ethereum
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ProperT wants your crypto to go shopping
A 5% token-back reward is the hook. The more interesting story is how ProperT uses payment processing and gift cards to give a digital token somewhere to go.
Offchain makes room for Ethereum
The team behind Arbitrum began by moving computation off Ethereum. Its next challenge is moving complexity out of the way of the people using it.
Sushi learned to share the trade.
It began by paying people to leave a rival exchange. Today, Sushi searches across rivals to execute a swap. The distance between those two ideas is the story.
Hayden Adams and the market that began as homework
After losing his engineering job, Hayden Adams learned to code by building an exchange. Uniswap turned that exercise into a career spent asking who gets to make a market.
Cointelegraph sells the speed. Trust pays the bill.
A crypto newsroom became a business in attention, analysis and access. Its most revealing story is what happens when a headline outruns the checks.
MetaMask puts the keys in your hands.
A browser extension helped millions enter crypto. Now MetaMask wants to handle everyday money, without taking custody of it. The hard part is making that freedom easy to use.
Harmony made blockchains fast. Trust took longer.
Two-second transactions were the easy part. A $100 million bridge theft, a bruising recovery debate and a proposed move into AI video reveal what speed alone cannot solve.
Andrej Bencic and the value of a second try
A hackathon team set out to fix public procurement and found a different problem under its own keyboard. Andrej Bencic has spent the years since building Tenderly around a simple ambition: let people see what happens before they commit.
Vladimir Novakovski and the mathematics of a useful stranger
Before Lunchclub, Vladimir Novakovski built trading systems and machine learning teams. His bet on better introductions led him back to a familiar question: how should a market bring two sides together?
Robert Leshner and the value of a boring idea
He helped turn crypto lending into software. At Superstate, Robert Leshner is betting that the next useful thing a blockchain can carry is something Wall Street already understands.
Evgeny Yurtaev and the art of starting over
Zerion’s co-founder has spent a decade changing what his company builds. The question underneath has stayed remarkably steady: why should using your own money require so much homework?
Mike Silagadze and the trouble with sitting still
He turned a shared living room into Top Hat, then traded a decade in education software for a new start in crypto. The thread running through Mike Silagadze’s career is a stubborn interest in what people can actually use.
Konstantin Richter and the business of making crypto boring
He spent years connecting people, phones and media. With Blockdaemon, Konstantin Richter took on a less glamorous connection: getting the financial establishment onto blockchain networks, one carefully governed step at a time.
Jutta Steiner and the trouble with trust
A question about online privacy took Jutta Steiner from applied mathematics to Ethereum’s security team and the co-founding of Parity Technologies. Her story follows the awkward distance between a promising idea and software people can depend on.
Gavin Wood and the problem with being in charge
He helped build Ethereum, gave Web3 its name and created Polkadot. Gavin Wood keeps returning to a more awkward question: how much power should any one person have?
Charles St. Louis and the difficult art of staying useful
He helped write the rules for decentralized organizations, became DELV’s CEO, and led its wind-down. Now Charles St. Louis is taking those lessons back to Ethereum’s wider financial ecosystem.
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.
Derek Chiang and the price of one more click
A basketball-inspired collectibles startup brought Derek Chiang face to face with crypto’s awkward front door. At ZeroDev, and now Ethlabs, he has kept working on what happens between a promising technology and a person willing to use it.
Karl Floersch and the economics of being useful
A college friend needed a new direction. Karl Floersch suggested Ethereum. Years later, the Optimism co-founder is still working on the same question: how do you make it easier, and worthwhile, for other people to build?
Monad wants your code. It would rather skip the queue.
The blockchain built by trading engineers keeps Ethereum’s familiar contracts and rearranges the machinery beneath them. Its next test is whether faster settlement makes money more useful.
Uniswap made a market out of a formula
A laid-off engineer turned a coding exercise into a way to trade without handing over your coins. Uniswap’s next experiment is making that open market pay for its own upkeep.
Superstate wants Wall Street to keep its shares - and change its clock
A Treasury fund was the rehearsal. Superstate is now building the ownership records and payment rails that let funds and public-company shares move through crypto markets.
Polymer Labs wants your money to arrive whole
Nearly $2 billion moved through its USDC bridge in nine months, the company says. Behind the tidy transfers is a more interesting idea: let applications prove what happened elsewhere, then get on with business.
Alchemy and the art of disappearing
A blockchain app needs someone to do the unglamorous work. Alchemy turned that chore into a business, then discovered that even an infrastructure company must choose what to leave to somebody else.
Zerion and the ten-cent theory of crypto
A wallet company discovered that the cheapest route can be the wrong route. Its larger wager is that making crypto understandable is a business of its own.
Zeshan Ali and the 3 A.M. Call That Made the Apes Real
Before Bored Ape Yacht Club became a public spectacle, two programmers had to make its club work. Zeshan Ali was one of them - and he learned the collection was selling out from a 3 a.m. phone call.
David Hoffman and the Price of Changing Your Mind
He helped make Ethereum a public conversation, then sold his own ETH. The Bankless co-founder’s story begins with a childhood computer in Seattle and reaches a harder question: what happens when a believer revises the thesis?
The Company That Lets Blockchains Rehearse
Tenderly began by explaining failed smart contracts. Now it gives developers, treasuries and risk teams a private dress rehearsal for decisions that would be expensive to discover in public.