performance (compared to Solana and other new l15s), and Ethereum collapsed (at least That's what they say). Still, Ethereum is up 58% (compared to Bitcoin’s 120% year-to-date gain), and more than 500 layer-2s have come to fruition. In particular, Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum are gaining traction in the real world.

Solana, whose market capitalization is up 111% year-to-date, is awash with meme coins and many less ephemeral projects. Telegram is now a real blockchain player. It uses click-to-earn games as its selling point and has attracted hundreds of millions of players around the world. DePIN (or decentralized physical infrastructure) is taking off as a category, promising real-world infrastructure (telecommunications, power, mapping, etc.) and a different form of crypto adoption. Polymarket shows that prediction markets may be better than polls and be as relevant to cryptocurrency traders as they are to regular people. Artificial intelligence becomes part of everything.

Stablecoins remain the most popular form of crypto (by transaction volume) and look more like a global payments layer. USDT dominated, and, with huge profits, Tether invested in a series of non-USDT projects in the hope of one day also trading legally in the United States.

Cryptocurrency showed real power, helping Trump and more than 50 other congressional candidates get elected. Action committees like Fairshake look great for 2026.

Although Europe is not as dynamic as Asia and the United States, it has implemented MICA and became the first region to have a comprehensive framework. Hong Kong and Singapore lead the Asia-Pacific region.

The following are the top ten influential figures in the encryption industry worth paying attention to in 2024.

Andy Ayrey, creator of Truth Terminal

Andy Ayrey, an artificial intelligence researcher from New Zealand ( 34 years old), he calls himself a "performance artist". His AI bot shows how decentralized AI can encrypt, build communities and even bring stories to life. Andy Ayrey created Truth Terminal. In a sense, Truth Terminal affects the real world of humans, currencies, and cryptocurrencies. Truth Terminal turned a cheesy joke into a billion-dollar fortune thanks to its creation of GOAT, embodying the narrative of the “AI agent economy” and in many ways representing a growing interest in the “crypto + AI” space that thrives greater hope.

Ansem, Meme coin KOL

In this cycle, he used Solana and a series of Meme coins received a handsome return (he did not want to disclose the exact amount). His tweet about tokens to watch on X received hundreds of thousands of views. His ramblings on Solana earned him nicknames like "The Solana Man."

Back in 2020, Ansem started tweeting about token purchases when he only had 100 followers. When some of his bets started to pay off, followers began to emerge. He became a minor celebrity, known for his early involvement in Solana, Avalanche and other properties. Today, he is perhaps most closely associated with Dogwifhat, a coin that had a market capitalization of $100,000 when he began promoting it (it is now over $3 billion).

Cynthia Lummis, U.S. Congressman

Lummis is the most important advocate for cryptocurrency in Congress , who is a major proponent of establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a leading advocate of stablecoin legislation in the Second House. With Republicans taking control of all three departments in 2025, both issues are likely to be on the agenda this year.

She has been holding Bitcoin since 2013, and she has a unique understanding of its importance. “We need stores of value that are decoupled from the economy.” She introduced stablecoin legislation this year with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) and is expected to become a leading advocate for the issue.

Donald Trump, the next President of the United States

Since Trump won the second term as President of the United States, Since his tenure, the price of Bitcoin has soared over the past month, rising by more than $30,000, or approximately 45%. Bitcoin’s rise to triple digits is widely believed to be a direct result of Trump’s victory. The crypto industry hopes that with Trump 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 industry. "If cryptocurrency is going to define the future, I want it mined, minted, and manufactured in the United States."

Fairshake, PAC

Fairshake is the largest company in American politicsIndustry money players. Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and cryptocurrency investment firm a16z created Fairshake from the ashes of the industry’s latest campaign mechanism. Fairshake is a new endeavor that “truly brings together the best and blue-chip companies in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.”

Jing Wang, Optimism Lianchuang

In 2024, Kraken, Uniswap, World Network ( Both formerly known as Worldcoin) and Sony’s Blockchain Labs have used Optimism’s technology to create their own scalable blockchains. The "textbook" project she began focusing her time on was Plasma, a scaling design that predated rollups and eventually became the precursor to today's Optimism. After the Plasma Group was founded, she discovered that people really wanted a Layer 2 with lower fees and faster transactions, so they made adjustments and came up with a sketch of an optimistic rollup.

Optimism adopts this technology to package large amounts of transaction data into digestible batches, making its transaction costs lower than Ethereum. Since the launch of Optimism, Rollups have become so popular that they have seen a lot of adoption. Other notable projects include Arbitrum, Blast, zkSync, Polygon, Starknet, and Scroll.

Larry Fink, BlackRockCEO

In 2023, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company (BlackRock) shocked the investment and cryptocurrency world by filing to create a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. The price of BTC surged as financial giants unexpectedly entered the cryptocurrency space. In 2024, BlackRock and several other issuers received licenses from U.S. regulators. Many suspect that BlackRock’s strong support for a Bitcoin ETF could help sway the SEC. The cryptocurrency’s market capitalization has grown from about $1 trillion when BlackRock filed for the Bitcoin ETF to nearly $3.6 trillion now, according to Coinmarketcap.

Waiting for the best opportunity may be Fink's secret.He believes that the difference between a great company and a great company is not that they are the earliest adapters of new trends, but their ability and openness to be reborn in an ever-changing world. BlackRock didn’t invent ETFs. Someone else invented ETFs in 1993. But fifteen years ago, Fink's company found great success in the space with its acquisition of iShares. This year, iShares launched BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF.

Nate Geraci, an ETF expert who closely follows the development of cryptocurrency ETFs, said: "One of the most powerful and influential figures in the financial world supports cryptocurrency ETFs. Clearly a game changer”

Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket

2024. Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket It built it into a multi-billion dollar business and became a popular gauge of which way the wind was blowing, cited by outlets from Donald Trump to CNN.

Coplan brings unprecedented attention to an idea long advanced in academia: the wisdom of crowds plus the power of self-interest compared with traditional experts or opinion polls. Support, more accurate predictions—or at least more accurate measures of sentiment—can be made.

During this year's U.S. presidential election alone, Polymarket's trading volume reached $3.6 billion, accounting for 74% of the market. The entire prediction markets industry has never topped $1 billion in trading volume during previous election cycles.

Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer

Kannan regards EigenLayer as a "fighting company" Start-ups”. Over the past 12 months, EigenLayer—which allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum’s powerful security—has grown from a relatively unknown company to an industry giant. The platform raised more than $100 million from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and even before it fully launched, it attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from crypto users looking for additional revenue. Many people are affected by the viralIncentives from a points program that investors hope will translate into lucrative future token airdrops.

EigenLayer's success during the bear market is remarkable, and Kannan may have played a greater role in revitalizing decentralized finance on Ethereum than any other entrepreneur . In addition to running Eigen Labs, he remains an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, where his theory of “restaking”—letting people use restaking Ethereum assets to secure other networks—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 eight long and painful months in a Nigerian prison, Gambaryan finally returned home to Atlanta to recover from his ordeal. He suffered from a series of illnesses during his time in Kuje prison, including malaria, double pneumonia and a herniated disc in his back, which left him in excruciating pain and making it difficult to walk.

Nigerian officials also dropped money laundering charges that had been filed against him since March. Nigeria had accused Binance of helping to move about $23 billion in 2023. Untraceable funds led to devaluation of the naira.

Gambaryan is not just any American executive being held for ransom—he is a former federal agent, former IRS investigator, and Part of an elite team of federal early cryptocurrency trackers. During his tenure at the IRS, Gambaryan played a central role in some of the largest cryptocurrency crime busts in the industry’s history, including the takedown of child sex abuse video network Welcome to Video and darknet marketplace Alpha Bay, the seizure of nearly 100,000 crypto assets stolen from Silk Road, 70,000 Bitcoins and the recovery of 650,000 Bitcoins stolen from Mt Gox. Gambaryan played an "important role" in promoting IRS-CI to become the leading federal agency in crypto investigations.

The following are 40 other influential figures:

Adam Sullivan, Core Scientific CEO

2024 is a transformational year for Bitcoin miners, with many of them devoting significant resources to operating artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. However, none have been as successful as Core Scientific (CORZ), which emerged from bankruptcy in January under CEO Adam Sullivan and subsequently partnered with long-time business partner AI hyperscale provider CoreWeave A huge multi-billion dollar deal was struck. Core Scientific is the first mining company to make a large-scale push into artificial intelligence computing, which has investors paying renewed attention to the mining industry.

Arthur Hayes, founder of 100X. Bitmex

Hayes’ family office Maelstrom has been operating since last year Since its inception, it has made dozens of high-profile investments. But this year, the investment that really caught the market’s attention was Ethena, or USDe. It differs from the two leaders, USDC or USDT, in that it maintains its $1 value by using staked Ether as backing and offsetting price changes with short positions in ETH, while earning from staking rewards and market fees.

USDe also embodies Hayes’ fiat-skeptic world view almost perfectly – it provides a synthetic dollar alternative that is completely independent of the traditional banking system. . Hayes believes that decentralized finance, including digital assets such as USDe, is critical to resisting the continued depreciation in value inherent in fiat systems.

Avery Ching, Aptos Lianchuang

In 2024, Aptos will compete with crypto and traditional finance There have been huge strides in institutional collaboration, both on the technology side and with many success stories in terms of products like Aptos Ascend, a digital asset management platform for financial institutions, and new integrations with Stripe, Circle and Tether. Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, Libre, and others have deployed tokenized assets on Aptos.

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network StateCreated by

The Network State is a techno-utopian abandonment of outdated plans to establish geographically dispersed technocratic sovereignty. At a time when the debate is centered on those who are invested in existing institutions and those who want to build new ones, "The Network State" has quickly gained popularity as a major exit strategy.

Brian Nelson, U.S. Treasury official

Nelson will leave the U.S. Treasury Department at the end of this year. Become a leading voice in cryptocurrency on Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Nelson previously served as Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence and played a major role in the cryptocurrency space, leading efforts to crack down on digital asset mixing services and ties to terrorists and seeking to expand federal influence in the space.

Nelson focuses on the dark side of cryptocurrency. He believes that cryptocurrency technology can become a tool to fund international terrorism and criminal groups, and believes that anonymous services such as Tornado Cash are A way for bad guys to move cash with impunity. To this end, Nelson tried to change the means to prevent the development of this technology.

David Tse, Babylon Lianchuang

Babylon protocol is the most important project in the emerging field One that aims to bring utility to the world’s oldest blockchain that is commonly seen in other networks. While the Bitcoin network itself does not allow staking (as a proof-of-work blockchain), Babylon’s protocol allows users to stake BTC to secure other chains, providing the security of the original cryptocurrency to the wider crypto world.

2024 is a great year for Babylon, with $70 million raised in a funding round in May and stakers secured when the mainnet launched in August enthusiastic response. The mainnet launch was capped at 1,000 BTC for security reasons, and it took just over an hour to reach that threshold. The protocol opened its second round of funding in October, raising 24,000 BTC in approximately one hour and 40 minutes.

Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart,Bloomberg Analysts

Balchunas and Seyffart are at the forefront of social media telling the shady and the pros about these highly anticipated products. May be "for" or "against". Balchunas foresaw the popularity of Bitcoin ETFs early on, tweeting as early as 2013: “It’s crazy: just the number of registration applications for Bitcoin ETFs has outnumbered the launch of dozens of new useful ETFs. It has received more media attention and tweet attention combined.”

Eric Semler, Chairman of Semler Scientific

In 2024, the first US listed company boss to be attracted by Bitcoin was Eric Semler. His medical technology company Semler Scientific chose Bitcoin as its main reserve asset.

Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer, Francisco Alarcon, founders of Taproot Wizards

Taproot Wizards is A collection of 2,108 JPEG images engraved on Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol received $7.5 million in seed funding in 2024. Founded by Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer, and Francisco Alarcon with a mission to "make Bitcoin magical again," the project will now turn its focus to upgrading Bitcoin itself using the proposed OP_CAT protocol, originally built by Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin, but was removed after concerns about excessive memory usage and potential vulnerabilities.

Erik Voorhees, founder of Venice.AI

Representative of "encryption + artificial intelligence" The character is Erik Voorhees. His career spanned many eras. When Voorhees launched Satoshi Dice, a blockchain-based gambling game in 2012 — which once accounted for half of all Bitcoin transactions — he pioneered a new use case for the cryptocurrency.

He is now applying the spirit of Bitcoin to the next wave of artificial intelligence, launching Venice.AI, with the humble goal of "unfettered civilizational progress." ". Announcing Venice on May 10, Voorhees explained that the app is similar to ChatGPT or Claude and that Venice will not censor conversations or “inject bias, securityism, or propaganda.”

Evan Cheng, founder of Mysten Labs

Evan Cheng created Sui to do more than just build Another blockchain. He also engineered a paradigm shift. Over the past year, Sui, one of the darlings of the bull market, has seen its total value locked (TVL) rise due to market confidence in the development of its new infrastructure, such as improvements to Sui’s underlying Move programming language and the launch of Circle’s on-chain USDC. It has soared from more than $200 million at the beginning of the year to more than $1.5 billion.

Cheng took lessons from the ill-fated Diem project run by Meta (then Facebook) and created a first-layer blockchain that not only Faster, cheaper, and fundamentally different from other layer-1 blockchains. With these lessons learned, Cheng and his team created Move, which makes 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, Chief Operating Officer of Helium Official

As thousands of DePIN projects flourish in 2024, they should be especially grateful to one decentralized physical infrastructure network for pointing the way: Helium . "We see that in 2024, new companies will emerge with all kinds of ideas and use cases to make Helium's economic model really power real-life physical infrastructure. It's really amazing."

Fred Thiel, MARA CEO

Under the leadership of Fred Thiel, MARA Holdings (MARA) (formerly forMarathon Digital Holdings) has become not only one of the world's largest Bitcoin miners, but also the second-largest corporate owner of Bitcoin, with a balance sheet worth approximately $3.9 billion.

Under Thiel's leadership, MARA went all-in on Bitcoin, becoming the first company to follow in the footsteps of MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor and purchase large amounts of the digital asset on the spot market. miner. The company even managed to raise $1 billion recently to buy more Bitcoins, and Thiel may be the Michael Saylor of Bitcoin mining.

Greg Osuri, Akash Lianchuang

Akash can be regarded as an open source "super cloud" ”, which allows people to buy and sell computing, now a coveted resource in the age of artificial intelligence. This is the core concept of decentralized physical infrastructure (aka DePIN) – using blockchain technology to organize otherwise dispersed resources (in this case, computing). Intended as a long-term alternative to Nvidia's centralized chips, Akash aims to make computing more affordable for individual users. "Akash gives you the power to compute, freedom from censorship, and freedom to think freely."

Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald, Bitwise executive

Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and chief investment officer Matt Hougan have worked tirelessly over the past seven years to bring institutional money into the cryptocurrency space, finally obtaining U.S. securities earlier this year Exchange Commission (SEC) Spot ETFs approved for Bitcoin and Ethereum. The digital asset manager has launched funds for both assets, bringing its assets under management to more than $10 billion, and Solana’s third ETF may also be available soon.

But their efforts in the cryptocurrency space go far beyond that, with the pair often sharing insights from their work with their large social media followings, promoting large banks, multi-family The office and other highly relevant institutional investors are “working hard to open up access to Bitcoin.” Hougan said “we are entering the golden age of cryptocurrency.”

IIlia Polosukhin, NEAR Lianchuang

Long before he co-founded the decentralized application blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked as an artificial intelligence engineer at Google Intelligence researcher and co-authored the seminal 2017 paper "Attention is All You Need", which is widely regarded as a pioneer of "Transformer" technology, which artificially Smart applications (such as ChatGPT). His credentials in artificial intelligence are impeccable.

"Artificial intelligence is indeed a powerful force," Polosukhin noted in 2023. , “But we don’t want it to be controlled and favored by one company. ” As a result, Polosukhin is now combining his original love (artificial intelligence) with NEAR’s decentralization mission to create a complete ecosystem for decentralized artificial intelligence, from computing to training to agents. “AI is at NEAR.

Johnny Ng, Hong Kong lawmaker

As Hong Kong moves to embrace crypto Currency and Web3, he has also become a leading advocate for the industry internally, inviting Companies such as Coinbase applied for regulation (they rejected him) and called for cryptocurrency ETFs to be launched in Hong Kong (they were approved in April). Last November, he appealed to the Nobel Prize Committee to include Satoshi Nakamoto in the Nobel Peace Prize or Candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. “The emergence of Bitcoin based on blockchain technology is solving some of the inflation problems and providing economic solutions to more poor areas. It has also revolutionized global payments, reflecting the current state of the global economy. ”

Julia Leung, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission

Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission SFC CEO Leong Fengyi noted: “While the debate over Bitcoin’s intrinsic value will continue, the fact that Bitcoin has experienced multiple boom and bust cycles over the past 15 years clearly demonstrates its role as an alternative Asset durability. What’s even clearer is that Bitcoin’s underlying technology, distributed ledger technology (DLT), is here to stay. ”

Tron is the third largest block in the world in terms of market capitalization chain project, Tron’s founders tend to ignore criticism and focus on construction. Justin Sun's cryptocurrency holdings have increased by nearly $700 million this year, from $1.5 billion at the beginning of the year to $2.2 billion today, making him the richest man in cryptocurrency. This is largely due to the explosive growth of TRX and the proliferation of stablecoins issued on the chain, which currently exceeds $60 billion. For a brief period, there was more USDT on Tron than on Ethereum.

Keone Hon, Monad Lianchuang

In early 2022, during the cryptocurrency winter, Hon Left Jump and co-founded Monad Labs. This vision attracted $225 million in funding in 2024, one of the largest cryptocurrency funding rounds of the year. Monad's technical specs say it all: Ethereum handles 15 transactions per second (TPS) for $10 to $50, while Solana handles 2,600 transactions per second for less than a cent, and Monad aims to start at $10 to $50 per second. 10,000 trades executed at only $0.001 per trade. Currently, DeFi’s daily trading volume is still in the billions of dollars, a fraction of the trillions of dollars in daily trading volume in traditional finance.

Lily Liu, Chairman of Solana Foundation

The two-year recovery story of Solana blockchain It may have peaked in late November with SOL reaching a new all-time high. Liu shifts the focus of industry insiders from Solana itself to the entrepreneurs building permissionless financial systems on top of it, from stablecoins to games and more. This could lead to significant changes in the race for blockchain to prove its usefulness.

Luca Netz, Pudgy Penguins CEO

Luca Netz recently announced that in 2025, Solana launches its own PENGU token. Approximately a quarter of the tokens will be reserved for NFT holders of the projectOther tokens will be reserved for Solana and Ethereum users.

Pudgy's success is a testament to the efforts of Netz, who acquired the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection in April 2022 after a bidding war with Web3 influencer BeanieMaxi and others . Netz has kept the brand relevant, 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 followers on TikTok and 205,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter). Videos of the Penguin character have been viewed 32 billion times on Giphy.

Luuk Strijers, DeribitCEO

Luuk Strijers said: It feels like stepping into this rebellion The Crossroads of Kafka’s struggle against systemic constraints has echoes 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 exceeding competitors such as Binance, OKX, and CME.

Mahesh Ramakrishnan, key figure at EV3 Ventures

DePIN is the biggest news in crypto in 2024 one. From telecommunications and energy to maps and weather data, DePIN has emerged to provide useful services to end users through blockchain, tokens and smart contracts.

Ramakrishnan believes that there are many factors for DePIN’s success. First, traditional finance and traditional companies cannot meet the huge demand for new infrastructure. Second, DePIN networks have begun to demonstrate superior economics and functionality over centralized systems, with telecommunications being a notable example. Ramakrishnan sees DePIN as part of a larger shift away from traditional structures in society following the 2008 financial crisis. DePIN is designed completely differently, with users sharing services and receiving rewards for participation directly in the form of tokens. This is a sharing economy where incentives and rewards are widely shared.

Matthew Long, Head of Payments and Digital Assets, UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

Long Supervision A strict regime requiring companies to comply with anti-money laundering rules has resulted in only four cryptocurrency companies being allowed to operate in the UK in 2024. Overall, 48 out of 365 companies that applied were approved. Long, who is leading the development of the cryptocurrency industry, held a series of roundtables on the UK’s upcoming cryptocurrency regime earlier this year. The FCA also stated that it intends to publish a series of documents to gather industry views on stablecoins, trading platforms, staking, etc. , with the aim of finalizing the industry’s rules by 2026.

Michael Saylor, Microstrategy CEO

Starting in 2020, Michael Saylor Saylor opened the way for businesses to buy Bitcoin. Through large-scale securities sales, he successfully raised funds for MicroStrategy to purchase billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Whether it is a bull market or a bear market, Thaler bought a large amount of BTC.

Paolo Ardoino, Tether CEO

Paolo Ardoino is the CEO of stablecoin giant Tether and spokesperson, the company has been as dominant as ever in the cryptocurrency market this year. The company’s flagship token, USDT, is the first and so far only stablecoin to reach a market capitalization of over $100 billion and captures 70% of the market share in this rapidly growing asset class. 2024 is a breakthrough year for stablecoins. But under Ardoino’s leadership, Tether is already betting on the next big thing. The company turns its profits into venture capital investments in payments, telecommunications, artificial intelligence and Bitcoin mining. It has also made strides into commodities trade finance, and most recently, it launched a tokenization platform — another hot crypto trend.

Patrick McHenry, Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee

In 2022, he began to Struggling with careers in industries that suffered massive disruption and discredited reputations,A tough battle began. He believes that digital asset regulation is a goal worthy of significant capital investment, and he fought fiercely with various congressional committees, parties, and chambers to finally pass his Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) in May 2024. Submitted to the House of Representatives for consideration.

Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram

Until August 24, 2024, Pavel ·Durov has just entered the public eye. The world's 120th richest person with a fortune of $15.5 billion (Forbes) isn't notable for that alone. But Durov’s achievements on social media are what truly sets him apart—his public stance in support of internet freedom underscores his dynamic role in the world.

Durov's first foray into social media came in Russia, when he co-founded the social networking site VKontakte (VK) in 2006. Controversy over the site and subsequent Russian interference forced Durov to leave his home country in 2014, just a year after he developed the groundbreaking social network Telegram with his brother Nikolay. In 2017, the company moved its headquarters to the United Arab Emirates. This year, Durov was arrested. In his view, the Internet is free. The exchange of ideas should be promoted, not suppressed. His arrest was actually the result of a long-term joint surveillance operation between France and the United Arab Emirates. Both countries wanted the keys to Durov's encryption code.

Pump.fun, Memecoin launchpad

Solana’s status as the top memecoin chain is largely It owes its rise to the launch platform Pump.Fun. Pump.Fun is redefining the way cryptocurrency investors create and bet on joke cryptocurrencies in 2024. In the process, it made hundreds of millions of dollars for its founding team.

Since its debut in the UK in early 2024, Pump.Fun has launched more than 4 million memecoins.

Ray Chan, Memeland CEO

RayChan uses his expertise to blend humor and culture with blockchain, 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 "fan proofing," where creators can interact with fans while building a layer of ownership that wouldn't be possible in a Web2 world.

Richard Teng, Binance CEO

Since taking office in November last year, Teng has been committed to Transform Binance from a founder-led organization (as it was during Changpeng Zhao’s six-year tenure as CEO) to a board-led organization. He also brought Binance into compliance with a host of global regulations, investing heavily in developing the cryptocurrency exchange’s compliance staff and obtaining regulatory approvals from regulators around the world. Under Teng’s leadership, Binance’s management team has ambitious expectations for the future of the cryptocurrency exchange: “It’s really about building a sustainable business that will be successful not only in the next few years, but also in the future Continue to prosper for 50 to 100 years”

Robin Linus, founder of BitVM2

2023. In October, Robin Linus published a white paper that shook up the cryptocurrency development community by introducing a theoretical approach to making Bitcoin more programmable. "BitVM" as it is commonly known was followed by a second iteration, "BitVM2" in August 2024, revealing improvements that could bring the concept closer to implementation. His proposed BitVM was hailed as a breakthrough because it did not require any changes to the Bitcoin code. The release of BitVM, originally designed by Linus, sparked enthusiasm for building projects on Bitcoin.

Rune Christensen, founder of Maker/Sky

This year is the key to Rune Christensen’s bold plan One year, the plan aims to transform MakerDAO, one of the largest and oldest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. The platform was rebranded as Sky—although the process wasn’t without its challenges—and he also launched a new stablecoin and governance token.

The protocol announced a "tokenization jackpot" to invest $1 billion worth of stablecoin reserves into tokenized real-world assets (RWA), attracting tokenized currency markets including BlackRock Interest from dozens of issuers, including BUIDL, has also expanded from the protocol’s long-time home Ethereum to the popular Solana, a blockchain network that Christensen has previously expressed admiration for and even proposed using. The underlying technology is Maker/Sky's idea to create custom chains

Satoshi Nakamoto

With 2024 Bitcoin. As currency prices soared, traditional media outlets took on the quixotic mission of finding Satoshi Nakamoto, 13 years after his disappearance on HBO. "Money Electronics: The Mystery of Bitcoin" was widely promoted, and many industry insiders were suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Sergio Demian Lerner, founder of Rootstock

Sergio Demian Lerner is a programmer from Buenos Aires, known for his early research on Satoshi Nakamoto mining activities and later development of Ethereum. Known for their contributions to Rootstock. It is currently working on its “BitVMX” project, which aims to improve Bitcoin’s programmability by leveraging the BitVM design released by Robin Linus in late 2023. The project’s white paper states: “The BitVMX framework is a framework for running anything on Bitcoin. The CPU provides the foundation." BitVMX aims to put the theory behind Linus's BitVM paradigm into practice by creating a framework for running programs on Bitcoin, and to implement sidechains and 2nd

Steve Yun, President of TON Foundation

TON is exploding. Growth has grown and the market capitalization now exceeds $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 that "TON is going to the United States."

Yat Siu,Animoca Lianchuang

Animoca Brands portfolio companies have a total market capitalization of $35.6 billion, up nearly 37% in the past 30 days alone. Siu believes: “Digital property rights can provide the basis for a more equitable society.” “Property rights and capitalism are the basis for realizing democracy.” Siu expects that by the end of next year, substantial progress will have been made around the world in developing regulations governing ownership of digital assets. He explained, “This will empower users by giving them clear rights to their digital assets – rights that are currently enabled by blockchain technology but are less well known in many jurisdictions.” p>

ZachXBT, Blockchain Detective

Since 2021, anonymous blockchain detective ZachXBT has Built an unparalleled reputation by relentlessly pursuing cryptocurrency thieves and scammers. He has 700,000 followers on X and 45,500 followers on Telegram.