Top 15 People With Maximum Influence in our Crypto World

Content of article:

  • Bitcoin Founder, Satoshi Nakamoto
  • Hal Finney, early Bitcoin developer
  • Changpeng Zhao, BINANCE founder and CEO
  • Brian Armstrong, COINBASE co-founder and CEO
  • Roger Ver, a crypto investor
  • Nick Szabo, smart contracts’ inventor
  • Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder
  • Joseph Lubin, Ethereum co-founder, ConsenSys founder
  • David Marcus, Libra cryptocurrency, Facebook
  • Winklevoss Twins, Gemini exchange, Winkdex price index
  • Chris Larsen, Ripple co-founder
  • Justin Sun, Tron Foundation, Rainberry, Inc.
  • Kelly Loeffler, ex-senator for Georgia
  • Ari Paul, BlockTower Capital co-founder
  • Elizabeth Stark, Lightning Labs

Cryptocurrency was designed for people by people. Without some of these outstanding personalities, the industry as we know it today would be different. Let’s see who has shaped this market and continues doing so, and what brought them to where they are.

10 years after the Bitcoin invention, it’s still unknown to the public who is Satoshi Nakamoto — and even if that’s a person or a team. In 2011, one of the world’s best white hat hackers Dan Kaminsky was trying to hack Bitcoin, and all his 9 attacks were removed. “Either there’s a team of people who worked on this,” Kaminsky said, “or this guy is a genius.”

People were analyzing the forum activity of Nakamoto to try to identify his geographical location; even linguistic analysis was used — people noted that Satoshi used the words like «optimise» or «colour», which is the way of spelling most common for Britain. However, others argued that was nothing but a disguise, and the identity of the Bitcoin founder still remains unknown.

There wouldn’t have been the cryptocurrency as we know it if not Hal Finney (1956–2014). An early Bitcoin enthusiast and adopter, he was the receiver of the first-ever Bitcoin transaction, and also the first person to mention cryptocurrencies on Twitter:

Several months after Bitcoin was launched, Finney learned about his severe diagnosis — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. While his state was worsening, he kept working at the elliptic functions that helped speed up Bitcoin transactions by 20%. Even when Finney lost his ability to type, he used an eye tracker to write a bcflick program that added more security to Bitcoin wallets.

Hal Finney is considered one of the most significant contributors to Bitcoin.

Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, is one of the most influential crypto enthusiasts active today. The Binance exchange he launched in 2017 has become one of the biggest crypto startups in less than a year, and CZ has become one of the first ‘official’ crypto billionaires. Today, he keeps launching new projects every year: Binance Chain and Binance DEX, Binance Smart Chain, and many others.

Let’s move on to one of the biggest CZ’s and Binance’s competitors, Brian Armstrong. His San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange was founded in 2012 and, unlike Binance, is legally available on the entire territory of the US.

A software engineer and a crypto entrepreneur, Armstrong has broad experience in the field, having worked at Airbnb, IBM, and Deloitte. His other project, GiveCrypto, helps with cryptocurrency donations to those in need across the globe. In 2017, together with Vitalik Buterin, Armstrong got into the Forbes’ “40 under 40” list of businessmen. His net worth is estimated at $13 billion.

Roger Ver is known as a cryptocurrency evangelist and investor, thanks to whom many early crypto startups have emerged. Ver funded the Kraken crypto exchange, BitPay — one of the first crypto payment platforms, and the privacy coin ZCash. For his enthusiasm in spreading the word about crypto, Ver has been called a “Bitcoin Jesus.” However, he didn’t find the first cryptocurrency perfect and initiated its hard fork, which led to Bitcoin Cash creation in 2017.

Nick Szabo is one of those few people who have been in the crypto industry till now from the very beginning — and even earlier. Back in 1998, Szabo introduced the concept of Bit Gold — a digital counterpart to fiat money that would need no trust in third parties. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Many claim this was the precursor of Bitcoin, which, however, has never seen live.

One more concept that Szabo has introduced is Smart Contracts. In 1997, the developer was describing it as an algorithm that works similarly to a vending machine: it takes your money and gives you the product in a trustless manner. Almost two decades later, in 2015, this idea was implemented in Ethereum — and remains one of the pillars of the crypto world.

Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia and then moved to Canada with his parents at the age of 6. At school, his talents in math and programming were quickly recognized, and he entered a class for gifted children.

Vitalik’s father was a programmer. When he learned about the Bitcoin invention, he let his son know about this new technology. Vitalik got interested, and a few months later co-founded the Bitcoin Magazine.

In 2013, Vitalik presented a Bitcoin upgrade proposal to improve the network’s scalability and allow devs to create dApps. After the proposal was rejected, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum whitepaper and 2 years after, co-founded Ethereum. Until today, Ether remains the Top-2 cryptocurrency by market cap, and Vitalik is one of the most influential people in the industry.

Joseph Lubin is one of the key engineers behind Ethereum. Back in early 2014, he was a COO at Ethereum Switzerland — a company that was trying to extend Bitcoin’s capabilities, granting blockchains the opportunity to store and operate programs, not only data. Later, Lubin was involved in the creation of the Ethereum foundation.

As a co-founder of Vitalik Buterin’s brainchild, he is also the founder of ConsenSys — a software engineering company focused on building blockchains, including the one of Ethereum. Today, Lubin stands in a row of crypto billionaires, according to Forbes.

Have you heard of that super-ambitious project, where Mark Zuckerberg wanted to launch his own cryptocurrency to introduce Facebook’s one-billion audience to crypto? Though Libra has never been implemented due to the SEC’s opposition, David Marcus — the co-creator and a board member of Libra, a French-American entrepreneur — is worth getting on this list. Today, his project exists by the name Diem and seeks approval from the US treasury to register as a money services business.

Winklevoss brothers, Cameron and Tyler, studied at Harvard College together with Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Though they took their path in crypto, it could have been different: back in the 2000-s, they accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea and the source code of their brainchild ConnectU for creating Facebook. You might remember this scandal episode in the “Social Network” movie!

Later on, the Winklevoss brothers launched the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, the Winkdex crypto price index, and Winklevoss Capital that funds numerous early-stage startups.

Chris Larsen is the executive chairman and the co-founder of Ripple — a cryptocurrency platform for cheap and fast remittances. Ripple has been going through scrutiny for years, has been accused by the crypto community of working with banks and of being too centralized (Ripple Labs, Inc. controls 61% of XRP) — nevertheless, Ripple stays in the Top-5 of assets, and Chris Larsen is one of the richest people in crypto.

If you’ve ever used ?Torrent, the following will make more sense to you: BitTorrent, Inc., is the company that operates ?Torrent, and in 2018, it was sold to Justin Sun and further incorporated into the TRON network, performing its own token sale. This was a part of Justin Sun’s, a Chinese-American 30 y.o. entrepreneur, plan for making the web more decentralized. Sun is the founder of TRON Network which means to compete with Ethereum in the domain of decentralized apps.

There are not too many politicians on this list, but Kelly Loeffler actually hasn’t been one for so long. As the Senator for the State of Georgia in the US Congress, Loeffler was seeking to develop considered crypto regulation — she came there after a 15-year long career in finance and crypto. Previously, Kelly Loeffler worked as the CEO of Bakkt, a company for digital asset management.

If you have many Bitcoins but aren’t sure what to do with them, Ari Paul’s BlockTower Capital could help. This is a crypto and blockchain investment firm that helps clients multiply their wealth by proper asset management. Ari Paul is a crypto specialist who sees more reasons for the Bitcoin dump besides Elon Musks’ tweets.

Have you heard of the Lightning Network, a second-layer scaling solution for Bitcoin? Elizabeth Stark is an entrepreneur whose Lightning Labs has created this protocol. Though it hasn’t gained much traction to date, scaling solutions for Bitcoin are a very promising field necessary for further cryptocurrency adoption.

All these people had different motivations that brought them to where they are. We hope these examples of passion and dedication inspired you, and you will find — or reinforce — yours.

 06.06.2021

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