Reku is an Indonesian investment platform that lets everyday users buy, sell and trade cryptocurrency alongside US stocks and ETFs from a single app. Founded in 2017 as Rekeningku.com and rebranded to Reku in 2022, the company positions itself as a low-fee, education-first exchange licensed by Indonesian regulators. It offers spot crypto, crypto futures, staking, OTC services and curated Reku Packs, and turned profitable in 2024 while serving hundreds of thousands of customers.
SettleMint is a Belgium-founded blockchain-platform-as-a-service company that helps banks, governments and large enterprises build, deploy and operate blockchain and tokenization applications without assembling infrastructure from scratch. Its Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform combines multi-chain infrastructure, smart-contract tooling, middleware and low-code application kits so teams can move from pilot to production across issuance, compliance, custody, settlement and servicing. Founded in 2016 by Matthew Van Niekerk and Roderik van der Veer, the company serves over 80 customers worldwide and powers national-scale deployments including Saudi Arabia's real-estate registration blockchain.

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.
Bruno Caratori is the co-founder and Global CEO of Hashdex, one of the world's leading regulated crypto asset managers. A Brazilian electrical engineer turned financial technologist, he helped build Hashdex from a 2018 startup into a firm operating across eight countries with regulated crypto investment products including Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. He was named Global CEO in March 2026 after years as COO, having earlier worked in investment risk at Gavea Investimentos and led product at the education network Edmodo.
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.
Eaglebrook is a New York-based crypto investment platform built for wealth managers. It gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) and their clients direct, tax-optimized exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets through separately managed accounts (SMAs) held at institutional qualified custodians. As an SEC-registered investment advisor, Eaglebrook operates one of the largest crypto SMA platforms in the market, integrating with advisors' existing portfolio-management and reporting systems so they can offer, trade, bill, and report on digital assets inside their normal workflow.
OP Labs PBC is the core software development company behind Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, and the OP Stack, the open-source framework that powers the Superchain - a network of blockchains including chains launched by Sony, Uniswap, Kraken and (until 2026) Coinbase's Base. Founded in 2019 out of the nonprofit Plasma Group, OP Labs raised $178.5M from Paradigm and a16z at a $1.65B valuation and structures itself as a Public Benefit Corporation committed to scaling Ethereum's technology and values, including funding open-source public goods.
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.'
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.
Futureswap is a decentralized, non-custodial protocol for leveraged perpetual trading, letting users take long or short positions on crypto assets with leverage while liquidity providers earn fees and token incentives. Built by a small San Francisco team led by founder Derek Alia, it launched on Ethereum in 2020, later moved to Arbitrum and Avalanche for lower-cost transactions, and pioneered an AMM-based design that plugs into pools like Uniswap and Trader Joe. Backed by roughly $13.5M from investors including Ribbit Capital, Framework Ventures, True Ventures and Placeholder, it was governed by the community via its FST token.
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.
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.
P00LS is a community-first Web3 protocol that lets creators and brands launch their own cryptocurrency token, distribute it to fans, and reward on-chain engagement across platforms. Founded in 2021 by Hugo Renaudin, the company turns audiences into token-holding communities, giving creators data and tools to map, reward, and grow their most active supporters. Backers include Acrew Capital, Maveron, and Kima Ventures, and early adopters range from footballer Ronaldinho to TIME and Ed Banger Records.
Succinct is a San Francisco cryptography company building SP1, an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine that lets developers prove the correct execution of any Rust program, and the Succinct Prover Network - a decentralized marketplace where independent provers compete to generate ZK proofs for rollups, bridges and onchain applications.
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.

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.
dYdX is a decentralized trading protocol best known for perpetual futures, where traders take leveraged long and short positions on crypto without handing custody to a centralized exchange. Founded by ex-Coinbase engineer Antonio Juliano in 2017, it evolved from an Ethereum DeFi app into its own sovereign Cosmos appchain (dYdX v4) that runs a high-performance, validator-operated order book settled in USDC. The protocol is governed by the DYDX token and, with the 2025 launch of spot trading, opened access to U.S. traders for the first time.
Edge is a San Diego company building a self-custody, privacy-first mobile wallet for buying, storing, swapping and spending more than 120 cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2014 as Airbitz and rebranded to Edge in 2018, it pioneered a username-and-password login model backed by client-side encryption and a zero-knowledge architecture, so private keys and account data never leave a user's device unencrypted. The same security layer is offered to developers as the Edge Login SDK.
Livepeer is an open, permissionless network that turns idle GPUs around the world into a decentralized marketplace for video infrastructure. Founded in 2017 by Doug Petkanics and Eric Tang, it began as a low-cost alternative to centralized video transcoding and has since expanded into real-time AI video - letting developers generate, transform and interpret live streams on a token-incentivized GPU network rather than expensive cloud providers.
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.
Doug Petkanics is the co-founder and CEO of Livepeer, a decentralized network that turns idle GPUs around the world into open video infrastructure. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and three-time founder, he built and sold Hyperpublic to Groupon and shipped an Apple App of the Year at Wildcard before betting on blockchain in 2016. Today he is steering Livepeer squarely at real-time AI video, arguing the open internet should not be rebuilt on the same handful of cloud giants it set out to escape.
Verbwire was a Web3 infrastructure company that collapsed the entire smart-contract stack into a single REST API. Founded by two former Wall Street quants, it let developers in any language - Python, Java, JavaScript, C++ - deploy contracts, mint NFTs, manage wallets, store files on IPFS and query on-chain data without ever touching Solidity or Hardhat. With 60+ endpoints across 10+ EVM blockchains, it served tens of thousands of developers and processed millions of API calls before the founders wound it down, noting that AI had begun to close the very complexity gap they were built to bridge.
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.