crypto-founder
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Clinton Bembry’s Second Exit Was Built on Making Crypto Feel Boring
First Astro Wallet sold to Coinbase. Then Slingshot sold to Magic Eden. Across both companies, Clinton Bembry has pursued the same unfashionable idea: crypto works better when users do not have to think about crypto.
Jelena Djuric
Jelena Djuric is the co-founder and CEO of Noble, a blockchain built for issuing and moving stablecoins natively across the interchain. She started Noble in early 2023 with Stefan Coolican and John Letey after years working across the Cosmos, Dfinity and Celo ecosystems, and after helping found the Canadian Web3 Council. Noble powers native USDC on Cosmos and now connects roughly 50 blockchains, has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, and raised a $15 million Series A led by Paradigm in late 2024. Djuric's stated ambition is to make stablecoins as easy to send as a Venmo payment.
David Cao
David Cao is the co-founder and self-styled 'Chief Get Shit Done Officer' of N1, a Layer 1 blockchain built for finance that promises ultra-low latency and 100,000+ transactions per second. With co-founders Dima Romanov and Sheheryar Parvaz, he spent years building 01, a fully on-chain Solana derivatives exchange, weathered a two-year crypto winter, pivoted through Layer N, and relaunched the whole effort as N1 in December 2024. Backed by Founders Fund, dao5, Multicoin Capital and Arthur Hayes, the New York-based, Harvard-schooled builder is betting that congestion-free, developer-friendly infrastructure is the missing piece for moving real markets onchain.
Fernando Reyes
Fernando Reyes, known on-chain as FDR, is the founder and CEO of Drosera Network, a decentralized incident response protocol building what he calls an 'immune system' for Ethereum. A former US Army Cyber Protection Brigade operative, he also founded Groom Lake, a Web3 security firm staffed by ex-military and intelligence personnel that hunts hackers and recovers stolen crypto. In February 2025 Drosera raised $4.75M led by Greenfield Capital to ship its 'Traps' technology - customizable Solidity smart contracts that detect and neutralize exploits before they spread.
Edward Woodford
Edward Woodford is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Hash, the Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company that quietly powers digital-asset features inside Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Shift4. A Goldman Sachs commodities alum who bought his first Bitcoin from an ATM as an MIT grad student, he built and sold a regulated derivatives venue before turning Zero Hash into a billion-dollar 'plumbing' business that has settled more than $45 billion in volume and onboarded over five million people to crypto.