crypto
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Ryne Saxe and the long way to a simpler dollar
Before Eco, Ryne Saxe studied atoms and negotiated technology deals. His education in money began earlier, watching his father do business on the strength of his word.
Ben Weiss and the surprisingly physical life of digital money
Ben Weiss helped build CoinFlip around a stubbornly ordinary habit: paying with cash. His route from a college Bitcoin wallet to thousands of kiosks runs through gas stations, bank accounts, and the work of earning trust.
Andy Bromberg and the trouble with a perfectly good calendar
After Sidewire, CoinList and Eco, Andy Bromberg is finding room for smaller inventions. His latest projects offer a close look at a founder who keeps asking why familiar tools have to work that way.
Yudhono Rawis and the art of moving carefully in a market that never sleeps
After years in deal advisory, fintech lending and Tokocrypto, Yudhono Rawis founded FLOQ. His wager is that Indonesia’s digital-asset market will reward the patient work of building trust.
Joshua Blew and the complicated business of being Normal
A teenage stock-picker learned to write code, built banking software, and set out to make crypto easier to use. Joshua Blew’s story is a study in how an impatient investor becomes a patient builder.
Hany Rashwan’s long road to one less click
Before he co-founded 21Shares, Hany Rashwan put a checkout inside a tweet. His career keeps returning to the same awkward space: the distance between wanting to do something with money and being able to do it.
Elliot Andrews and the end of the 100x conversation
Before Aspen Digital, Elliot Andrews worked on the machinery of institutional finance. Now, from Abu Dhabi, he is bringing that experience to a question wealthy crypto investors increasingly ask: how does this fit into the rest of my life?
Sumardi Fung and the question that became an exchange
He first dismissed Bitcoin as a scam. A conversation about Ethereum sent Sumardi Fung into mining, then into building Reku - an Indonesian investment platform shaped by years of trading and learning on the job.
Shayne Coplan and the price of being right
A New York kid with an early interest in Ethereum built Polymarket around a stubborn question: what do people really believe when money is on the line? Now his experiment in reading the future has to meet the demands of the financial establishment.
Alex Svanevik and the value of a well-placed comma
A Norwegian data scientist turned a question about anonymous wallets into Nansen. His next wager is that the machines reading the market will also make the trades.
Graham Jenkin and the art of getting there early
Before he helped crypto projects find their first communities, Graham Jenkin was protecting his mornings at Google. The CoinList co-founder’s career follows a practical question: how do you make room for something new?
Jesse Choi and the education that began after Stanford
He moved to Jakarta with a Stanford MBA, a private equity background, and a relationship worth crossing the world for. Building Reku would teach Jesse Choi how much a good résumé leaves out.
Mo Shaikh and the Missing Forty Dollars
A Brooklyn taxi fare first made Mo Shaikh curious about where money goes. After a real estate experiment and a blockchain born from Meta’s abandoned Diem project, he is putting that question to work as an investor.
The Engineer Who Kept Asking What Money Should Be Able to Do
Before Sui, Adeniyi Abiodun wrote software for oil wells, banks and Bitcoin miners. The Mysten Labs co-founder has spent the years since Meta’s abandoned Libra project trying to make moving value online feel ordinary.
Jesse Pollak Kept Looking for the Door Into Crypto. Then He Built the Floor.
A student startup tried to retire the password. A Coinbase assignment asked for an onchain future. Between them, Jesse Pollak learned that the hardest part of building a new internet is deciding what belongs underneath it.
Dan Romero and the Art of Starting Over
He helped Coinbase find its footing, built an open social network, then handed it on. At Tempo, Dan Romero is testing a new premise: that the next useful crypto product may simply move money.
Avery Ching Built the Pipes. Now He Wants to Move the Money.
A circuit-design class sent a Honolulu student toward supercomputing. Two decades later, the systems engineer behind Facebook data infrastructure and Diem is running Aptos Labs - and arguing that the next useful blockchain will look less like a coin and more like a market.
Chris Larsen Has Spent 30 Years Making Money Move
Before crypto had a culture war, Larsen was prying open credit scores and mortgage fees. Ripple is the third act in a career built around one stubborn idea: financial systems should reveal their machinery.
David Wachsman Learned to Sell the Future. Now He Has to Build It.
He built a career helping crypto founders explain unfamiliar ideas. Eleven years later, David Wachsman is testing those lessons in a new role: operator, adviser and investor inside a public company.
Amir Bandeali Built the Pipes for a World of Tokens
A former Chicago trader left the desk, learned to build, and bet that tokenized value would need open markets. Nearly a decade later, 0x is still solving the unglamorous machinery of how assets actually move.
The Blackstone Alum Betting That Wall Street Runs on Blockchain Next
Alex Marinier left private equity to write the earliest checks into blockchain finance. Six years and one Polymarket later, New Form Capital is raising again - and the institutions it once worked for are finally listening.
The Only Two Bets BlueYard Will Make: Utopia or Oblivion
BlueYard hands early-stage founders a check between $500K and $5M to chase problems most investors call radioactive - fusion reactors, hypersonic defense, decentralized money, engineered cells. Since 2016 it has backed Solana, Groq, IonQ and Filecoin from a partnership split between Berlin and the US.
RRE Ventures Has Been Playing the Long Game Since 1994 - and It Shows
The New York firm wrote early checks into Palantir, Datadog and Venmo, then stayed in the boardroom for the parts that actually get hard.
How a Forgotten Wallet Turned Into America's Verb for Money
Venmo turned paying a friend back into a social ritual - complete with emojis and a public feed. Fifteen years later, "just Venmo me" is how a generation moves money.
The Firm That Turned Bitcoin Into a Ticker Symbol
Grayscale spent a decade building the plumbing that lets ordinary investors own crypto without touching a wallet - then went to court to prove the SEC had to allow it.
Alexandre Elkrief
He managed institutional crypto positions on spreadsheets and assumptions, then watched the market blow up. Now he is trying to rebuild the plumbing so it can't happen the same way twice.
Utkarsh Sinha
Utkarsh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade, a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) fintech building a platform for traders outside the US to trade perpetual futures on American stocks with up to 20x leverage, self-custodial wallets, and local-currency onboarding. Raised in a middle-class family in Ranchi, he studied EECS at IIT Kharagpur and computer science at Columbia, worked at McKinsey and in engineering roles, and previously built Martian Wallet from his Columbia dorm room, scaling it to 2M+ installs and a $2B+ transaction volume before it was acquired.
Fliq by EthosX
Fliq is a creator-owned, mobile-first prediction market built by EthosX (YC S22), the DeFi derivatives protocol founded by ex-JP Morgan derivatives quant Deepanshu. Fliq turns trading into simple yes/no questions on sports, politics, memes and culture, letting local creators launch their own markets. Built on the Aptos blockchain with USDT settlement, it aims to onboard the ~95% of people in markets like India who have never traded, making prediction markets as engaging as short-form video.
Settle Network
Settle Network is a Buenos Aires-based fintech that builds the fiat-to-crypto rails Latin America runs on. Through its Latamex gateway and Stellar-based settlement infrastructure, it lets exchanges, businesses, and users convert local currencies like the Argentine peso and Brazilian real into crypto and stablecoins - and back again - in seconds. A Y Combinator S22 company backed by the Stellar Development Foundation, Settle became the on/off ramp behind global exchanges including Binance and OKX across the region.
Hata
Hata is a Malaysian dual-licensed digital asset exchange that lets people buy, sell, store and stake cryptocurrencies using local fiat. Founded in 2023 and launched in May of that year, it holds licences from both the Securities Commission Malaysia and the Labuan Financial Services Authority - a rare dual-regulated footprint that keeps customer assets custodied inside the country. Led by ex-Luno APAC general manager David Low, Hata grew to more than 209,000 registered users by the end of 2025 and closed an US$8 million Series A led by Bybit in April 2026.