Top 50 Web3 Founders and CTOs Leading Innovation in 2026

Web3 moves fast, but not always in the way headlines suggest.

Behind every scaling breakthrough, every onchain product that actually gets used, and every piece of infrastructure developers rely on, there are builders and teams doing the work.

This list focuses on those people.

Not always the loudest voices, but the ones shipping. Founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders pushing forward areas like parallel execution, zero knowledge systems, decentralized trading, onchain consumer apps, and cross chain infrastructure.

The kind of work other developers build on top of, and that users rely on every day.

Here are 50 leaders (In no particular order) worth paying attention to this year.

1.

Jesse Pollak

Jesse Pollak is the Head of Base and Base App (Coinbase Wallet) at Coinbase, where he serves as a key member of the company’s executive leadership team. Having joined Coinbase in 2017 following the acquisition of his passwordless identity startup, Clef, Jesse rose through the ranks to manage the engineering teams behind Coinbase’s core consumer products.

In 2022, he created and launched Base, an incredibly successful, low-cost Ethereum Layer-2 network that has become one of the primary hubs for the global onchain economy.

Today, Jesse leads both the protocol-level development of Base and the design of the consumer-facing Base App, spearheading Coinbase's mission to bring the next billion users onchain.

2.

Tarek Mansour

Tarek Mansour is the Co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, the first CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange that allows users to trade on the outcome of real-world events.

A former macro trader at Citadel and AI researcher at MIT CSAIL, Mansour has scaled Kalshi into a leading financial platform, recently expanding its reach into Canada through a partnership with Wealthsimple and integrating with StarCompliance for institutional trading compliance.

Under his leadership, the exchange has popularized mainstream event-contract trading, bridging high-finance indices with pop-culture markets and high-profile global sports partnerships.

3.

Gracy Chen

Gracy Chen is the CEO of Bitget, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges serving over 100 million users globally.

She transitioned from a media and TV background into tech and crypto, previously founding a startup before joining Bitget’s leadership. Since becoming CEO in 2024, she has focused on expanding Bitget into a “universal exchange” integrating crypto, tokenized equities, and commodities.

She is also a lecturer in crypto finance at HKUST and an active voice on institutional trends in digital assets.

4.

Eli Ben-Sasson

Eli Ben-Sasson is a pioneering cryptographer, computer scientist, and the Co-Founder and CEO of StarkWare, a leading developer of STARK-based blockchain scaling solutions.

He is globally renowned as a co-inventor of ZK-STARKs and the FRI protocol, groundbreaking cryptographic systems that enable highly scalable, secure, and quantum-resistant blockchain transactions without requiring a trusted setup. Previously a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Technion, Ben-Sasson also co-founded the Zerocash protocol and served as a founding scientist of Zcash.

He transitioned to the role of CEO of StarkWare in January 2024 to lead its ongoing expansion across Ethereum and Bitcoin.

5.

Manan Patel

Manan Patel is a software engineer and entrepreneur who serves as the Co-Founder of Neynar, a leading developer infrastructure platform for decentralized social networks.

Prior to launching Neynar in 2023, he spent nearly five years at Coinbase as a Senior Software Engineering Manager leading key consumer initiatives like the Web3 MPC wallet and core iOS app, following engineering roles at Uber and Mirror. Under his leadership, Neynar became the primary backbone for Farcaster, culminating in Neynar's acquisition of the protocol and its Clanker launchpad in January 2026.

Patel is now focused on executing a developer-first roadmap for Farcaster, empowering builders to seamlessly launch onchain mini-apps and generate recurring revenue.

6.

James Hunsaker

James Hunsaker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Category Labs (formerly Monad Labs), the core research and development company building the ultra-high-performance, parallelized Layer-1 blockchain Monad.

Prior to founding the company, he spent eight years as a Senior Software Engineer on Jump Trading's trading team, where he built high-frequency trading systems and served as a primary maintainer of the Pyth Network. His extensive background in algorithmic strategy and quantitative finance also includes serving as Vice President at both Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.

Today, he leverages his deep expertise in low-latency systems to spearhead next-generation parallel execution technologies in the Web3 space.

7.

Mudit Gupta

Mudit Gupta is the Chief Technology Officer at Polygon Labs, where he leads the engineering and protocol development for one of Ethereum's largest scaling networks.

Having originally joined Polygon in 2022 as Chief Information Security Officer, Mudit's deep background in cybersecurity has made him one of the most prominent security experts and smart contract researchers in the Web3 space.

He has a highly respected track record as a hands-on builder, previously serving as a core developer at SushiSwap, Lead Blockchain Engineer at Polymath, and Technical Partner at Delta Blockchain Fund. Today, he leverages his expertise in Rust, Solidity, and security auditing to drive the scalability and safety of Polygon's expanding multi-chain ecosystem.

8.

Sam Blackshear

Sam Blackshear is the co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs (the creators of Sui and Walrus) and the creator of the Move programming language.

Previously, he was a Principal Engineer at Meta, where he designed Move for the Diem blockchain project and worked on static analysis. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in programming languages and software verification.

9.

Anatoly Yakovenko

Anatoly Yakovenko is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and the Co-Founder of Solana, a high-performance blockchain platform. Leveraging over a decade of experience designing operating systems, Yakovenko introduced Proof of History, a novel consensus mechanism that dramatically increases blockchain speed, throughput, and scalability.

Prior to founding Solana in 2018, he spent over 12 years at Qualcomm as a Senior Staff Engineer Manager, followed by key engineering roles in distributed systems and operating systems at Mesosphere and Dropbox.

10.

Pedro Gomes

Pedro Gomes is the Founder and Director of WalletConnect, the open-source protocol and financial connectivity layer for the decentralized web. Since founding the platform in 2021, Gomes has guided WalletConnect's evolution into a critical piece of Web3 infrastructure, helping connect over 700 wallets and 70,000 applications to serve more than 55 million users globally.

Currently focusing on the mainstream expansion of WalletConnect Pay, he is driving the global adoption of self-custodial stablecoin payments through milestone integrations with major networks like TRON and Monad, as well as a landmark partnership with physical terminal giant Ingenico to bring native crypto checkouts to retail merchants worldwide.

11.

Georgios Konstantopoulos

Georgios Konstantopoulos is the Chief Technology Officer and a General Partner at Paradigm, where he leads research, engineering, and investment efforts in cryptography and distributed systems.

He also serves as the Engineering Lead for Tempo, a high-performance payments blockchain built on Reth that was incubated by Paradigm and Stripe to scale global stablecoin and machine-to-machine transactions. Prior to joining Paradigm, he worked as an independent scalability and security consultant for prominent Web3 projects including Celo, Aragon, and Keep Network.

He is widely recognized as a leading figure in open-source blockchain infrastructure, mechanism design, and Ethereum scaling solutions.

12.

Jayendra Jog

Jayendra Jog is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and the Co-Founder of Sei Labs, the development team behind Sei, a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain optimized for trading and digital asset exchange.

Leveraging his background at Robinhood, where he witnessed the 2021 GameStop trading restrictions firsthand, Jog co-founded Sei Labs in late 2021 to build decentralized, low-latency infrastructure capable of matching traditional financial speed. Under his leadership, Sei has pioneered innovative consensus mechanisms such as Autobahn and Sedna to maximize transaction speed, throughput, and scalability.

13.

Harry Kalodner

Harry Kalodner is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Offchain Labs, the development team behind Arbitrum, Ethereum’s leading layer-2 scaling suite. He co-founded the company in 2018 alongside Steven Goldfeder and Ed Felten.

Prior to Offchain Labs, Kalodner was a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University, where his research focused on cryptocurrencies, economics, and security. His academic work laid the technical foundation for Arbitrum’s optimistic rollup technology.

14.

Ryan Zarick

Ryan Zarick is the Co-Founder and CTO of LayerZero Labs, where he leads the engineering and protocol development of one of the most widely adopted cross-chain messaging protocols in Web3.

His technical work has been central to enabling seamless omnichain applications across dozens of blockchain networks, establishing LayerZero as foundational infrastructure for interoperability at scale.

15.

Tiago Sada

Tiago Sada is the Chief Product Officer at Tools for Humanity, where he leads product, engineering, and design for the World project (formerly Worldcoin) [time]. Since joining as a core contributor in 2021, Sada has spearheaded the development of the World App, which has grown into a leading global self-custody wallet, and drove key initiatives like World Chat, a secure, bot-free messenger built on top of the XMTP protocol.

Based in San Francisco, he is a prominent advocate for privacy-preserving digital identity and proof-of-humanity verification systems designed to help society safely navigate the age of artificial intelligence.

16.

Dennis Jarosch

Dennis Jarosch is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Ripple, where he leads the engineering teams responsible for the company's core payments, custody, and stablecoin products.

Prior to joining Ripple, he spent nearly a decade at Square (Block), rising from a software engineer to the Head of Payment Platform, where he oversaw a 200+ person organization powering over $150 billion in annual transaction volume. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin and a PhD in Information Science from the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Throughout his career, Jarosch has specialized in bridging traditional financial infrastructure with emerging blockchain technologies and scalable platform products.

17.

Ratko Vekrep

Ratko Veprek is the Chief Technology Officer of Digital Asset, a leading enterprise blockchain firm, where he has spent over a decade in technical leadership. Throughout his tenure, he has played a foundational role in developing the company's ledger technologies, previously serving as the Director of Engineering for the privacy-enabled Canton network.

He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich and brings over 25 years of diverse technology experience spanning computational research, consulting, and fintech. In his current role as CTO, he leads the technical architecture and scaling of Digital Asset's privacy-preserving smart contract ecosystem.

18.

Avery Ching

Avery Ching is the co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, the development team behind the high-performance layer-1 blockchain Aptos. He initially served as the company's CTO from its founding in 2021 before transitioning to the CEO role in late 2024.

Prior to founding Aptos Labs, Ching spent over a decade at Meta (formerly Facebook), where he was a Principal Software Engineer. During his tenure, he served as the technical lead for the crypto platform team at Novi (Meta's digital wallet initiative) and was a core maintainer of the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain project. His extensive background in distributed systems also includes over 14 years as the VP of Apache Giraph at the Apache Software Foundation.

19.

Leonard Leung

Leonard Leung is the CEO of Aster, a fast-growing decentralized perpetuals exchange designed to bridge the gap between decentralized and centralized trading.

Before entering the crypto space and working at Binance, Leung spent five years in traditional finance building high-frequency trading infrastructure and risk engines. Under his leadership, Aster emerged as a competitive force following its September 2025 token generation event, operating under a low-profile, execution-focused ethos.

To drive institutional adoption, Leung spearheaded the 2026 launch of Aster Chain, a custom Layer-1 blockchain that natively integrates optional privacy features to prevent front-running and protect large traders.

20.

Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu

Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu is the President of Jupiter, the leading onchain finance superapp on Solana, where she oversees its expansion into trading, lending, and stablecoin payments. Before joining Jupiter in 2025, she spent five years at KKR as a Digital Operating Partner and Digital Assets Lead, shaping the firm's global crypto strategy, and previously incubated ventures at BCG Digital Ventures as the founding CEO of heycar UK.

A former concert pianist who grew up in China and studied at the London School of Economics, she is a leading voice in driving institutional adoption and global financial access onchain.

21.

Artur Goulão

Artur Goulão Ferreira is the Co-founder and Chief AI Officer of Humanos, where he architected the VIA Protocol, a cryptographically secure authorization layer enabling AI agents to safely execute real-world tasks like payments. A seasoned serial entrepreneur, he previously founded the acquired crypto-payment pioneer Utrust, co-founded the luxury Web3 platform Exclusible, and led product development for Liesl.

Today, his work at Humanos establishes the universal, verifiable mandates that serve as the critical trust infrastructure for autonomous agentic commerce.

22.

Karl Floersch

Karl Floersch is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OP Labs, the core development team behind the Optimism layer-2 scaling network and the OP Stack. He previously served as the company's CEO and original CTO.

Floersch has been a prominent figure in the Ethereum ecosystem since its early years. Before launching Optimism, he worked as a core consensus and scaling researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and as a blockchain engineer at ConsenSys. He is a vocal advocate for cryptoeconomics and education, having designed one of the early comprehensive, open-source courses on the subject.

23.

TN Lee

TN Lee is the Founder of Pendle Finance, a prominent DeFi protocol launched in 2020 that enables the tokenization and trading of future yields. Under his leadership, Pendle pioneered yield-splitting technology, allowing users to separate assets into Principal Tokens and Yield Tokens for advanced hedging and speculation.

Prior to Pendle, Lee was a founding team member and Head of Business at Kyber Network, where he scaled global operations across Asia, Europe, and the United States. He first entered the blockchain space during the 2015 Ethereum ICO, transitioning from a fintech researcher to an active community organizer.

24.

Michael Lee

Michael Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Abstract Foundation, where he is building a quantum-resistant blockchain backed by Founders Fund to bring the global economy onchain. Prior to launching Abstract in 2024, he served as Senior Vice President at ZKsync, helping incubate and launch the zero-knowledge Ethereum scaling protocol valued at $6.5 billion.

His diverse career also includes leading Activision Blizzard's global community of over 400 million players, guiding Pivotal Software through a successful IPO, and working with the Democratic National Committee. An alumnus of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Lee combines deep consumer engagement expertise with bleeding-edge Web3 infrastructure development.

25.

Tony Jin

Tony Jin is the Co-Founder and CTO of Wormhole Labs, where he leads the development of open-source cross-chain infrastructure and recently launched the Solana asset gateway, Sunrise.

Prior to spinning out Wormhole as an independent entity, he served as an Engineering Manager at Jump Crypto. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly four years at Twitch as Director of Engineering, working on Amazon's live-video developer service, AWS IVS.

26.

Lei Yang

Lei Yang is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mega Labs, the startup building MegaETH, widely recognized as the first real-time blockchain. Holding a PhD from MIT, Yang brings deep academic and systems-level expertise to the challenge of building Ethereum-compatible infrastructure capable of processing tens of thousands of transactions per second with sub-millisecond latency.

His work at MegaETH focuses on rethinking the execution layer from the ground up, pushing the boundaries of what EVM-compatible chains can achieve in terms of throughput and responsiveness.

27.

Vladimir Novakovski

Vladimir Novakovski is a quantitative trader, technologist, and the Founder and CEO of Lighter, a high-growth decentralized perpetual futures exchange built as an Ethereum Layer-2 zero-knowledge rollup. He previously co-founded Lunchclub, an AI-powered networking platform, before pivoting the team's focus in 2022 to build fully decentralized, high-performance financial infrastructure.

Prior to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Novakovski spent nearly 15 years spanning traditional quantitative finance, including roles at Citadel and Graham Capital, and Silicon Valley technology, where he served as VP of Engineering at Addepar and Head of Machine Learning at Quora. An alumnus of Harvard University who graduated at the age of 18, he is also an active angel investor and advisor to notable startups such as Robinhood, Ramp, and Cognition.

28.

Jayant Krishnamurthy

Jayant Krishnamurthy is a Technical Lead at the Pyth Network, where he contributes to the development and maintenance of one of the most widely used decentralized oracle networks in Web3. His work focuses on the core infrastructure that powers real-time, high-fidelity market data feeds across dozens of blockchain ecosystems, supporting critical DeFi applications that depend on accurate and low-latency price information.

29.

Ismail Khoffi

Ismail Khoffi is the co-founder and CTO of Celestia Labs, the team behind the pioneer modular data availability network Celestia.

Prior to founding Celestia, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer at the Interchain Foundation and Informal Systems, where he built the first Tendermint light client in Rust.

He studied at the University of Bonn and specializes in the intersection of academic research and hands-on blockchain engineering.

30.

Steve Ellis

Steve Ellis is the Cofounder of Chainlink, the industry-standard decentralized oracle network. Since cofounding the project and its parent entity, SmartContract, in 2014, he has served as Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder, playing a central role in developing secure blockchain middleware that connects smart contracts to real-world data and APIs.

He is based in New York City and is an alumnus of New York University.

31.

Michael Cahill

Michael Cahill is the CEO of Douro Labs and a Director of the Pyth Data Association, leading the growth of the Pyth Network as premier decentralized market data infrastructure.

He has bridged traditional and decentralized finance by onboarding major institutions like Fidelity and Euronext to publish data directly onchain, while also collaborating with the United States Department of Commerce to put official economic data on the blockchain. Previously, Cahill worked in business development at Jump Crypto and foreign exchange sales at Cboe Global Markets.

32.

Rob Dawson

Rob Dawson is the Chief Technology Officer at Consensys, where he leads technical strategy, cross-product alignment, and the Office of the CTO across the organization's decentralized product suite. Since joining the company in 2017, Dawson has transitioned from Technical Lead to Product Lead for PegaSys, helping scale the team and deliver Hyperledger Besu, before stepping into the global CTO role in 2020.

Under his leadership, Consensys has launched critical open-source initiatives, notably transitioning its Linea ZK rollup stack to the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust. Combining his early engineering roots in Australia with deep expertise in Ethereum, Solidity, and cloud architecture, Dawson is dedicated to fostering diverse, high-performing technical teams and building robust Web3 infrastructure.

33.

Scott Dykstra

Scott Dykstra is the Co-Founder and CTO of Space and Time, a decentralized network delivering the first zero-knowledge proven, tamperproof SQL database and ZK coprocessor. Under his leadership, the platform launched its mainnet, secured a $20 million Series A, and introduced Dreamspace, an AI-powered onchain app builder on Base. Prior to founding Space and Time, he spent nearly eight years at Teradata, ultimately serving as VP of Global Cloud, where he focused on highly scalable cloud analytics architecture.

34.

Erik Reppel

Erik Reppel is a prominent Web3 engineer and the creator of x402, an open-standard protocol incubated at Coinbase to power agentic commerce through stablecoin microtransactions. Previously the Head of Engineering for the Coinbase Developer Platform and Head of Engineering at Zora, he scaled high-volume developer infrastructure and payment rails.

Currently, he is building a new stealth startup while continuing to shape the future of AI-driven payments as a Coinbase advisor and Technical Steering Committee member for the x402 Foundation.

35.

Shayne Coplan

Shayne Coplan is the Founder and CEO of Polymarket, the world's largest decentralized prediction market platform. Since launching the network in 2020, he has built the platform into a mainstream information resource that processes billions of dollars in transaction volume.

Coplan has secured strategic backing from high profile venture capital firms like Founders Fund, partnered with major media outlets such as Dow Jones to deliver real-time market data, and established sports integrations with major brands including the UFC and LALIGA. Previously, he studied computer science at New York University before leaving to pursue blockchain development.

36.

Shahar Shamai

Shahar Shamai is the Co-founder and CTO of GK8, an enterprise-grade digital asset custody platform. A cybersecurity expert who previously spent five years with the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel, Shamai co-founded GK8 in 2018. Under his technical leadership, the company pioneered the world's first true Cold Vault, which signs blockchain transactions entirely offline to eliminate cyber attack vectors, alongside a proprietary MPC algorithm.

Now operating as the technology arm of Galaxy following its acquisition, GK8 provides secure custody and tokenization infrastructure for major banks, custodians, and financial institutions worldwide.

37.

Kristin Smith

Kristin Smith is the President of the Solana Policy Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for public policies and regulatory clarity that foster the growth of the Solana ecosystem and decentralized networks.

Prior to launching SPI in May 2025, she served as the CEO of the Blockchain Association for nearly seven years, building it into Washington D.C.'s most powerful and influential crypto trade group. With nearly a decade of experience as a Capitol Hill congressional aide, Smith is widely recognized as one of the most prominent and award-winning lobbyists and policy voices in the entire digital asset industry.

38.

Alon Cohen

Alon Cohen is a prominent cryptocurrency entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and primary public face of pump.fun, the massive Solana-based memecoin launchpad launched in early 2024.

Under his leadership, the platform has revolutionized token creation, driving billions of dollars in volume and cementing its position as a cornerstone of the modern Solana ecosystem. Cohen actively drives the project's strategic vision, frequently engaging with the Web3 community to advocate for the tokenization of social media and digital creator culture.

39.

Philipp Zentner

Philipp Zentner is the Co-Founder and CEO of LI.FI, the premier execution and liquidity coordination layer for onchain finance. Under his leadership, LI.FI has scaled to process over $10 billion in monthly volume across 70+ chains, bridging fragmented DeFi ecosystems for over 1,000 enterprise partners, wallets, and institutions, including partnerships with Ondo Finance and Coinbase's x402 ecosystem.

A veteran developer and venture builder, Zentner is currently pioneering the next frontier of cross-chain infrastructure through LI.FI Intents to power seamless, gasless stablecoin payments for autonomous AI agents.

40.

Ahmed Nimale

Ahmed Nimale is the Co-Founder and CEO of KYD Labs, a Web3 live event commerce and ticketing platform built on Solana. Backed by $7.1 million in funding led by a16z crypto CSX, KYD Labs provides Web3-powered ticketing and fan loyalty infrastructure that operates seamlessly without requiring crypto knowledge from end-users.

A former Product Manager at Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and Yelp, Ahmed is leveraging his deep industry expertise to scale decentralized solutions that empower artists and venues with better capital access and data ownership.

41.

Matthew Fisher

Matthew Fisher is the CEO of Katana, a DeFi-focused blockchain platform incubated by Polygon and GSR. Based in New York, he previously worked in business development at Polygon Labs and is an active angel investor in the crypto space.

He took on the CEO role in 2026 following Katana's token launch and acquisition of IDEX, helping position the platform as a vertically integrated DeFi superapp. His work centers on building institutional-grade DeFi infrastructure with real revenue and liquidity.

42.

Julien Genestoux

Julien Genestoux is a seasoned entrepreneur, hacker, and the Head of Engineering at Relay, where he leads the development of decentralized, cross-chain payment infrastructure. Prior to joining Relay, he spent over seven years as the Founder and CEO of Unlock Inc, a decentralized access control protocol designed to help creators monetize their work through Web3 memberships.

His team at Unlock was acquired by Relay in late 2025 to bolster its multi-chain interoperability layers. In addition to his operating roles, Genestoux has served as a council member for The Graph since 2023, supporting the governance and technical growth of its decentralized indexing protocol. An advocate for the open web, he is also a serial startup founder who previously built and successfully sold a profitable business to Medium.

43.

Sreeram Kannan

Sreeram Kannan is the Founder and CEO of Eigen Labs, an open network infrastructure company managing over ten billion dollars in assets. He serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, where his academic research focuses on distributed systems, machine learning, and cryptography.

Currently, Kannan is pioneering open agentic research to build decentralized coordination layers for artificial intelligence. He previously completed postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

44.

Lukas Schor

Lukas Schor is the Co-Founder and Product Lead at Safe, the leading smart account infrastructure protocol securing over $100 billion in digital assets. His work at Safe has been central to establishing programmable, multi-signature wallet infrastructure as a cornerstone of onchain security, enabling everything from DAO treasuries to enterprise custody solutions.

Schor is a prominent voice in the account abstraction movement and continues to shape how users and protocols interact with assets onchain in a safer, more composable way.

45.

Joao Reginatto

Joao Reginatto is the Chief Strategy Officer at M0, a modular stablecoin protocol enabling financial institutions and fintechs to issue and govern their own digital dollars. He previously spent eight years at Circle, where he served as VP of Product for Stablecoins and led the creation, launch, and scaling of USDC, EURC, and the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP).

With over 25 years of tech and finance experience, Reginatto is a leading pioneer in digital fiat infrastructure, helping global brands like MoneyGram and MetaMask build customized, self-controlled monetary stacks.

46.

Torab Torabi

Torab Torabi is the CEO of Movement, a Move-powered blockchain protocol designed as a regulated stablecoin settlement and yield layer for emerging markets.

After serving as the founding business development lead at Movement Labs, he took over as CEO in late 2025 to lead the company's expansion into compliant fintech infrastructure. Under his leadership, Movement has secured licensed payment rails across the US, EU, and Canada, partnering with Circle to deliver low-cost digital dollar transactions and tokenized asset yields to the Global South.

47.

Jeffrey Yan

Jeff Yan is the Founder and CEO of Hyperliquid, a leading high-performance decentralized perpetuals exchange built on its own custom Layer-1 blockchain. A former International Physics Olympiad gold medalist, he graduated from Harvard with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science before starting his career as a quantitative developer at Hudson River Trading.

After building and scaling Chameleon Trading, a highly profitable crypto-native market-making firm, he pivoted to co-found Hyperliquid in late 2022 to address the custodial risks exposed by the collapse of FTX. Under his leadership, the platform has grown into a dominant decentralized powerhouse, famously built by a lean team of roughly 11 people while completely bypassing traditional venture capital funding.

48.

Jonathan Levin

Jonathan Levin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Chainalysis, the leading blockchain data and analytics company used by governments, financial institutions, and crypto businesses worldwide. Since co-founding the company in 2014, Levin has built Chainalysis into the foundational layer of crypto compliance infrastructure, enabling law enforcement agencies and regulators to trace illicit activity onchain and helping legitimate businesses manage risk.

His work sits at the intersection of economics, policy, and blockchain technology, making onchain finance more transparent and accountable at a global scale.

49.

Jorge Batista

Jorge Batista is the Co-Founder and CTO of BlockBee, a cryptocurrency payment gateway that enables businesses to accept on-chain digital asset payments online and in-store.

A computer engineer and blockchain developer, Batista previously co-founded and served as CTO of CryptAPI, a widely used crypto payment API. In 2022, he and his team spun out their enterprise features to launch BlockBee, introducing advanced capabilities such as automated split payments, instant exchange conversions, and a dedicated mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) app.

50.

Francesco Agosti

Francesco Agosti is a software engineer and entrepreneur who serves as the CTO and Co-Founder of Phantom, a leading self-custody Web3 wallet backed by Paradigm and Sequoia.

Prior to co-founding Phantom in 2021, he spent over two years at the decentralized exchange protocol 0x as a Tech Lead and Software Engineer, following a software engineering role at Yelp. Under his technical leadership, Phantom has scaled to serve millions of users and expanded its ecosystem through key acquisitions, including the token data platform SimpleHash.

A graduate of Duke University, Agosti is currently focused on growing Phantom's world-class engineering team and integrating AI-driven developer workflows to make crypto safer and easier for mainstream adoption.