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.
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.
0x is the open exchange infrastructure powering token swaps for many of crypto's largest apps - Coinbase, Robinhood, Phantom, MetaMask, Matcha and more. Through its Swap API, gasless transactions, and the underlying 0x Protocol, the company aggregates liquidity from hundreds of sources across the major chains so developers can ship trading experiences without building order routing themselves.
Will Warren co-founded 0x in October 2016 alongside Amir Bandeali, building the open protocol that became foundational DeFi infrastructure for peer-to-peer trading of Ethereum-based digital assets. A former applied physics researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who left a PhD program in structural engineering to bet everything on Ethereum, Warren grew 0x from a whitepaper into a protocol powering billions in DEX volume and a developer platform serving the broadest ecosystem of DeFi apps, wallets, and market makers. In May 2026 he stepped down as Co-CEO while remaining a major shareholder and board member.
Dan Robinson is a General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of the most influential crypto venture firms in the world. A former litigation attorney turned protocol engineer, he co-authored 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' - the paper that defined MEV for the industry - and played a central role in designing Uniswap V2 and V3. Robinson joined Paradigm in 2019 as its first Research Partner, was later promoted to General Partner, and has published foundational work on MEV taxes, Gradual Dutch Auctions, and prediction market AMMs. His rare combination of legal training and deep blockchain engineering makes him one of crypto's most distinctive voices at the intersection of mechanism design and decentralized finance.
Uma Roy is the co-founder and CEO of Succinct, the company building SP1 - the world's fastest open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). A former Google Brain AI researcher and MIT double major in mathematics and computer science, she pivoted from machine learning to cryptography to make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to every developer. Under her leadership, Succinct raised $55M led by Paradigm, launched a decentralized prover network, and positioned SP1 as critical infrastructure securing billions in TVL across major Layer 2 networks.
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.
Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output (IOHK), one of the five original co-founders of Ethereum, and a polarizing figure in cryptocurrency who left Ethereum over a for-profit vs. nonprofit dispute. He now runs a peer-reviewed blockchain platform, owns an 11,000-acre buffalo ranch in Wyoming, funds alien-hunting expeditions, donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon for formal mathematics research, and is pioneering anti-aging medicine while building political influence through his Wyoming Integrity PAC.
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.
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.
Joel Monegro is a Managing Partner and Co-founder of Placeholder, a New York City-based venture capital firm that invests exclusively in decentralized blockchain networks and cryptoassets. Best known for authoring the seminal 2016 essay 'Fat Protocols' - one of the most influential frameworks in crypto investing - he built Union Square Ventures' blockchain thesis before launching Placeholder in 2017 with Chris Burniske. A former Dominican Republic government technology official turned VC, he is also an amateur competitive racing driver who races under @racingpapi with the Dominican flag proudly displayed.
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.
Tom Schmidt is a General Partner at Dragonfly Capital, the leading crypto-native venture firm, where he serves as the team's DeFi expert. A Stanford CS graduate who mined Dogecoin in 2012 and turned down an early Coinbase offer to intern at a Chinese AI company, Schmidt brings rare cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary depth to his investing. After stints at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, and 0x Protocol, he joined Dragonfly in 2019 and has since championed landmark bets on Dune Analytics, Lido, Ethena, Polymarket, and Rain. He writes some of the most technically rigorous DeFi research in the industry and is known as a low-profile investor whose map of the future tends to be a few years ahead of the market.
ZeroDev is a New York-based B2B blockchain infrastructure company that provides account abstraction wallets as a service. Founded in 2022 by Derek Chiang and backed by Y Combinator (W23), ZeroDev built Kernel — the first modular, extensible smart contract account — enabling developers to ship wallets with social login, gasless transactions, session keys, and transaction batching without seed phrases. By the time of its acquisition by Offchain Labs (Arbitrum's creator) in August 2025, ZeroDev powered 5+ million smart accounts across 130+ EVM-compatible chains for 100+ applications including Gemini, Crossmint, and DIMO.
Laura Shin is the leading voice in crypto journalism - host of the Unchained podcast, author of The Cryptopians, and founder of Unchained Crypto. A Stanford and Columbia-educated journalist, she was the first mainstream reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time, amassing 25+ million downloads and solving one of crypto's biggest mysteries: the 2016 Ethereum DAO hack.
Nader Dabit is a developer relations leader, educator, and engineer who built a career from scratch after starting to code at 30. From React Native expert to AWS advocate to Web3 bridge-builder, he has spent the last decade making complex technology accessible to developers everywhere. A founder of DeveloperDAO, author of two O'Reilly-family books, and now working at Cognition on AI software agents, Nader is the rare person who connects technical depth with community instinct - and has the self-taught story to prove it.
Preethi Kasireddy is a serial founder, engineer, and educator who pivoted from Goldman Sachs investment banking to venture capital at Andreessen Horowitz, then taught herself to code at Hack Reactor and went on to build at Coinbase, found TruStory, create DappCamp - one of the most respected Web3 developer bootcamps - and most recently co-found Ferta, a root-cause fertility coaching startup. Her writing on Ethereum and blockchain architecture has become essential reading for tens of thousands of developers worldwide.