Paul Puey is the CEO and co-founder of Edge, a San Diego-based self-custody crypto wallet and security platform. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate who once shipped 3D graphics at Nvidia, he caught the Bitcoin bug in 2013 and launched Airbitz in 2014, rebranding it to Edge in 2017 as crypto moved beyond Bitcoin. His pitch is stubbornly simple: if you do not hold your keys, you do not own your coins, and security belongs on the edges of the network, in your hands, not on someone else's server.
Akash Sinha, who goes by 'Sky,' is a Web3 and DeFi commentator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He builds an audience on LinkedIn around Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems, posting frequently from crypto conferences like Solana Breakpoint and Token2049 and weighing in on tech-policy moments such as the TikTok ban debate.
Will O'Brien is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the CEO and co-founder of NFT Oasis, the metaverse platform owned and operated by Provenonce, Inc. A blockchain and gaming veteran, he co-founded and led Bitcoin security pioneer BitGo (later acquired by Galaxy Digital for $1.2B) and was named Bitcoin industry 'CEO of the Year' in 2014. Before that he ran corporate development at Big Fish Games and held operating roles at Keen IO and TrialPay. He has backed 70-plus early-stage startups, holds a Harvard computer science degree and an MIT Sloan MBA, and moonlights as an improvisational pianist.
Ambre Soubiran is the CEO and chairman of Kaiko, the independent provider of institutional-grade, regulatory-compliant cryptocurrency market data and indices. After a decade structuring equity derivatives at HSBC in London and Paris, she walked away from traditional finance in 2016 to buy control of Kaiko - then a bright idea with no revenue and no staff - and built it into a global data business with roughly 130 people across New York, London, Paris and Singapore. She has raised over $80M and positions Kaiko as the trusted, neutral source of truth for crypto markets used by exchanges, asset managers and regulators.
Kraken is one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, founded in 2011 and launched in 2013 by Jesse Powell after the Mt. Gox security failures convinced him crypto needed an exchange built on trust. Operated by parent company Payward, Inc., Kraken lets retail and institutional clients buy, sell, trade, stake, and self-custody dozens of digital assets, alongside crypto futures, margin, and index products. By late 2025 it served over 5 million funded accounts, held tens of billions in client assets, and was preparing for a public listing.
David 'Dave' Ripley is Co-CEO of Kraken, one of the world's largest and longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. He joined via Kraken's 2016 acquisition of Glidera, a bitcoin wallet service he co-founded, and rose from COO to CEO to Co-CEO as Kraken expanded aggressively — completing $1.5B acquisitions, raising $800M in 2025, and filing confidentially for a U.S. IPO. A former BCG principal and electrical engineer turned crypto operator, Ripley has shepherded Kraken from a 50-person startup to a 2,600+ employee global exchange while navigating major SEC enforcement actions and a shifting regulatory landscape.
Alexander Leishman is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of River, a Bitcoin-only financial institution built to provide brokerage, custody, and mining services to individuals and institutions. With a background spanning aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, computer science at Stanford, and security engineering at Airbnb, Leishman co-founded River in 2019 after stints at MaiCoin, Deloitte, and Polychain Capital. River has raised over $17.7 million in venture funding and became the first Bitcoin-only exchange to publicly release its financial statements in April 2025. Leishman also serves on the board of Brink, a Bitcoin research and development nonprofit.
Marshall Hayner is the Founder and CEO of Metallicus, a San Francisco-based blockchain infrastructure company building compliant, regulation-forward digital banking tools for credit unions and financial institutions. A Bitcoin miner since 2009, Hayner pioneered social crypto payments with QuickCoin (the first Facebook-integrated Bitcoin wallet) in 2014, then spent a decade building Metallicus into the only blockchain company certified as a service provider for the Federal Reserve's FedNow instant payment rail. His company's flagship products - Metal Pay, Metal Blockchain, and the Digital Banking Network - sit at the intersection of traditional finance and decentralized infrastructure.
River is a San Francisco-based, bitcoin-only financial services company offering brokerage, custody, mining, and Lightning Network infrastructure. Founded in 2019 by Alex Leishman and Andrew Benson, River serves individuals and businesses who want to buy, hold, earn yield on, and transact with bitcoin from a US-regulated, transparent, full-reserve institution.
Spencer Bogart is a General Partner at Blockchain Capital, one of the oldest and most active venture firms in the crypto industry. A CFA charter holder who started his crypto career writing Wall Street's first blockchain research report at Needham & Company, Bogart now leads research across Blockchain Capital's five funds and 85+ investments. Known on Twitter as @CremeDeLaCrypto, he made early bets on DeFi before the term existed and has been a consistent voice for Bitcoin fundamentals and crypto infrastructure since 2014.
Katie Haun is the founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a $1.5 billion crypto and frontier technology venture firm she launched in 2022 after co-leading a16z Crypto. A former federal prosecutor who created the DOJ's first cryptocurrency task force, she is one of the most credible voices at the intersection of law, policy, and digital assets - a former skeptic turned crypto believer, converted by the very Silk Road case she was assigned to prosecute.
Tim Draper is a third-generation venture capitalist and founder of Draper Associates, the firm behind early bets on Hotmail, Baidu, Skype, Tesla, Coinbase, and Robinhood. He pioneered viral marketing with Hotmail's email footer tagline, bought 30,000 bitcoins at a U.S. Marshals auction in 2014 for $19 million, and has never sold. The founder of Draper University of Heroes in San Mateo, he frames entrepreneurship as a heroic calling - handing students superhero capes on day one. Twice tried to split California into multiple states. Consistently predicts Bitcoin will hit $250,000. Sings his own original songs at startup conferences. Backed 60+ unicorns from seed stage across four decades.
Chris Burniske is a partner and co-founder of Placeholder, a venture capital firm that has invested in over 75 blockchain companies and networks since 2017. He co-authored the influential book 'Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond' and led ARK Invest to become the first public fund manager to offer bitcoin exposure in 2015. Known for his unconventional approach - famously rolling up barefoot on a skateboard to pitch Cathie Wood - Burniske combines deep technical knowledge with a surfer's mentality toward finding uncrowded opportunities in crypto markets.
Chris Dixon is the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto, the largest dedicated crypto venture fund in the world with over $7 billion in committed capital. A Columbia philosophy graduate turned software engineer turned serial entrepreneur (SiteAdvisor, Hunch), he joined Andreessen Horowitz in 2012 and has since become Silicon Valley's most prominent crypto bull, leading investments in Coinbase, Uniswap, and dozens of foundational web3 companies. His 2018 essay 'Why Decentralization Matters' became a manifesto for the open internet movement, and his 2024 book 'Read Write Own' extended that thesis into a New York Times-listed blueprint for the next era of the internet.
Jeremy Liew is a legendary consumer venture capitalist and Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, best known as the first institutional investor in Snapchat — turning an $8.1M bet into nearly $2 billion at the 2017 IPO. Born in Singapore and raised in Perth, Australia, Liew competed at the International Math Olympiad alongside future Fields Medalist Terence Tao before pivoting to business. After stints at McKinsey, IAC, and AOL, he joined Lightspeed in 2006 as its first consumer specialist, backing Affirm, Bonobos, GIPHY, and Epic Games along the way. A 9-time Forbes Midas List honoree, he stepped back from new investments in 2021 — just before turning 50 — to preserve the family time COVID had unexpectedly given him.
Dan Robinson is General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of crypto's most influential investment and research firms. A Harvard-trained lawyer turned protocol engineer, Robinson has co-authored landmark papers including the 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' MEV essay, the Uniswap v3 whitepaper, and the Blend NFT lending protocol. His work sits at the intersection of mechanism design, mathematical finance, and open-source software - making him one of the rare figures who shapes both how DeFi protocols are built and how capital flows into them.
Fred Ehrsam (Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III) is a serial founder and investor who co-founded Coinbase in 2012 — the crypto exchange that went public on Nasdaq in 2021 — and Paradigm in 2018, the research-driven crypto VC firm that raised a $2.5 billion fund. Now he's chasing his next frontier: Nudge, a non-invasive brain-computer interface startup using focused ultrasound to modulate brain states, which raised $100 million in Series A funding in 2025. A Duke computer science graduate turned Goldman Sachs FX trader, Ehrsam discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and never looked back — quietly becoming one of the most influential architects of the crypto industry while building a reputation as a deep thinker obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human capability.
Meltem Demirors is a Turkish-American crypto investor, venture capitalist, and the founder and general partner of Crucible Capital - a $50M seed fund at the intersection of energy, compute, and crypto. Previously Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares (where she helped grow AUM to $7B and take the firm public), she's also a prolific angel investor with 250+ bets, an Oxford lecturer, a World Economic Forum council member, and the self-described 'benevolent mischief-maker' who testified before Congress on Facebook's Libra in 2019.
Vitalik Buterin is the Russian-Canadian programmer who, at age 19, wrote the Ethereum whitepaper and changed what a blockchain could be. He turned a programmable ledger into an idea engine - smart contracts, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs - and then spent years fighting to keep it decentralized. He travels with a single suitcase, posts thousand-word blog essays at 2am, and once cried over a World of Warcraft nerf that indirectly launched a $200B ecosystem.
Haseeb Qureshi is the Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, one of crypto's largest VC firms with $4B+ AUM. A former professional poker player who turned $50 into seven figures by age 19, he walked away from the game, gave away his earnings, taught himself to code at a bootcamp, worked at Airbnb, then bet everything on crypto. He is one of the most distinctive voices in Web3 - part philosopher, part strategist, part contrarian - known for rigorous long-form essays, sharp market predictions, and an improbable career arc that no resume template could contain.
Joseph Lubin is the co-founder of Ethereum and founder/CEO of ConsenSys, the most influential Ethereum software company in the world. A Princeton-trained engineer who spent years at Goldman Sachs before pivoting through a Jamaican music production detour to become one of crypto's most consequential builders, Lubin methodically constructed the plumbing of the Web3 internet — MetaMask, Infura, Truffle — while most people were still debating whether blockchain was real. As of 2026, he chairs SharpLink Gaming's mission to build the world's largest publicly-traded ETH treasury, and warns loudly about centralized AI's threat to democratic society.
Linda Xie is a crypto investor, founder, and ecosystem builder who co-founded Scalar Capital in 2017 after serving as an early product manager at Coinbase. She raised a $20 million fund backed by Chris Dixon and Fred Ehrsam, championed privacy-focused blockchain projects, co-produced the Ethereum documentary 'Ethereum: The Infinite Garden,' and now leads developer ecosystem growth at Farcaster - a decentralized social protocol she first used as a user in 2021, invested in as a VC in 2022, built on in 2023, and officially joined the team in 2025.
Matt Huang is co-founder and Managing Partner of Paradigm, the research-driven crypto investment firm he launched with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam in 2018. With $12.7 billion in AUM and foundational investments in Uniswap, Optimism, Flashbots, and dozens of other protocols, Huang transformed venture capital by treating his firm as a hybrid research lab, engineering organization, and fund. The son of a Goldman Sachs derivatives head and a pioneering computer science professor, he turned a $500K bet on a language-barrier pitch from Zhang Yiming into an estimated $500M windfall. In 2025, he added founding CEO of Tempo - the Stripe-Paradigm blockchain for global payments - to his portfolio, while raising a new $1.5B fund to expand into AI and robotics.
Olaf Carlson-Wee is the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, one of the world's largest crypto-focused investment firms managing billions in assets. A Lutheran minister's son from rural Minnesota who wrote his college thesis on Bitcoin, he was Coinbase's first employee, demanded his salary be paid entirely in cryptocurrency, then left to launch Polychain in 2016 with $8 million that grew to $1 billion in under two years. He is a practicing lucid dreamer, a transhumanist, and the brother of two poets — a fact that tells you nearly everything about the household he grew up in.
Jalak Jobanputra is the founder and managing partner of Future\Perfect Ventures, one of the world's first VC funds dedicated to blockchain technology, launched in 2014. Born in Nairobi, Kenya to parents of Indian descent and raised in rural New Jersey, she brings a rare global lens to venture investing - from backing Bitcoin infrastructure at seed stage (Blockchain.com, Blockstream) to building microfinance programs in Tanzania. A Wharton and Kellogg alumna, she started investing in Bitcoin in 2013 before it was remotely fashionable, and has since built a portfolio of 50+ companies at the intersection of decentralized technology, AI, and financial inclusion. Her blog 'The Barefoot VC' has run since 2009 and was named a top 10 investor blog by Business Insider.
Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter and Square (now Block), a Bitcoin maximalist, and one of Silicon Valley's most enigmatic figures. He sent the first-ever tweet, built a payments empire, walked 5.3 miles to work daily, meditates two hours a day, eats once a day, and is currently obsessed with decentralizing everything from money to social media. His latest ventures - Bitchat (Bluetooth mesh messaging) and Block's Bitcoin treasury - reveal a builder who has moved far beyond the platforms that made him famous.
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-Canadian-American venture capitalist, founder of Social Capital, and co-host of the All-In Podcast. A former VP of User Growth at Facebook who helped scale the platform from 50M to 700M+ users, he left to build one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive investment firms. Known for contrarian takes, a welfare-to-billionaire origin story, and pioneering the 'growth hacking' playbook, he now manages $2.147B in AUM while running a top-ranked Substack newsletter and co-hosting one of tech's most listened-to podcasts.
Taylor Pearson is the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny Fund, a multi-strategy long volatility and tail-risk hedge fund whose sub-advisors manage over $10 billion in client assets. Before building Mutiny, he wrote 'The End of Jobs' (2015), an Amazon #1 bestseller translated into five languages that argued entrepreneurship had become safer than employment. He runs 'Interesting Times,' a monthly newsletter for 27,000+ founders, investors, and executives exploring complex systems, finance, and the future of work. A former college football offensive lineman who once marched for Bolivian workers' rights in Argentina, Pearson cold-called his way into digital marketing at minimum wage before buying a software company and eventually co-founding a hedge fund - all while living across eight countries.
Anthony Pompliano - known as 'Pomp' - is an Army veteran turned tech operator turned Bitcoin maximalist who built one of the most influential finance media empires on the internet. From three tours at Facebook to three weeks at Snapchat (and a whistleblower lawsuit to show for it), he has relentlessly bet on Bitcoin when no one on Wall Street would. Today he runs ProCap Financial (Nasdaq: BRR), a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company holding 5,457+ BTC, while publishing The Pomp Letter to 270,000+ subscribers and hosting a podcast with 50 million downloads.
Balaji Srinivasan is a serial founder, investor, and author who holds four Stanford degrees and has co-founded companies sold for nearly half a billion dollars. Former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and first CTO of Coinbase, he is best known for writing The Network State — a WSJ #2 bestselling book advocating technology-enabled sovereign communities — and for building The Network School, a live experiment in startup-society living on a private island near Singapore.