Tagged: crypto
30 results
Will Villanueva
Will Villanueva is the co-founder and CEO of DELV (formerly Element Finance), a San Francisco-based decentralized finance company building fixed and variable yield markets on Ethereum. A physicist by training and former Ethereum researcher at ConsenSys, he co-founded Element Finance with Jonny Rhea in 2020 to bring fixed-rate income to DeFi. The company raised a $32M Series A in 2021 at a $320M valuation and later rebranded to DELV, whose flagship product Hyperdrive reimagines fixed and variable rate markets with an everlasting-liquidity AMM design.
Christopher King
Christopher King is the founder and CEO of Eaglebrook, a crypto investment platform that gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) direct access to bitcoin and digital assets through tax-optimized separately managed accounts (SMAs). A Penn State finance graduate who began investing in digital assets in 2014, King started his career in crypto-focused venture capital at Morgan Creek Capital Management before launching Eaglebrook in 2019. The New York and Miami-based company has grown into one of the largest crypto SMA platforms serving wealth managers, backed by investors including Castle Island Ventures, Brewer Lane Ventures, and Franklin Templeton.
August Digital
August Digital is a New York-based institutional crypto company building on-chain prime brokerage infrastructure. Its platform gives trading desks, funds, protocols and treasuries secure smart-contract accounts, real-time risk and pricing engines, cross-margining, lending, and structured products so they can borrow, lend, trade and settle across DeFi and CeFi with any liquid collateral - all with on-chain auditability. August also operates Upshift, a vault product that opens institutional-grade yield strategies to a wider set of users. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Dragonfly in March 2025 and reports having processed roughly $45B in cumulative volume.
Blackbird Labs
Blackbird Labs is a New York-based restaurant technology company that pairs a consumer dining app with a blockchain-based payments and loyalty network. Founded in 2022 by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, Blackbird lets diners check in at participating restaurants, earn a rewards currency called $FLY, and pay their bill through the app, while giving restaurants lower payment-processing fees and direct ownership of their guest data. The company runs its own layer-2 network, Flynet, and operates in New York, San Francisco, and Charleston with roughly 1,000 restaurants on the platform.
CryptoQuant
CryptoQuant is a crypto on-chain and market data analytics platform founded by Ki Young Ju that collects raw blockchain data, enriches it with exchange and entity labels, and delivers it as actionable metrics, charts, alerts and APIs. Often called 'the Bloomberg of crypto,' it serves professional traders, researchers and 200-plus institutional clients, and was the first on-chain data provider listed on CME Group's DataMine marketplace.
Eisen
Eisen is a New York-based compliance operations platform that automates escheatment, disbursement, and regulatory reporting for banks, credit unions, fintechs, and crypto companies. Its software tracks state-by-state unclaimed property rules, reaches out to account holders before funds are turned over to governments, and manages payouts and 1099 tax reporting - reducing the manual, error-prone work financial institutions face when handling dormant accounts, stale checks, and account wind-downs.
Metaversal
Metaversal is a Miami-based Web3-native merchant bank for the digital culture economy. Founded in 2021 by Yossi Hasson and Daniel Schmerin, it acquires and builds around blue-chip NFT intellectual property and now originates NFT-backed art loans and on-chain GPU financing tied to the AI compute buildout. Backed by a $50M Series A led by CoinFund and Foxhaven, the firm sits at the intersection of NFTs, lending, and AI infrastructure.
Startale Group
Startale Group is a Singapore-headquartered Web3 infrastructure company building the onchain stack for finance, entertainment, and consumer applications. Led by founder and CEO Sota Watanabe - who also created Astar Network - Startale operates a vertically integrated portfolio spanning the Sony-backed Ethereum Layer 2 Soneium, the Astar Network, the Strium blockchain for tokenized securities and real-world assets, the JPYSC and USDSC stablecoins, and a consumer Startale App. Backed by Sony and SBI, the company aims to bring Web3 to billions by bridging traditional finance with onchain systems.
Ian Krotinsky
Ian Krotinsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fin, a New York based payments company that uses stablecoin infrastructure to move large sums of money instantly across borders. A former quantitative portfolio manager and trader at Citadel, he and co-founder Aashiq Dheeraj first built TipLink, a tool for sending crypto with a link, before rebranding around a broader ambition: to build the payments app of the future for high-value transfers. In December 2025 the company raised a $17 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating.
Jing Wang
Jing Wang (Jinglan Wang) is the co-founder and CEO of OP Labs, the company that builds and maintains Optimism, one of the largest Ethereum Layer 2 scaling ecosystems. She helped turn a small nonprofit research effort, Plasma Group, into the OP Stack, an open-source framework that now powers a majority of Ethereum's Layer 2 activity and is used by chains from Coinbase, Uniswap, World, Kraken, and Sony. Known for championing retroactive public goods funding and a collaborative, inclusive leadership style, Wang has guided Optimism through a $150M Series B and its evolution from a single chain into the vision of a networked 'Superchain.'
Kirill Gertman
Kirill Gertman is the co-founder and CEO of Conduit, a New York-based B2B cross-border payments platform that settles international transactions using stablecoins. After more than a dozen years building fintech products in banking and startups - including product leadership roles at BRD (acquired by Coinbase) and Eco - he launched Conduit in 2021. The company pivoted from crypto-backed DeFi analytics to cross-border payments after the 2022 market downturn, and now processes more than $10 billion in annualized volume across a network of 20-plus banks in nine countries. In May 2025, Conduit raised a $36 million Series A co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Altos Ventures.
Maggie Wu
Maggie Wu is the CEO and co-founder of VelaFi, a stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure company that helps businesses move money across borders faster and cheaper than traditional banking rails. Born in China and now based in Frisco, Texas, she built her name in Latin America, where her earlier venture TruBit grew to more than 300,000 users. In January 2026 VelaFi raised a $20 million Series B led by XVC and Ikuyo, with backing from Alibaba Investment and BAI Capital, pushing total funding past $40 million as the company expands from Latin America into the United States and Asia.
CoinList
CoinList is a San Francisco-based crypto platform that gives investors early access to new token sales and blockchain networks before they list on exchanges. Spun out of AngelList in 2017, it pioneered compliant token distribution with KYC/AML and accredited-investor verification, and has run primary sales for projects including Filecoin, Solana, Near and Algorand. In 2025 the company began shifting to a fully non-custodial, onchain model that delivers tokens directly into user-controlled wallets.
DELV
DELV, formerly Element Finance, was a research-driven DeFi company that called itself 'the factory for DeFi.' Founded in 2020 by Will Villanueva and Jonny Rhea, it built open-source infrastructure for fixed- and variable-rate yield - most notably the Element Protocol, the Hyperdrive AMM, and the Council on-chain governance framework. Backed by a16z, Placeholder, and Polychain Capital with about $36.4M raised, the team pursued the idea that reliable fixed rates were essential to mainstream DeFi adoption. After a March 2025 Hyperdrive vulnerability and a conclusion that the product had not found market fit, DELV wound down operations in June 2025 with no reported loss of user funds.
Hashdex
Hashdex is a crypto-focused asset manager that packages digital assets into regulated index funds and ETFs so ordinary investors can buy crypto through a brokerage account. Founded in Brazil in 2018 and now headquartered in the New York area, it co-developed the Nasdaq Crypto Index, launched the world's first crypto index ETF in 2021, and brought the first multi-asset spot crypto ETF (NCIQ) to US investors in 2025. The firm manages roughly $1 billion across products in nine countries.
Slingshot
Slingshot is a San Francisco-based crypto trading app that lets people buy, sell, and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains from a single USDC balance - hiding the usual friction of wallets, bridges, and gas fees behind a clean consumer interface. Founded in 2020 by Coinbase alum Clinton Bembry, it raised roughly $18M through a Ribbit Capital-led Series A and was acquired by NFT marketplace Magic Eden in April 2025.
Thesis*
Thesis* is a Bitcoin-focused venture production studio founded in 2014 that builds companies and protocols in-house rather than investing in outside teams. Operating under the banner "Money is power, Bitcoin is empowerment," it has incubated a portfolio spanning Bitcoin infrastructure and consumer finance - including tBTC (a decentralized, trust-minimized bridge that tokenizes Bitcoin on Ethereum), Mezo (an on-chain Bitcoin banking layer backed by the MUSD stablecoin), Fold (a Bitcoin rewards app), Acre (Bitcoin staking), and Taho (a community-owned web3 wallet). Led by CEO Matt Luongo, Thesis raised a $21 million Series A in 2021 and has become one of the most prolific studios building Bitcoin-native financial products.
Scott Keto
Scott Keto is President of CoinList, the San Francisco token-launch and crypto fundraising platform. He joined in 2018 to run strategy and business development, became Chief Operating Officer in January 2021, and now leads the platform that has helped crypto projects raise hundreds of millions of dollars from a global investor base. Trained as a portfolio analyst before earning an MIT Sloan MBA, Keto pairs traditional finance credentials (Series 7, 24, and 79) with a builder's fluency in token design, distribution, and community-driven growth.
Sota Watanabe
Sota Watanabe is the founder and CEO of Startale Group, a Singapore-based Web3 infrastructure company backed by Sony and SBI. He is the founder of Astar Network, one of Japan's most recognized Layer-1 blockchains, and a central figure in Japan's push to bring tokenized stocks, JPY stablecoins, and onchain finance into the mainstream.
Drosera Network
Drosera Network is a decentralized incident response protocol that aims to be an 'immune system for Ethereum.' It lets DeFi protocols deploy 'Traps' - small, off-chain-defined smart contracts that continuously monitor on-chain state, detect anomalies or exploits, and trigger automated emergency responses (like pausing functions) before an attack drains funds. A decentralized network of Operators watches those Traps and pushes verified responses on-chain, turning security from an after-the-fact audit into a live, programmable defense layer.
N1
N1 (formerly Layer N) is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for onchain finance at scale. Founded by DeFi veterans Dima Romanov, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz, N1 pairs an ultra-low-latency, congestion-free execution layer with native financial primitives - an onchain orderbook, atomic transaction bundles, unified margining, and RFQ - so that trading applications that previously had to run offchain can run natively onchain. Every app runs in its own isolated environment with no state congestion, and developers can write smart contracts in TypeScript (with Python and other languages on the way). Backed by Founders Fund, Multicoin Capital, dao5, Kraken Ventures, and Arthur Hayes, the New York-based team is targeting the performance ceiling that has kept serious finance from moving onchain.
Ola Guild Games
Ola Guild Games (OLA GG) is the largest Web3 gaming community in the Spanish-speaking world, operating as a regional subDAO of Yield Guild Games. Founded by lifelong Hispanic gamers, it onboards players across Latin America and Spain into blockchain games through NFT scholarships, Web3 education, and a shared-rewards model that lets people play and earn without upfront cost. In 2022 it raised $8 million in seed funding from investors including Galaxy Interactive, BITKRAFT, and Arca.
Justin Benjamin
Justin Benjamin is the co-founder and COO of Normal, a Chicago-based crypto savings and index investing platform built on Stellar. He is also a beach wrestling world champion - the first U.S. man to win a Senior Beach World Series gold medal - and serves as Head of Strategy for USA Wrestling. He was a Big Ten wrestler at Northwestern University and earlier built products at CoinFlip and Bitcoin of America before co-founding Normal through the Antler Boulder accelerator in 2022.
Ami Lebendiker
Ami Lebendiker is the founder and CEO of Roga, a neurotech company that makes a discreet behind-the-ear wearable for stress relief paired with an on-demand content app. A former product manager at Google, he spent a decade shipping hardware including Pixel phones and Google Home before turning his cost-engineering instincts toward consumer neurotech. Earlier he founded Mango Startups, billed as the first ICO backed by a venture fund in Latin America, and helped coordinate the region's startup accelerator network. Costa Rica-born and multiply credentialed, he is part operator, part investor, and part builder who keeps returning to the same idea: democratize access to things normally locked behind gatekeepers.
Hugo Renaudin
Hugo Renaudin is the co-founder and CEO of P00LS, a Web3 platform building social and community tokens for creators and brands. A French-born, math-trained entrepreneur, he ran the largest ICO in France (raising roughly $20-30M in under 10 hours for LGO, a crypto exchange he sold to Voyager Digital), then co-founded the DeFi venture Bender Labs before launching P00LS in 2021. P00LS has raised around $18M to turn fandom into ownership: creators mint non-speculative tokens that reward and identify their most loyal supporters across chains.
Neel Popat
Neel Popat is the CEO and co-founder of Popcorn, a software-first 'next-gen telco' that sells one global eSIM phone plan with unlimited talk, text, and data across 180+ countries and no roaming fees. A British-Indian former finance professional turned serial founder, he coded a viral message board at 13, studied mathematics at LSE, spent a decade inside investment funds, then built the crypto-investing app Donut through Entrepreneur First. When Donut's custody partner Genesis went bankrupt, Popat fought through the wind-down and returned 100% of user funds before channeling the lessons into Popcorn.
Nico del Pino
Nico del Pino is the co-founder and CEO of Ola Guild Games (OLA GG), the largest web3 gaming community in the Hispanic world. A subDAO of Yield Guild Games, OLA GG sets out to turn play into financial inclusion for the 500-million-plus Spanish-speaking market across Latin America and beyond. A crypto and fintech operator for more than a decade, del Pino co-founded Liquid Meta (the first publicly traded liquidity-mining company), ran fintech at Endeavor, and led sales at NASDAQ-listed dLocal before betting his career on the idea that owning your in-game economy could change a household's bottom line.
Nicolás Jaramillo
Nicolás Jaramillo is a Chilean engineer turned serial fintech founder who wants to be the BlackRock of web3. After helping build MACH, Chile's first widely adopted digital bank, and scaling the cross-border payments company Global66 across Latin America, he co-founded Arch in 2020 to make crypto investing as boring and accessible as an index fund. Arch packages the chaos of DeFi into tokenized, risk-rated portfolios, raised $5M in seed funding from Digital Currency Group and Upload Ventures, and aims to bring traditional-market discipline to the decentralized economy.
Bluwhale
Bluwhale is a San Francisco AI and Web3 company building a decentralized intelligence layer that turns on-chain data and personal financial activity into a monetizable, user-owned asset. Its platform pairs wallet-level AI profiling with autonomous agents that act across banks, brokerages, and blockchains, giving consumers a single view of their money and a financial-health score (WhaleScore) while letting enterprises and dApps reach engaged, verified users. Founded in 2022 by repeat founder Han Jin, the company has grown to millions of users and expanded into multi-chain agentic finance backed by SBI, UOB Venture Management, Cardano, Sui, and others.
Antonio Juliano
Antonio Juliano is the founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges for crypto perpetuals and derivatives. A Princeton computer science graduate who learned crypto at Coinbase, he launched dYdX in 2017 and built it into a leading DeFi protocol. After stepping back from daily operations in 2024, he returned as CEO six months later, declaring he was going into 'Founder Mode' to revitalize the company.