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(https://modernconsensus.com/)

The 2019 Modern Consensus 100 Most Influential People in CryptoThe individuals moving, shaking, and shaping cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology rightnowBy Lawrence Lewitinn (https://modernconsensus.com/author/lvlewitinn/), Leo Jakobson (https://modernconsensus.com/author/leo-jakobson/), Martine Paris(https://modernconsensus.com/author/martine-paris/), Brendan Sullivan (https://modernconsensus.com/author/brendanjsullivan/) and Michael Hillmeyer (https://mod-ernconsensus.com/author/michaelhillmeyer/) , January 7, 2019

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W ho are the most influential people in crypto today? That’s the tough question posed—sometimes verbally, butmostly through actions—by entrepreneurs, developers, investors, enthusiasts, traders, and journalists. It’s one weoften contemplate at Modern Consensus and, with the start of the year, we thought we’d try to answer it as bestwe can.

Digital currency is a relatively new technology and still a growing industry, despite one of the worst years cryptocurrencies havefaced in their brief history. This lends itself to an incredible potential for upward mobility for someone with talent. A kid in highschool when Bitcoin’s first block was created can, a decade later, become the most important man in blockchain technology. Billion-aires don’t always have as much clout as coders with a sizable fan base.

We created this list after several weeks of research and debate. A team of Modern Consensus writers and contributors—Leo Jakobson(https://modernconsensus.com/author/leo.jakobson/), Martine Paris (https://modernconsensus.com/author/martine-paris/), Bren-dan Sullivan (https://modernconsensus.com/author/brendanjsullivan/), and Michael Hillmeyer (https://modernconsensus.com/au-thor/michaelhillmeyer/)—worked day and night to compile an impeccable list of a couple hundred of the biggest names in the cryp-to. Many factors were considered, such as assets under management and portfolio; the importance of entrepreneurs’ projects; andthe impact thought leaders have in shaping the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. A process was developed torank the data we had and discussions—sometimes heated—ensued. Names were dropped while others were added.

To be sure, the resulting list is imperfect. However, it’s safe to say that someone in the Top 10 has more power and influence than,say, folks in the 80s or 90s. That’s how such a list works.

And, because of the fluid nature of this business, someone who makes the crypto world shake in its boots now may not do so nextyear, while a relatively unknown person can revolutionize the technology in just a few months.

Before continuing, we feel we must point out a somber fact: Despite all the promise of the democratization of technology that is be-ing promised, there remains a woeful lack of diversity among its leaders. For example, there are a few, very powerful women on thislist but nowhere near as many as there should be. For there to be a revolutionary change in technology and finance, there will haveto be a revolutionary change in who’s making the key decisions.

We now bring you the first annual Modern Consensus 100 Most Influential People in Crypto.

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1.Vitalik Buterin (Photo by Romanpoet/Wikicommons).

Vitalik Buterin Ethereum Founder

Turning just 25 at the end of January, Valerik Buterin is firmly ensconced as the voice of Ethereum, the blockchaindesign he proposed as a robust platform for decentralized smart contracts rather than just a cryptocurrency. And that may be a prob-lem. In a Nov. 1 article in MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612372/ethereums-founder-vitalik-buterin-says-his-creation-cant-succeed-unless-he-takes-a-step/), Buterin was quoted as saying that for Ethereum to succeed, he needed tostep back from leading its development, but almost immediately had to walk that comment back for a nervous community, sayingthat he was staying involved but merely encouraging others to become more involved. This is after a hoax report of his death in 2017knocked $4 billion off the third-largest cryptocurrency’s value.

The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (https://entethalliance.org/), founded in 2017 to support its use as an enterprise blockchain plat-

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form, includes 358 members, mostly blockchain companies but with quite a few major firms like Deloitte, Microsoft, BP, and J.P.Mor-gan as well.

Buterin, who was awarded an honorary doctorate from Switzerland’s oldest university in November, is heavily involved in the sched-uled Ethereum “hard fork” scheduled for January that will shift Ethereum mining from a proof-of-work model like Bitcoin to a proof-of-stake model, in which “miners” stake a greater number of coins rather than solving a mathematical puzzle to create the nextblock. Buterin says this will help blockchain transactions (https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-proof-of-stake-sharding-to-make-blockchains-1-000x-more-efficient) become “thousands of times more efficient” as well as much more environmentallyfriendly.

2. Jihan Wu Bitmain Co-founder

When there’s a gold rush on you want to be the guy out there selling pickaxes. Jihan Wu’s Bitmain is a $12 billion company that haskept the crypto world in mining equipment. And that’s not including his stake in the $3 billion crypto startup Circle.

3. Jay Clayton Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Jay Clayton is certainly crypto’s biggest roadblock at the regulatory body. Despite a part-nership with Nasdaq for use of its manipulation surveillance tools, the SEC, spearheaded by Clayton, in July turned down a proposedexchange traded fund (ETF) tracking the value of Bitcoin by the Winklevoss twins’ BATS BZX Exchange. It was the most recent in aseries of such rejections, and Clayton recently suggested it won’t be the last.

Speaking at the Consensus Invest Conference in Manhattan in November (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/sec-wants-key-up-grades-in-crypto-markets-before-approving-bitcoin-etf.html), Clayton said, “What investors expect is that trading in the commodi-ty that underlies that ETF makes sense and is free from the risk of manipulation. It’s an issue that needs to be addressed before Iwould be comfortable,” approving a cryptocurrency ETF. A leader of the white shoe legal firm Sullivan & Cromwell before his ap-pointment by President Donald Trump, Clayton has reportedly disappointed Republicans (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-sec-clayton/republican-frustrations-grow-as-sec-chair-proves-frequent-ally-of-democrats-idUSKCN1OJ0I1) who expected a moreaggressively pro-business approach on issues ranging from enforcement to cryptocurrency regulation.

4. Naval Ravikant AngelList Founder & Chair

Naval Ravikant is one of the most beloved investors in the crypto space for having founded AngelList, one of the first platforms cre-ated for startups to raise capital from accredited investors. He was instrumental in getting the Jobs Act of 2012 passed which allowsfor regulatory compliant crowdfunding under Reg CF and Reg A. An early investor in Twitter, Uber, Postmates, Yammer, Foursquare,Gigster, 21, Plancast, Poshmark, and Product Hunt (which AngelList bought), his recent crypto investments include Coinlist, Chia,CryptoKitties, Bitwise Asset Management, Orchid Labs and Kraken. Of his 77 investments on AngelList, 69 have had exits. “Naval isThe Matrix,” said serial entrepreneur and investor, Jared Kopf on Naval’s AngelList profile. He has nearly a half million Twitter fol-lowers; so popular was this cypherpunk tweet that he reposted it to kick off the year (https://twitter.com/naval/sta-tus/955998687670411264?lang=en), “Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quickscheme.”

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5. Joe Lubin Consensys Founder

Ethereum co-founder and possible still-billionaire Joseph Lubin is best known as head of ConsenSys (https://consensys.net/), ablockchain startup incubator and technology firm focused on building companies around every aspect of the Ethereum blockchainsystem. An articulate evangelist for the technology and former Goldman Sachs banker, Lubin has spoken at events (https://www.har-rywalker.com/speakers/joseph-lubin) ranging from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to SXSW.

With the value of the Ethereum coins that make up his fortune dropping sharply over the Crypto Winter of 2018, his sprawling,Brooklyn-based firm is reportedly in the process of undergoing a sea-change that may see up to 60 percent of its around 1,200 em-ployees laid off in a strategic refocusing of the company (ConsenSys 2.0, Lubin calls it) from a hybrid incubator model to a more tra-ditional investor. Two days before announcing ConsenSys 2.0 (https://content.consensys.net/wp-content/uploads/ConsenSys-Shares-2.0.pdf), Lubin called the move (https://www.coindesk.com/lubin-wont-rule-out-layoffs-amid-refocusing-at-consensys) “arefocusing of priorities… On more rigor, more structure, more sustainability, more accountability.” That his empire grew in about ayear from 200 to 1,200 and now appears to be shrinking just as quickly has given the entire industry a black eye, and one could makea fair argument that Lubin and ConsenSys are responsible for more market cap loss in ETH than anyone else 2018. The companyhelped create and expand the image of the space as an anarchist playground with no meaningful goals or metrics while also playingmidwife for many ICOs that fueled the hype cycle. Ultimately, many of their science experiments now appear that they’d work betterwith traditional database technology, while the massive layoffs have created bad optics for the whole industry. The upshot is thatETH is down far more than BTC and XRP over the past six months, though a December rally pared some of the losses.

6. Mike Novogratz Galaxy Digital Founder & CEO

A former Goldman Sachs banker and Fortress Investments Group hedge fund manager, Mike Novogratz was a fairly early investor inBitcoin, personally buying $7 million worth at $100 in 2013. As founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital (https://www.galaxydigital.io/), heoversees a merchant bank dedicated to digital assets and blockchain technology with four main lines of business: OTC trading, assetmanagement, advisory, and principal investing in VC and other business stages. In November, Galaxy Digital announced several topexecutive departures as Novogratz refocused on institutional clients rather than small ICO and blockchain consulting.

In 2017, after leaving Fortress after several big losses, Novogratz started Galaxy Digital, whose Galaxy Digital Capital Management(https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/galaxy-digital-capital-management-november-2018-month-end-aum-702508091.html)subsidiary had $422 million under management as of Nov. 30. He is known for being bullish on cryptocurrencies despite calling Bit-coin a bubble in 2017 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-26/mike-novogratz-is-set-for-comeback-with-crytocur-rency-hedge-fund), telling Bloomberg in Dec. 2018 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-12-18/galaxy-s-mike-novo-gratz-on-the-crypto-collapse-of-2018-video), “Most manias are built on something that’s real. The Internet bubble felt like a mania,and whoa did the Internet change our world… Two years from now people are going to look back and see this as a huge buying op-portunity in the crypto space.”

7. Brian Armstrong Coinbase Co-founder & CEO

In 2018 there were more active Coinbase accounts than Charles Schwab accounts thanks largely to CEO and Chief Legal Officer BrianArmstrong. The co-founder recently penned a New York Times op-ed(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/business/dealbook/digital-reserve-currency.html) in support of the U.S. creating its ownworld reserve crypto currency and he wants Coinbase to be the “Google of Crytpo (http://fortune.com/the-ledger-40-under-40/brian-armstrong-1/).”

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Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse (Modern Consensus).

8, 9, 10. Brad Garlinghouse, Cory Johnson, David Schwartz Ripple Co-founder & CEO, Chief Market Strategist, CTO

Ripple (https://ripple.com)’s goal of taking on SWIFT and disrupting global banking hinges on its leadership team’s ability to exe-cute. So far, they’re making progress. They have 120 banks as partners in their xCurrent product and have done tests with centralbanks like those of England and Saudi Arabia. And now that the xRapid product has launched with several real-world financial ser-vice companies using it, critics who have wondered whether Ripple’s technology would ever incorporate XRP tokens have been qui-eted. As CEO, Brad Garlinghouse has been the public face of Ripple, regularly appearing on TV and doing the conference circuit, in-cluding the company’s own yearly event SWELL, presumably so named to bust SWIFT’s chops. He recently brought in Bloomberg TVhost Cory Johnson as Ripple’s chief markets strategist, essentially serving as Garlinghouse’s surrogate as demand for the CEO’s timegrows.

One of the original developers of the Ripple consensus network, Schwartz helped create the second most valuable cryptocurrency bymarket cap, XRP, which knocked Ethereum down to No. 3 this year. Designed specifically as a “frictionless” means of transferringmoney globally at very low cost, Ripple’s technology claims several benefits over rivals Bitcoin and Ethereum, notably the speed atwhich transactions can be settled. That’s important, considering that the company’s RippleNet software aims to take over the old-fashioned business of interbank money transfers by knocking the traditionally days-long process down to a few seconds (comparedto hours for Bitcoin and minutes for Ethereum).

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A developer of cloud storage and messaging systems for the likes of CNN and the U.S. National Security Agency, Schwartz is current-ly focused on two goals: working with financial institutions like American Express and Santander that are experimenting with itsproducts, and explaining to the crypto community that Ripple does not have central control of XRP (https://www.forbes.-com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2018/09/04/ripples-trillion-dollar-man/) despite holding vast amounts of the 100 billion XRP itsfounders created.

11. Wences Casares Xapo Founder & CEO

Known as the “patient zero (https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244859)” of Bitcoin among Silicon Valley VC firms, Wences Ce-sares is a serial entrepreneur and board member of both PayPal and the crypto research and advocacy non-profit Coin Center(https://coincenter.org). His current project is Xapo (https://xapo.com), which says it combines the convenience of a cryptocurrencywallet with the security of cold storage, and has heavyweight advisors including a former Secretary of the Treasury and chairman andCEO of Citibank.

A strong believer (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2018/01/15/paypals-wences-casares-i-can-imagine-a-world-in-which-bit-coin-becomes-a-global-standard-of-value/) that a single blockchain cryptocurrency—most likely Bitcoin—will end up as the mainstore of value, Casares likens the crypto space to the early days of the Internet, when various protocols were battling to see whichwould become the main carrier of information. A native of Argentina, Wences’ past ventures include videogame maker WanakoGames, Brazil’s Banco Lemon, mobile payment firms Bling Nation and Lemon Wallet, and Latin American online brokerage Patagon,which Banco Santander bought for $750 million.

12. Elizabeth Stark Lightning Labs Co-founder

Harvard Law, teaching at Stanford and Yale on everything from peer-to-peer culture to memes. Stark remains focussed on the prom-ise of blockchain and AI without getting distracted by the vagaries of market trends. Her Twitter feed would have you believe thatshe’s at least having a bit more fun than most blockchain CEOs. —

13. Chris Larsen Ripple Co-founder

Called the richest man in cryptocurrency by Forbes, which placed him at No. 383 on the 2018 Forbes 400 list (https://www.forbes.-com/profile/chris-larsen/?list=forbes-400), Ripple co-founder and executive chairman Chris Larsen’s $2.1 billion fortune derivesfrom his holding of more than 5 billion of the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency, XRP. He also has a large holding in the companyitself, which is focused on speeding financial transactions and decreasing their cost. Larsen has a long history in finance, co-found-ing online mortgage lender e-Loan in 1997 and peer-to-peer lender Prosper in 2005.

The visionary behind Ripple, Larsen has kept it focused closely on one vital segment of the finance industry: building a bettermousetrap for moving money from one place to another. Ripple, which is not technically a blockchain, has attracted more than 200financial firms ranging from major banks to remittance facilitators around the world to the Ripple Network, which aims to replacethe 1970s-era SWIFT interbank settlement system which can take days to confirm transfers with one that takes seconds, is cheaper,and offers the security of a distributed consensus network.

Last year, Larsen led a new industry lobbying group to meet with congress. The Securing America’s Internet of Value Coalition

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(https://www.saivcoalition.com) seeks to encourage and influence government regulation of the cryptocurrency and blockchain in-dustry.

14. Changpeng Zhao Binance Founder & CEO

Changpeng Zhao—also known as CZ—created the world’s largest and fastest cryptocurrency exchange. His is a rags-to-riches story,as he was exiled from China as a child and has gone on to amass astounding wealth. In just eight months following the launch of Bi-nance, CZ has become one of the richest people in crypto with an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion, according to Forbes.

15. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder & General Partner

Marc Andreessen was a major player in the Silicon Valley VC market long before embracing Bitcoin and blockchain in 2013. A bil-lionaire who made his first fortune during the 1990’s Internet bubble, in the mid-90s he switched to venture capital, eventually co-founding Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Facebook and Twitter among other highly successful start-ups. In June, the firmannounced a new, $300 million fund focused solely on the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, a16z crypto (https://a16zcrypto.-com/). It’s led by Katie Haun, who earned her crypto stripes as a prosecutor on the Silk Road case and now serves on the board ofCoinbase.

Comparing the field to PCs, the Internet, and smartphones, the firm said a16z plans to invest consistently over time, regardless ofmarket conditions. “If there is another “crypto winter,” we’ll keep investing aggressively,” it added.

16. Fred Wilson Union Square Ventures Partner

Fred Wilson is a pundit in the crypto investing space with a long running blog at avc.com (http://avc.com) and over half a millionTwitter followers. He can be a loudmouth at times—his Bitcoin maximalism has proven short-sighted as well as off-putting. HisUnion Square Ventures portfolio includes Coinbase, Blockstack and Polychain.

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Winklevii (via Wiki Commons).

17, 18. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss Gemini Co-Founders

Rowing Olympians—and Mark Zuckerberg’s erstwhile foes—Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been working for more than fiveyear on providing legitimacy and regulatory acceptance of the cryptocurrency market. Through their firm Winklevoss Capital Man-agement (https://winklevosscapital.com/) and its New York State Department of Financial Services-regulated digital asset exchangeGemini (https://gemini.com/), the Winklevoss twins have provided FDIC insurance of dollar deposits and launched the Gemini dollarstablecoin this past September. They have also been pushing the Virtual Commodity Association (https://virtualcommodities.org/), awell-received idea for a cryptocurrency self-regulatory organization (SRO), which they proposed back in March (https://medium.-com/gemini/a-proposal-for-a-self-regulatory-organization-for-the-u-s-virtual-currency-industry-79e4d7891cfc). Yet their biggestproject over the past five years, the so-far unsuccessful crusade (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/26/winklevoss-twins-bitcoin-etf-rejected-by-sec.html) to win approval of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a cryptocurrency exchange-tradedfund (ETF), eludes them. While the proposal has been rejected twice due to the SEC’s concerns about the potential for fraud andprice manipulation in the broader cryptocurrency market, their latest proposal won the support of only one of the five SEC commis-sioners, Trump-appointee Hester Pierce, in the summer of 2018.

19. Balaji Srinivasan

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Coinbase CTO (and Co-founder of Counsyl, Earn, Teleport, Coin Center)

After his Earn.com (http://Earn.com) was acquired by Coinbase, Srinivasan leveled up as Coinbase CTO on a mission to evangelizecrypto and make sure that all the best people end up working there for him. He is practically the Anna Wintour of crypto as every-thing he chooses to list on Coinbase heats up in the market right away.

20, 21. Alexis Ohanian & Garry Tan Initialized Capital Co-founders

Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan have wide reaching influence in Silicon Valley’s venture community with their close relationship withY Combinator. Their portfolio companies have generated more than $20 billion in market value and they just closed their fourthfund of $225 million. With Reddit founder Ohanian returning full time from paternity leave with his wife, tennis legend SerenaWilliams, expect to see more investment in building the blockchain coming from the dynamic duo. Their portfolio includes Coin-base, Polychain, Horizon Blockchain Games, Coinbundle and Cointracker.

22. Peter Thiel Founders Fund Founder

Peter Thiel is Silicon Valley’s most legendary digital money merchant prince. Alongside Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, KenHowrey and others in the PayPal Mafia, he birthed the era of fast, secure ecommerce. Founder of Palantir and early investor in Face-book, LinkedIn, Yelp and other Silicon Valley unicorns, he was a billionaire many times over before investing in Bitcoin. His co-founders at Founders Fund includes Sean Parker and has billions under management with a portfolio that include SpaceX andAirbnb. There are countless stories from Silicon Valley CEOs of how Peter Thiel changed their lives. Thiel Fellows include the co-cre-ator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. Not without controversy, the man also singlehandedly shutdown Gawker and has close ties to theTrump administration which runs counter to tech politics in the West. He is also a New York Times best selling author.

23. Jed McCaleb Stellar Founder

You may know Jed McCaleb’s name better than you do Stellar (https://www.stellar.org/), the open-source blockchain he co-foundedthat, despite having the sixth-largest cryptocurrency (Lumens, or XLM), has “done a pretty poor job of marketing” itself and what itdoes, he admits (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-pioneer-jed-mccaleb-most-105604729.html). A co-founder of Stellar-com-petitor Ripple, McCaleb also created Mt. Gox (https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-mess-that-was-mt-gox-four-years-on), the once-dominant bitcoin exchange that—long after he left—collapsed following the theft of what was then more than $450 million in Bit-coin. More recently, he picked a fight with Tron CEO Justin Sun, calling that coin “just garbage” in an interview that declared “90% ofcrypto projects B.S.” Sun fired back by pointing out Stellar’s “extremely low transaction volume, centralized & non-democratic sys-tem” and also attacked another failed McCaleb project, eDonkey.

Lightyear, McCaleb’s for-profit Stellar Development Foundation spinoff, in September purchased Chain, a business-to-business pay-ment firm used by companies like Visa (https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Introduces-International-B2B-Pay-ment-Solution-Built-on-Chains-Blockchain-Technology/default.aspx) and Citigroup (https://www.citigroup.-com/citi/news/2017/170522a.htm), and created Interstellar (https://interstellar.com), an enterprise blockchain developer focused onthe global financial services sector. IBM has also built its IBM Blockchain World Wire (https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solu-tions/world-wire) cross-border payment settlement product on Stellar.

24. Tim Draper DFJ, Draper University

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Founder

Tim Draper is a Silicon Valley superhero, an undeniable icon coming from a long line of venture capitalists. Robinhood, the $5 billionfinancial services company, would have never made it without Draper’s cash infusion (https://twitter.com/techcrunch/sta-tus/1037806843735625728?lang=en) when the founders were first applying for their broker dealer license. Through DFJ, he was alsoan early investor in Twitch, Coinbase, SpaceX, AngelList, Twitter, Yammer, Unity, Giphy, Meetup, Skype, Foursquare, Baidu, Box, andTumblr. These days he’s best known as a Bitcoin Maximalist who has predicted that Bitcoin will be at $250,000 by 2022 because ofthe long term potential of the technology and is training the next generation of blockchain entrepreneurs at Draper University.

25. Stefan Thomas Coil Founder

As CTO of Ripple, Stefan Thomas became so excited about the possibilities of the currency-neutral, cross-blockchain, open-protocolpayment system Interledger (https://interledger.org) that it created that he decided to leave and build a new company to take advan-tage of it. Coil (https://coil.com), the company he created, aims to resurrect the idea of Web micropayments for content through webmonetization, which pays creators on a second-by-second basis as users browse their sites.

26. Arthur Hayes BitMEX CEO

As co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (https://www.bitmex.com) (BitMEX), Arthur Hayes is one of the largest cryp-tocurrency exchanges by volume, former Deutsche Bank and Citigroup equities trader (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/fea-tures/2018-02-01/bored-with-banking-this-former-citi-trader-went-full-crypto) Arthur Hayes is a leader in the cryptocurrency peer-to-peer leveraged trading and derivatives market. Based in the regulation-free Seychelles and headquartered in Hong Kong, BitMEXhas long banned American traders from its platform to avoid aggressive U.S. regulators.

Hayes recently expressed some skepticism (http://unchainedpodcast.co/how-crypto-and-blockchain-technology-could-change-fi-nancial-services-ep97) about whether Bitcoin will prove to be a secure asset over the long term, saying it “is still an experiment.”And while he remains bearish—predicting the crypto market may not improve (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-bear-mar-ket-last-18-months-says-ceo-top-crypto-platform-073142305.html?guccounter=1) for another 12 to 18 months—Hayes also recent-ly predicted that ICOs will be back (https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitmex-ceo-ethereum-will-quickly-test-200-when-ico-market-returns) by mid-2020 and that Ethereum will “rebound aggressively” when that happens.

27. Katie Haun Andreessen Horowitz General Partner

The tough prosecutor created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and thecorrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. Now the bike-to-work San Franciscan is a partner in the Silicon Valley venture capitalfirm with $300 million mandate to find the next big thing in cryptocurrencies.—all while keeping the company on the right side ofthe law.

28. Chris Dixon a16z General Partner

Chris Dixon is one of the most well-respected venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and in the crypto space. He co-hosts the a16z pod-cast and has over a half million followers on Twitter. He is a general partner of Andreessen Horowitz whose blockchain portfolio in-

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cludes Chia, Coinbase, CryptoKitties, Dfinity, Filecoin, Harbor, MakerDAO, Orchid, and Polychain.

29. Andreas Antonopoulos Author & Bitcoin Evangelist

The author of “Mastering Bitcoin (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1491954388/)” and the bestselling “The Internet of Money,Vol. One (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1537000454/) and Two (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/194791006X/),” aswell as the just-released “Mastering Ethereum (https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Con-tracts/dp/1491971940),” Andreas Antonopoulos is hugely influential figure in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency space. A widely-soughtspeaker, he is a passionate supporter of the original, decentralized ideals of Bitcoin and derides the growing idea (https://bitcoin-magazine.com/articles/revolutions-and-counter-revolutions-andreas-antonopoulos-reflects-10-years-bitcoin/) that blockchaintechnology can be co-opted for centralized business purposes like real estate or medicine, calling it nothing more than a “very slowdatabase.”

He is also an opponent of the exchange traded funds (https://www.ccn.com/andreas-antonopoulos-a-bitcoin-etf-is-inevitable-but-damaging/)(ETFs) that he thinks are both inevitable and antithetical to the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies as the financialinstruments that are traded like stocks remain in the central control of a custodian rather than the traders.

To give an idea how much he’s loved in Crytpoland, in late 2017, Roger Ver chided him for not holding on to his bitcoins and thusmissing out on huge gains. As Antonopoulos explained, he used Bitcoin as a medium of transaction—one of its intended uses—at atime when he desperately needed money. Fans rushed to his defense and in a matter of days, showed their gratitude by donatingmore than 94 BTC to his account—at the time, worth $1.6 million.

Roger Ver (Adjusted image. Original source: RogerVer.com (http://RogerVer.com))

30. Roger Ver Bitcoin.com (http://Bitcoin.com) Investor

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Adam Draper’s firm’s website literally says, “Not allsuperheroes wear capes” above his name (via Boost

VC).

The bitcoin evangelist (or, as some call him, “Bitcoin Jesus”) has the unique ability to be thoughtful in his movements. Where othersmight care only to acquire and expand, Ver brings a sense of contemplation to his moves such as earlier this year when he split fromCraig Wright in the middle of the BCH fork.

31. Howard Marks StartEngine Co-founder & Chair

As the co-founder and chair of Activision and Acclaim (now part of Disney), Howard Marks was already one of the most influentialpeople in gaming. With StartEngine, a compliant token sales platform and conference series, he’s become one of the most influentialpeople in fintech.

32. Adam Draper Boost VC Co-founder & Managing Director

Adam Draper, like his dad, Tim Draper, is a superhero to so many aspiringblockchain entrepreneurs. A Bitcoin Maximalist, he has been unwaveringin his support for BUIDLers, hosting dapp development nights at Boost VCand keeping the community focused on the long term potential of thetechnology. Along with Boost VC co-founder, Brayton Williams, spent2018 fulfilling their funding pledge to back one hundred crypto startups.Their robust portfolio includes 0x, Bitcoin, Coinbase, Decentraland,Ethereum, Filecoin, Monero, Polychain, Tezos, The Block and Zcash.

33. Patrick Byrne Overstock Founder & CEO

Byrne founded Overstock in 1999 and he is the the last of the OG dotcom-ers who are still bootstrapping some wild ideas. Overstock runs MediciVentures with the hope of bringing blockchain global. To show just how.serious he is to crypto, Overstock will be paying its 2018 Ohio state taxesin Bitcoin (http://fortune.com/2019/01/03/ohio-bitcoin-overstock/).

34. Caitlin Long Wyoming Blockchain Coalition Co-founder

Caitlin Long is responsible for the recent groundbreaking crypto-friendly legislation in Wyoming. A Harvard law school graduate and22 year Wall Street veteran, Long is often called upon as a fintech pundit to read the tea leaves of the SEC. She was named by Institu-tional Investor as one of the most influential people in pensions from 2013 to 2015.

35. Joseph Poon Plasma, Lightning Network Co-founder

Joseph Poon is a leading authority in the space of blockchain scalability. He is the co-founder of Ethereum’s Layer2 Plasma withEthereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and he is the co-author of the Lighting Network which is a second layer payment protocol that al-lows for lighting fast cross chain transactions. To date, several leading players including Lightning Labs, Blockstream, Stellar and

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Square CEO Jack Dorsey have adopted the Lightning Network.

36. Jeremy Allaire Circle Co-founder, Chairman & CEO

As head of one of the best-funded companies in the blockchain space, Jeremy Allaire presides over a company that is both a peer-to-peer global payments firm via its Circle Pay (https://www.circle.com/en/pay) product and a cryptocurrency trading platform via itsCircle Trade (https://www.circle.com/en/trade). In 2018, Goldman Sachs-backed Circle acquired cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex(https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/alt-coins/circle-set-acquire-poloniex/) and retail investor-focused Circle Invest(https://www.circle.com/en/invest).

An outspoken supporter of coordinated, intergovernmental regulation of cryptocurrencies at the G20 level, Allaire told Reuters(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-circle/global-rules-on-cryptocurrencies-needed-circle-ceo-idUSKC-N1MW2E2) this should include initial coin offerings, market manipulation, and Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, not just anti-mon-ey laundering. At MoneyConf Dublin this summer (https://cointelegraph.com/news/circle-ceo-at-moneyconf-dublin-we-are-at-the-beginning-of-tokenization-of-everything), he predicted that the “tokenization of everything” from legal contracts to voting to phys-ical property like houses and cars is coming.

37. Jesse Powell Kraken Co-founder & CEO

Kraken left New York State over the “bitlicense” regulations in 2015. The outspoken CEO refused to respond when the New York At-torney General began an investigation into whether they might serve New Yorkers illegally. When the AG’s report came out, Powellresponded, “Thanks to the NY taxpayer for funding this research—saved our Product team a lot of time, and we got some interestingnon-public info on our competitors.”

38. Sam Lessin Slow Ventures Founder

Sam Lessin is a serial entrepreneur, investor, ex-Facebook, ex-Bain, Harvard grad, blogger, podcaster, co-founder of virtual assistantFin, and crypto half of The Information power couple, which is edited by Jessica Lessin. He is as Silicon Valley as it gets—and whenhe joked onstage at SF Blockchain Week that these are the last days of privacy, well, he knows something. Both as an angel and part-ner at Slow Ventures, Lessin has his hands in some of the coolest tech startups, In addition to allbirds, Artsy, AngelList, Brandless,Birchbox, Blue Bottle Coffee, Casper, ClassPass, Common, Dropbox, Dwell, Eaze, eero, Giphy, Hipcamp, MakerBot, MasterClass, Nest,Nextdoor, PillPack, Pinterest, Postmates, Slack, TaskRabbit, Wag, he is also an avid investor in the future of money and has partici-pated in rounds for Venmo, Ripple, Betable, Robinhood and others.

39. Olaf Carlson-Wee Polychain Founder

Olaf Carlson-Wee, a 29-year-old Vassar College sociology major, parlayed his gig as Coinbase’s first employee into managing roughly$650 million in assets with his Polychain Capital. It’s an impressive number but last year, the fund was touted as the first crypto fundto hit $1 billion in assets under management. That’s because after a 2017 that saw 2,303 percent returns, he gave back a huge chunkof it as crypto prices crashed. Polychain Capital has taken in cash from (http://fortune.com/2018/06/26/polychain-capital-bitcoin/)Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Bain, and Bessemer, among others. Relations haven’t beenentirely smooth with his investors; Carlson-Wee’s relationship with Pantera Capital has been contentious (https://www.wsj.com/ar-ticles/olaf-carlson-wee-rode-the-bitcoin-boom-to-silicon-valley-riches-can-he-survive-the-crash-1536681364). Investments in-

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clude CoinList, MakerDAO, and Dfinity.

40. Pete Rizzo CoinDesk Editor-in-chief

Getting up to date coverage on an industry based on crooks doing long division isn’t always a blast but somehow Rizzo usuallymakes it informative and sometimes even fun. Some of his writers have fled CoinDesk with tales of Rizzo tyranny and many industryinsiders complain that the site misunderstands not just their particular brilliance but important nuances of the industry – their ownversion of this same kind of power list was widely mocked for overvaluing style and marketing over innovation. But CoinDesk hasbuilt an expansive voice in this space in a short time, and that cannot be underestimated.

41. Gil Penchina Ridge VC Partner

Gil Penchina is a super angel who has invested in over 200 startups including Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, EOS, Paypal, Angellist, In-diegogo, and other unicorns like LinkedIn, Cruise and Dollar Shave Club. As the former CEO of Wikia, co-founder of Fastly, and partof the pre-IPO team at eBay, he is a well-connected, well-respected industry veteran and pundit.

42. Bobby Cho Cumberland Global Head of Trading

The global head of trading at Cumberland (https://cumberland.io/), an over-the-counter (OTC) cryptocurrency trading firm special-izing in institutional investors, Bobby Cho sees these hedge funds and other financial companies finally beginning to jump intocryptocurrency investing in a serious way. This “professionalization” marks the beginning of the end of “the Wild West days of cryp-to” he said recently. (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/institutional-investors-are-using-back-door-for-cryp-to-purchases)

Wholly owned by principal investment firm DRW Holdings (https://drw.com/), which is active in trading, technology and real estateinvestments, Cumberland is a major provider of liquidity in the cryptocurrency trading market.

43. Andy Bromberg Coinlist Co-founder & President

Andy Bromberg’s compliant token sales platform, Coinlist, was one of the hottest Silicon Valley startups in 2018 processing over$400 million in crypto investments in just the first few months of the year and closing a $9.2 million Series A round in April withseveral top investors vying for a piece of the action. A founding research scientist at the Stanford Bitcoin Group, Bromberg has farreach into the developer community and has the ability to draw the best and the brightest talent to his hackathons.

44. Valerie SczcepanikSecurities and Exchange CommissionAssociate Director of the Division of Corporation Finance and Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation

The Securities and Exchange Commission (https://www.sec.gov) may not have approved any crypto ETFs in 2018, or provided muchcomfort to firms looking to launch initial coin offerings (ICOs) with its recent flurry of enforcement actions, but that agency did sig-nal that it is serious about supporting the cryptocurrency industry in June when it appointed Valerie A. Szczepanik associate directorof the division of corporation finance and senior advisor for digital assets and innovation for Division Director Bill Hinman. As thefirst “Crypto-Czar,” Szczepanik said her mission is “to facilitate capital formation, promote fair, orderly, and efficient markets, andprotect investors, particularly Main Street investors,” in the announcement of her appointment (https://www.sec.gov/news/press-

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Kathleen Breitman, cofounder of Tezos(viaLinkedIn).

Respectable citizen John McAfee (HendersonCounty, Tennessee, sheriff’s office)

release/2018-102).

One way to do that, she says, is to open a dialogue (http://fortune.com/2018/06/07/valerie-szczepanik-sec/) with entrepreneurs inthe FinTech space, and the agency’s newly launched Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology (https://www.sec.-gov/finhub) (FinHub) is the way the agency is doing that. Among her suggestions is writing regulatory compliance into smart con-tracts built into the blockchain technology cryptocurrencies are based on. More recently, she suggested (https://www.coindesk.-com/secs-crypto-czar-signals-some-flexibility-on-token-offerings) that the agency would be willing to offer what amounts to pre-approval to the minority of ICOs that are genuinely not securities.

45. Kathleen Breitman Tezos Co-founder

Kathleen Breitman is the public half of the husband-and wife team thatfounded Tezos, a proof-of-stake-based blockchain designed as a smartcontracts platform similar to Ethereum, but designed to resolve what itsdesigners saw as several weaknesses in ETH’s governance and technology.

The outspoken Breitman was among those vilified after XTZ became oneof the richest (at $232 million) and most controversial initial coin offering(https://www.wired.com/story/tezos-blockchain-love-story-horror-story/)after a feud between the founders and Tezos Foundation chair led to along standoff in which lawsuits were launched and the future of the of theblockchain project was in serious doubt. With development funded by theBreitmans during Tezos’ long standoff, its mainnet went live in June 2018and the project appears to be (https://breakermag.com/tezos-kathleen-breitman-is-unapologetic-and-living-her-best-life/) on a sound footing.

46. JohnMcAfee Entrepreneur &Politician

Crypto attractsa lot of eccen-tric people butperhaps no oneis as off-the-wall wacky astech pioneerJohn McAfee.He seems to always have trouble staying out of trouble. There was that whole thing in Belize where a couple of his neighbors endedup dead and he faked a heart attack in Guatemala to avoid Belizean authorities, who called him a “person of interest” in one of thosedeaths (the story has a somewhat happy ending—McAfee married a prostitute (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4500686/John-McAfee-s-wife-opens-life-prostitute.html) he met after being deported back to the U.S. and they remain together tothis day; she’s clearly a saint). Then there was that arrest for driving under the influence with a firearm in Tennessee in 2015 solelybecause John McAfee. There was that time when he enjoyed taking “bath salts (https://mic.com/articles/19680/john-mcafee-thinks-bath-salts-are-the-finest-drug-ever),” that messed-up drug concoction that sometimes makes people eat their friends for supper. Hehas now recast himself as a crypto advocate, though he is accused of being more like a pump-and-dump scammer (http://nymag.-com/intelligencer/2018/12/bath-salts-to-bitcoin-john-mcafees-bizarre-crypto-hustle.html) in the industry. At least he has another

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job to fall back on—McAfee plans to run again for President of the U.S. in 2020 on the Libertarian Party ticket. Bizarre rantings onTwitter are no longer a disqualification for the job and, should he win the nomination, he still wouldn’t be the nuttiest person on theballot that November.

47. Charles Lee Litecoin Creator

An alumnus of both Google and Coinbase before founding Litecoin, Charlie Lee also famously got out and sold all of his LTC duringthe height of the market a year ago.

48. Justin Sun Tron Founder

In purchasing leading peer-to-peer filesharing platform BitTorrent (https://www.bittorrent.com/) last June, Tron (https://tron.net-work/) CEO Justin Sun brought a platform with 100 million users to his blockchain platform, which aims to create a decentralized en-tertainment distribution system connecting producers of content such as videos and games directly to users. On Jan. 3, BitTorrentlaunched its own BitTorrent Token (BTT) running on the Tron protocol, which will be used to pay BitTorrent content uploaders forsharing files. Designed as a decentralized app platform with a focus on speed, Tron is currently the 10th most valuable cryptocurren-cy by market capitalization.

The former chief representative of Ripple in China, Sun himself is a somewhat controversial figure, drawing criticism for things suchas overhyped Tweets (https://cointelegraph.com/news/confirmed-baidu-and-tron-to-cooperate-on-cloud-computing-resources). Inearly January, Stellar’s Jed McCaleb drew Sun’s fire after calling Tron “garbage,” which led Sun to point out via Twitter (https://twit-ter.com/justinsuntron/status/1080201532807639040) that McCaleb had started a failed P2P filesharing service of his own.

49. Nouriel Roubini New York University Professor of Economics

Crypto’s Dutch uncle has an Italian accent. Nouriel Roubini, the NYU economics professor and head of Roubini Macro Associates,made his name (and earned the moniker “Dr. Doom”) predicting the severity of the financial crisis before most people. He now has anew favorite target—cryptocurrencies. His public appearances and Twitter feed feature incessant attacks on industry. Naturally, thishas made him a popular speaker at crypto-related events.

50. Jamie Dimon JPMorgan Chase Chairman & CEO

As chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitablebank in the United States, Jamie Dimon’s opinions on anything financialcarry a lot of weight. So the fact that he’s called Bitcoin a “terrible store ofvalue,” (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jamie-dimon-i-dont-really-give-a-shit-about-bitcoin-2018-10-31) a “fraud,” and predicted that it“would not survive” over the past five year was taken seriously by a lot ofpeople. In fact, he never wanted to be the spokesman against Bitcoin, hesaid at an Axios conference in October (https://www.marketwatch.-

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JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon showinghow he’d wring the neck of any one caught tradingbitcoin on one of his trading desks. (via Wikipedia).

com/story/jamie-dimon-i-dont-really-give-a-shit-about-bitcoin-2018-10-31). Not that he regrets it, mind you. It’s just that he doesn’t “really give ashit about Bitcoin,” he added. At the same time, he and the bank he runsare huge supporters of the blockchain technology that underlies cryp-tocurrencies like Bitcoin. JPMorgan Chase’s Blockchain Center of Excel-lence (https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/blockchain) considers itself a“thought leader in the blockchain space,” and as of September it hadsigned up 75 other banks (https://www.businesswire.-com/news/home/20180925005617/en/J.P.-Morgan-Interbank-Informa-tion-Network) to its Interbank Information Network, designed on itsEthereum-based Quorum platform, which is designed to speed paymentprocessing. “Blockchain is real,” he said at the Axios conference. “It’s atechnology. Bitcoin is not the same as a fiat currency.”

51. Erik Voorhees ShapeShift CEO

The prominent Bitcoin evangelist and CEO of ShapeShift has taken on theSEC twice now and as of early 2019, he’s playing for keeps. When the Wall Street Journal found $9 million in money laundering onhis platform, he replied that they should change the title of their article to “Less than two tenths of one percent of ShapeShift’s busi-ness might be illicit.”

52. Slava Rubin Indiegogo Founder

Rubin’s goal was always to give people access to capital. After 10 years of helping entrepreneurs raise over $1.5 Billion for their ownprojects, Rubin set his sights on crypto with token brokerage firm MicroVentures to tokenize early round investing in everythingfrom startups to brew pubs (https://equity.indiegogo.com/?referral_code=indiegogo).

53. Nick Szabo BitGold Founder

Nick Szabo is one of the most likely candidates to be Satoshi Nakamoto or perhaps part of the “Satoshi Collective,” if that’s how itwent down. This is due to his creation of the concept of smart contracts in 1997 and his “Bit Gold” proposal, which appears to havebeen published in 2005 or 2008—and possibly designed as early as 1998. The Bit Gold proposal contained most, if not all, of the fea-tures that ultimately went into Bitcoin although the solution to the double spending problem ended up being different. Szabo hailsfrom Washington state and is a computer scientist by training whose writings in recent years have focused on the evolution of col-lectibles which comprise non-fungible treasure and fungible money.

54. Jameson Lopp CasaHODL CTO

A software engineer and cypherpunk, Jameson Lopp is a Bitcoin core developer, the creator of Statoshi.info which provides real-timeBitcoin node statistics, and founder of the Bitcoin SIG discussion group which appears to be available only to Mensa members. Loppis currently CTO of Casa, a personal key system for the secure storage of users cryptocurrency assets. Lopp’s personal website(https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html) contains an extensive, open source listing of Bitcoin and blockchain resources.

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55. Tuur Demeester Adamant Capital Founder

Tuur Demeester is the founding partner of Adamant Captial, a cryptocurrency investment fund. Prior to this he was editor in chief ofAdamant Research, which focused on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Before starting firms named after an English New Wavesinger, Demeester’s Macro Trends newsletter was among the first to add Bitcoin to its basket of recommended currencies in 2012.The native of the Netherlands has also translated Jesus Huerta de Soto’s “Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles” into Dutch.

56. Anthony Pompliano Morgan Creek Digital Assets Founder & Partner

Anthony Pompliano also known as Pomp pulled off a major coup the first quarter of this year when, riding the security token wave,he sold his crypto venture firm, Full Tilt Capital, to Mark Yusko’s multi-billion dollar Wall Street hedge fund, Morgan Creek Capital.Then in August, Morgan Creek teamed up with Hunter Horsley’s Bitwise Asset Management to launch the $500 million Digital AssetIndex Fund, which Pomp now heads up with his partner, Jason Williams. A popular blogger, Pomp is a social media influencer withnearly 180,000 Twitter followers.

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Charlie Shrem at Ben’s Deli in Manhattan (Ken Kurson)

57. Charlie Shrem CoinIQ Chief Visionary Officer

We recently saw Charlie Shrem in a legal fight with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; the Gemini founders claim Shrem owed them5,000 bitcoins he was supposed to have purchased for them. Shrem found himself on the wrong side of authorities before, when hisBitInstant sold $1 million in bitcoins to Silk Road users. In the 2016 documentary “Banking on Bitcoin,” he stated that he’d be leav-ing New York after his release from prison. True to his word, the Midwood, Brooklyn, native and co-founder of the Bitcoin Founda-tion is now a Florida resident. Shrem recently started CryptoIQ, a membership-based cryptocurrency trading advisory and news site

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based in Sarasota.

58. Chris Burniske Placeholder VC Partner

Chris Burnishke is a partner and co-founder of Placeholder Management, a New York-based VC fund that invests in decentralized in-formation networks, i.e., cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology and associated companies. Prior to Placeholder, Burnishke was anInternet analyst at ARK Investment Management covering big data, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and cryptocurrencies and even-tually became the firm’s Blockchain Products lead. Burnishke also co-authored the 2017 book “Cryptoassets” with Jack Tater.

59. Laura Shin Journalist & Podcast hostForbes, “Unchained”

The “Unchained” podcast host and Forbes Magazine contributor is not only a prominent voice in crypto, but also a no-coiner. Shecovers the fascinating characters of the blockchain world the same way she would investigate government spending projects withoutbeing in the infrastructure business.

60. Alex Morcos Chaincode, HRT, Coin Center Co-founder

Alex Morcos is one of the leading contributors to Bitcoin core development and an authoritative voice on public policy issues con-cerning cryptocurrency and decentralized computing technologies.

61, 62. Dan Boneh & Benedikt Bunz Stanford Unviersity Applied Crypto Group

Dan Boneh is an award-winning cryptographer that oversees the Applied Crypto Group at Stanford University where his PhD stu-dent, Benedikt Bunz, co-authored the groundbreaking crypto privacy white paper, Bulletproofs, which has gotten the developer com-munity very excited. The technology is designed to enable efficient confidential transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrenciesand is currently being adapted for Monero, and possibly soon Litecoin.

63. Yoshitaka Kitao SBI Holdings CEO

Back in 2015, the former Softbank CFO saw the savings all international banks could make by switching to crypto, specifically to Rip-ple. In 2018 as CEO of SBI Global, he has changed his focus on how crypto can make better provide unturndown-able solutions forbusiness

64. Ryan Selkis Messari Founder & CEO

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In the 18 months he was managing director of CoinDesk, Ryan Selkis increased revenues sevenfold and turned its annual Consensusshindig into the biggest event in crypto. With his latest venture, Messari, Selkis is trying to fill a gaping hole in the industry by offer-ing much-needed unbiased data and research to the masses.

65. Mike Dudas The Block Founder

A veteran of Google and PayPal who later headed business development for Venmo, Mike Dudas has more than a passing interest indigital currency. He raised seven figures and put together a powerhouse team including Mark Rogowsky, Frank Chaparro, Jake Mc-Graw, and Larry Cermak to form a new publication, The Block. It has quickly become required reading thanks to its knack for regular-ly breaking stories.

66. Craig Wright Entrepreneur

Wright has long been rumored to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of the original Bitcoin white paper. Of course Craig was the onewho started that rumor but, to his credit, he has always stuck to the “Satoshi Vision” since the original paper dropped. He sided withBitcoin Cash in their split over BTC and went all-in on a public split from BCH to BCH-SV and survived both. Is he really SatoshiNakamoto? We’ll honestly probably never know.

67, 68. Joey Krug & Jeremy Gardner Augur Co-founders

Crypto pioneers Joey Krug and Jeremy Gardner created a protocol for decentralizing prediction markets and launched the first ERC-20 token built on Ethereum. Their seminal work laid the groundwork for a generation of blockchain entrepreneurs to follow whowould use their ICO model to fundraise. Their Crypto Castle accelerator would mark the days of decadence for the industry. Thesedays Krug, a Thiel fellow and top ten Angellist syndicate, is co-CIO at Pantera Capital with investments in BitPesa, Brave, Chain, Cir-cle, Civic, Harbor, Polychain, Ripple, Zcash, 0x, Filecoin, ICON, Pryze and WAX. Gardner is the co-founder of Ausum Ventures andimpact fund dedicated to creating social change through the blockchain. Ausum’s portfolio includes Codex, Filecoin and Oasis Labs.Gardner has also launched a new Crypto Castle in Miami.

69, 70. Sam Cassatt & Amanda Gutterman ConsenSys Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Marketing Officer

C-level executives don’t normally have to speak very loudly to be heard clearly, but as ConsenSys (https://consensys.net/) CSO SamCassatt and CMO Amanda Gutterman have been quick to point out, the largest pure Ethereum firm is not a normal company. Likeblockchain itself, ConsenSys has been a distributed company, in which traditional hierarchies existed only minimally. Creating andselling Ethereum-based solutions in a company that both provides consulting services and acts as a startup incubator means the pairhave had to spend a lot of time educating and building consensus as well as evangelizing — a difficult task in the “crypto winter”—and one that is changing as the company moves to become a little more hierarchical.

71. Jackson Palmer Dogecoin Inventor

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Although Jackson Palmer is no longer involved in Dogecoin, the coin he launched as a joke and funded via a test ICO is still tradingas one of the top cryptocurrencies in the world. Quite a testament to decentralization! Palmer is now a PM at Adobe, YouTuber, andTwitter personality.

72. Bitfinex’ed Blogger

The anonymous blogger has been attacking Bitfinex and its sister company, Tether, for a couple of years. What seemed at first likethe rants of a disgruntled customer may have led to CFTC subpoenas, a few academic studies, and now an investigation by the De-partment of Justice of both Bitfinex and Tether into whether they were involved in manipulating the price of Bitcoin. Whether or notit will mean any finding of wrongdoing or prosecutions remains to be seen but it’s now the biggest cloud over the crypto markets andit’s in large part thanks to Bitfinex’ed.

73. Neha Narula MIT Media Lab Director of Digital Currency

Neha Narula in a well respected thought leader on the future of money and how digital currencies will transform our world. She is aTED speaker, ex-Google, ex-Digg.

74. Arianna Simpson Autonomous Partners Founder & MD

Arianna Simpson is an early stage investor who has been backed by hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen of Cohen Private Venturestwice and other leader investors including Union Square Ventures in her latest fund, All eyes were on her in 2018 as she started tomake investments for Autonomous Partners. She’s ex-Facebook, former BitGo PM, and a Y Combinator alum, who is frequentlysought out as a pundit by the media to comment on the state of blockchain and cryptocurrency investments.

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Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times, April 2018 (Modern Consensus).

75. Nathaniel Popper

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The New York Times Reporter

Nathaniel Popper is the author of the 2015 book “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying toReinvent Money” and a reporter for the New York Times since 2012 whose beat includes cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and financialtechnology. Popper has also written on noted Holocaust scholars Raul Hilberg (“The Destruction of the European Jews”) and HannahArendt (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”) for the New Yorker.

The header image on Brock Pierce’s Twitter profile page is him appearing heroically onfictitious money (via Twitter)

76. Brock Pierce (Re)start, ONE, Blockchain Capital, EOS, DNA, Tether, Bitcoin Foundation, Mastercoin Entrepreneur

The controversial former child star and ninth-wealthiest person in crypto was an early investor in Coinbase, Ethereum and Block-.One’s EOS. He has committed to giving away nearly $1 billion dollars of his crypto wealth.

77, 78. Bram Cohen & Ryan Singer Chia Network Founder

Bram Cohen and Ryan Singer are building a more energy-efficient digital money that accomplishes a decentralized Nakamoto con-sensus using proof of space and time in place of the more wasteful proof of work used in Bitcoin. As evangelists for regulatory com-pliant fundraising, they secured over $3.4 million in venture funding from Naval Ravikant, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partnersand other top investors and are currently pursuing a Reg A IPO for Chia. Singer frequently speaks at conferences advising blockchainentrepreneurs to steer clear of ICOs in the U.S. because of the regulatory risk. Cohen, the legendary inventor of the peer to peer shar-ing BitTorrent protocol also became strategic advisor to Lightning Labs who are building software to enable faster and cheapertransactions on Bitcoin and compatible blockchain networks.

79. Michael Terpin Transform Group Founder

Michael Terpin is the producer of the longest running crypto conference, CoinAgenda, which consistently draws the most impressiveroster of speakers. At the last show, Perry Farrell, lead singer of Jane’s Addiction and producer of Lollapalooza, dropped in to talkabout his new perpetual festival metaverse, Kind Heaven, which will debut at Caesars Palace Las Vegas in 2019 and feature token re-wards. Terpin, the founder of Marketwire, is a renowned publicist. He is also a prolific crypto investor and has been instrumental in

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attracting innovation and funding to rebuild Puerto Rico. Such a visionary, he was the first blockchain entrepreneur to be grantedAct 22 status by the Puerto Rican government and owns the domain blockchainisland.com (http://blockchainisland.com), havingbeaten Malta to it.

80. Adam Ludwin Interstellar Co-founder & CEO

Adam Ludwin spent 2018 transforming Chain into a compelling solution for “enterprise to BUIDL” financial products on theblockchain. He impressively won over support from the biggest players in the space including American Express, Paypal, Visa, Capi-tal One, Citigroup, NASDAQ and Orange, and then orchestrated the sale of Chain to Stellar subsidiary Lightyear.io where he hasstayed on as CEO with Stellar co-founder Jed McCaleb as CTO.

81. Hester Pierce Securities and Exchange CommissionCommissioner

In publicly dissenting from the SEC (https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/peirce-dissent-34-83723)’s refusal to overrule itsstaff and approve a proposal by Gemini-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss for a Bitcoin-tracking exchange traded fund (ETF),SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce suddenly found herself the darling of the cryptocurrency community this summer. Dubbed “Cryp-toMom” as a result, Pierce in her dissent wrote, “the Commission’s interpretation and application of the statutory standard sends astrong signal that innovation is unwelcome in our markets, a signal that may have effects far beyond the fate of bitcoin ETPs.” [ETF’sare a type of exchange traded product, or ETP.]

82. Michael del Castillo Forbes Reporter

When Michael del Castillo, a talented writer and in-demand moderator for crypto panels, jumped from CoinDesk to Forbes in 2018, itimmediately raised the publication’s standing in the community. And it was a perfect place for the pony-tailed MDC, a journalistwhose specialty is covering the business side of blockchain technology.

83. Brian Behlendorf Hyperledger Executive Director

Brian Behlendorf and Daniel Barbosa are leading Hyperledger efforts to create open source cross-chain interoperability on behalf ofthe Linux Foundation. Behlendorf has served on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla, and is the formerchair of the World Economic Forum.

84, 85. Bart & Brad Stephens Blockchain Capital Co-founders & Managing Partners

Bart Stephens and Brad Stephens are two of the most active investors in the blockchain space. They have funded over 72 companiesacross the crypto ecosystem with a portfolio that includes BitGo, BitFury, BitPesa, BlockOne, Blockstream, Chain, Civic, Coinbase,

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Filecoin, Harbor, Kraken, Messari, Orchid, Radar Relay, Ripple, Securitize and 0x.

86. Alice Lloyd George RRE Ventures Principal

As principal at New York-based VC firm RRE Ventures (http://www.rre.com/), Alice Lloyd George focuses on emerging technologiesincluding blockchain, machine intelligence and computer vision, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, and NewSpace. A veteran ofBridgewater Associates, the Brookings Institute, and the Wall Street Journal, she works with RRE blockchain portfolio companies in-cluding peer-to-peer digital cash transfer app Abra and secure cryptocurrency app development platform Gem (formerly BitVault), aswell as non-blockchain companies like VR firm 8i and small satellite launch access firm Spaceflight. She is also the host of the FluxPodcast (https://medium.com/@TheFluxPodcast), where she has interviewed tech visionaries on subjects ranging from crypto fu-tures to3D printing to neural computing interfaces.

87. Avichal Garg Electric Capital Managing Partner

Avichal Garg is a thought leader in the programmable money space and launched his crypto asset management firm, Electric Capital,earlier this year “to invest in liquid and illiquid tokens that are emerging stores of value and rooted in novel technology.” He isbacked by Adrian Fenty’s M Ventures and his first investments have been in two very popular Silicon Valley deals – Andy Bromberg’scompliant token platform, Coinlist, and the privacy-first cloud-computing platform, Oasis Labs. His profile reads like the ultimateSilicon Valley insider: Stanford grad, ex-Google, ex-Facebook, Y Combinator, data driven investor—a power player by any definition.

88. Hunter Horsley Bitwise Asset Management Co-founder & CEO

Hunter Horsley is the co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Asset Management, a cryptocurrency index fund backed by Naval Ravikant,Blockchain Capital, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures. Horsley checks all the boxes as a Silicon Valley power player: Whartongrad, Forbes 30 Under 30, ex-Facebook, ex-Instagram, data driven investor. Major deals this year include partnering with MorganCreek to launch the $500 million Digital Asset Index Fund. —

89. Joshua Klayman Klayman LLC Founder

Josh Klayman is one of the most influential blockchain attorneys in the industry. She is the chair of the Wall Street Blockchain Al-liance Legal Working Group, a member of the Wharton RegTech thinktank, and sits on the Delaware Blockchain Strategy Committee.Chambers and Partners recognized Klayman as one of the top 12 blockchain and cryptocurrency lawyers globally. This past summer,she left Morrison Foerster to set up her own shop, Klayman LLC. She has her JD from Temple University and graduated summa cumlaude from University of Pennsylvania.

90. Benny Giang CryptoKitties Co-founder

Benny Giang is the chief evangelist for the collectible cat game, CryptoKitties, and speaks and blogs frequently on how ERC721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) provide transparency, authenticity, provenance, interoperability and liquidity for assets and will ultimatelydrive mass adoption of the blockchain. —

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91. Ba Minuzzi Ausum Ventures Co-founder & General Partner

Ba Minuzzi is a financial advisor to ultra high net worth families in Brazil and impact investor that seeks to improve the lives of peo-ple at mass scale leveraging distributed ledger technology. Her investments include Codex, a decentralized registry for art and col-lectibles, Filecoin, censor proof storage, and Oasis Labs, high performance cloud computing on the blockchain.

92. Donna Redel New York Angels Board Member, Co-chair, Blockchain Committee

Donna Redel is a board member of NY Angels where she co-chairs the Blockchain Committee, leveraging her experience as manag-ing director of the World Economic Forum, chair of the New York Commodity Exchange (COMEX) and CIO of Prudential Securities.

93. Rachel Rose O’Leary CoinDesk Writer

Nobody writes about Ethereum and privacy quite like O’Leary. She is Vitalik Buterin’s biggest evangelist and toughest tastemaker.

94. Kim Dotcom Kim.com (http://Kim.com)

The founder of now-defunct file hosting giant MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom is in the final stage of appealing (https://www.the-guardian.com/world/2017/feb/20/kim-dotcom-eligible-for-extradition-to-us-new-zealand-high-court-rules) a New Zealand extradi-tion order that could see him facing up to 20 years in prison over U.S. copyright infringement charges. In the past two years, he hasannounced several versions of a forthcoming cryptocurrency—most recently in July 2018 (https://www.ccn.com/kim-dotcom-cre-ates-own-cryptocurrency-aimed-at-content-creators/)—aimed at creating a direct payment channel between content creators andbuyers.

95. Steve Wozniak EQUI

Steve Wozniak aka “Woz” is one of the visionary pioneers of the industry that enables you to read this short biographical blurb onsomething other than paper and in a decentralized location. More specifically, Wozniak was a co-founder of Apple Computer in 1976.An electrical engineer by training and a serial entrepreneur with continued interest in cutting edge technologies, education, and StarTrek, Wozniak recently joined Doug Barrowman’s blockchain startup EQUI as a co-founder along with Baroness Michelle Mone OBE.EQUI describes itself as a traditional venture capital fund with the added wrinkle of investors having the opportunity for on-demandliquidity via the firm’s security token.

96. Ian Balina Crypto evangelist

The “Ian Balina Effect” still refers to crypto projects thatflourish with his seal of approval. It’s not 100 percent, buthis ability to pick winners and communicate in commonsense language why he made his choices makes him a

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Ian Balina the moment he lost $2.5 million in the middle of aLivestream.

thought leader for young crypto enthusiasts.

97. Linda Xie Scalar Capital Co-founder & Managing Director

Linda Xie spent the year launching Scalar Capital, a $20million crypto hedge fund based in San Francisco backedby Coinbase founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam,Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon,and Bain Capital Ventures. Scalar’s First Annual Summitfeatured thought leaders from a16z, Blockchain Capital,Coinbase, Electric Capital, Zcash and 0x. The ultimate in-sider, Xie is Y Combinator alum, Forbes “30 Under 30”, ex-Coinbase, and advisor to 0x, which her husband, Will War-ren, co-founded and which Coinbase recently started to trade.

98. Daniel Roberts Yahoo Finance Reporter

Yahoo Finance’s Dan Roberts generally covers the business of sports but he has become the site’s in-house expert on cryptocurren-cies and blockchain technology. With Yahoo Finance’s 90 million monthly visitors, Roberts has quite a reach with retail investors.

99. Matt Corallo Chaincode Developer

He can pick apart code and tell you which protocols will move into scam territory when they scale. But in 2018, the Bitcoin Corecoder took a developer’s approach to fixing crypto’s diversity problem by tracking it to its source in the code. “The many studies in-dicating broader sets of backgrounds and viewpoints add a ton to the quality of decisions made in management should be prettyoverwhelming evidence for anyone who cares about evidence-based decision making.”

100. Christopher Giancarlo Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman

As Chair of the CFTC, Christopher Giancarlo’s importance to the cryptocurrency market exploded on Sept. 26, when a federal judgeruled that virtual currencies like bitcoin and XRP are commodities, upholding his agency’s authority to investigate and prosecutefraud in those markets. But his importance to, and in, the cryptocurrency market blew up on Feb. 6, when he used his opening re-marks to a Senate hearing to explain how Bitcoin had finally gotten his children interested (https://www.cftc.gov/Press-Room/SpeechesTestimony/opagiancarlo44) and even excited in investing for the first time. His Twitter account @giancarloCFTC(https://twitter.com/giancarlocftc) grew to some 49,000 after that hearing, and he embraced the medium, as well as the hashtag#cryptodad (https://twitter.com/hashtag/cryptodad). The agency he leads has been aggressive in pursuing bad actors in the cryp-tocurrency market, reportedly leveling about $900 million in fines (https://www.wsj.com/articles/cryptocurrencies-trading-scams-draw-increased-federal-enforcement-1538731800) in FY 2018, which ran through Sept. 30. While pointing to that record, Giancarlo—who has announced he will not seek reappointment next year—said on Oct. 1 (https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/10/01/cftc-chair-

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chris-giancarlo-on-the-future-of-crypto.html) that the CFTC is “innovative and thoughtful when it comes to innovation,” in thecryptocurrency business. He added: “I personally think that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I think there is a future for them. I’mnot sure they ever come to rival the dollar or other hard currencies, but there’s a whole section of the world that really is hungry forfunctioning currencies that they can’t find in their local currencies… Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies may solve some of the prob-lems.”

Lawrence Lewitinn, CFA is editor in chief of Modern Consensus. Disclosure: Lewitinn owns no cryptocurrencies in his portfolio.

Leo Jakobson is a New York-based journalist who has spent much of the last 15 years covering the employee engagement and recognitionbusiness. Before that he covered the East Coast side of the Internet boom and bust, and wrote about politics in New York City. Disclosure:Jakobson owns no cryptocurrencies.

Martine Paris is a Silicon Valley tech reporter who follows the money across AI, robotics, gaming, crypto, and blockchain. Disclosure: Sheowns an insignificant amount of crypto. Follow her on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/contentnow).

Brendan Sullivan is a writer, producer, and author of the memoir Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime ofOur Lives (https://www.amazon.com/Rivington-Was-Ours-Lower-Prime/dp/0062125583). Disclosure: he owns cryptocurrencies. Followhim on Twitter (https://twitter.com/mrbrendanjay).

Michael Hillmeyer has primarily been an independent consultant in the financial services, technology and healthcare industries since 2004.Prior to this, Michael was a senior sell-side equity research analyst at Merrill Lynch covering several technology industries. He owns nopositions in any cryptocurrency but writes the “Distributed Leisure” column for Modern Consensus.

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