Who are the most influential people in cryptocurrency? Which startups or platforms are poised to change the fast-growing marketplace over the next year? To help our readers get a lay of the land in this often-opaque sector, we have put together profiles of individuals who have emerged as prominent figures in the digital currency arena. While our list is by no means exhaustive, it offers a snapshot of leaders in the field who will be making headlines in the months ahead, from recent college graduates to Silicon Valley veterans.
THE TAKEAWAY
The people making waves in the digital currency world range from recent college graduates to veteran venture capitalists. The Information put together profiles of influential people and companies to help readers track the most important developments in this sometimes-secretive sector.
Name: Olaf Carlson-Wee
Age: 28
Role: Founder, Polychain Capital
The context: Olaf Carlson-Wee has been working in cryptocurrency since he graduated from college: He wrote his senior thesis at Vassar College on Bitcoin, and was the first employee at Coinbase, which operates a wallet for digital currency. He worked there for three years before leaving to start his own cryptocurrency hedge fund, Polychain Capital.
Polychain maintains a dominant position in the market, with $200 million under management from a list of investors that includes such Silicon Valley heavyweights as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The fund serves a purpose for institutions wanting to invest in crypto assets but whose limited mandates or lack of technical knowledge prevent them from entering the market directly. Since Polychain’s inception, dozens of hedge funds have cropped up hoping to capitalize on cryptocurrencies’ sometimes triple- or quadruple-digit returns and compete for the dollars of investors seeking exposure to the market.
The bottom line: Mr. Carlson-Wee pioneered a model that has acted as a bridge between venture capital firms and the cryptocurrency sector, which has helped give cryptocurrency credibility among institutional investors.
What’s next: While Polychain will continue to play an important role in the cryptocurrency marketplace, it is going to see a lot of competition moving forward from firms seeking to replicate its success. That doesn’t mean it will suffer (actually, probably the opposite), but the landscape is changing: As the cryptocurrency market matures, more VCs will bring in people to invest directly in projects.
Name: Brad Garlinghouse
Age: 46
Role: CEO, Ripple
The context: Mr. Garlinghouse is a veteran in the technology industry. Before joining Ripple as CEO, he was president of consumer applications at AOL and senior vice president at Yahoo, where he oversaw the company’s homepage, Flickr, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger.
Ripple, a platform for banks to move currency, has been one of the most successful undertakings to date involving blockchain, or digital ledger technology, having raised $94 million in venture money and employing 165 people across five locations. Mr. Garlinghouse says Ripple’s ability to settle international transactions quickly and efficiently has helped it enlist large corporate clients, including Bank of America and RBC. “In cryptocurrency, you still see a lot of science experiments,” he says. “Ultimately, science experiments are not a business model.”
The bottom line: Ripple’s popularity among multinational corporations needing to settle transactions across borders has demonstrated how blockchain technology can serve traditional businesses.
What’s next: Mr. Garlinghouse says he hopes Ripple can someday accomplish what Amazon did: pursue one vertical, dominate the market and expand into other applications for blockchain technology.
Name: Tim Draper
Age: 59
Role: Individual investor
The context: Mr. Draper, the veteran venture capitalist who founded DFJ in the 1980s, has long been a proponent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, but he has recently started to expand his portfolio as one of the largest individual participants in initial coin offerings, or ICOs. Two projects he has supported are Tezos and Bancor, which collectively raised nearly $400 million in their token sales earlier this summer. An outspoken personality in the media, Mr. Draper has helped to generate additional interest in ICOs he has backed that translates into millions of dollars for cryptocurrency startups.
The bottom line: Mr. Draper’s role as both a promoter for ICOs and a big-time investor in them makes him a powerful force in influencing which token sales will succeed.
What’s next: Mr. Draper told The Information that he intends to support projects that are pursuing grand sociological transformations. “I like banking the unbanked, data, insurance, health care, real estate, government, utilities—anything that looks like a societal transformation,” he said.
Name: Barry Silbert
Age: 41
Role: Founder, Digital Currency Group
The context: Mr. Silbert, the founder of SecondMarket, the trading exchange for private company stocks, says he was drawn to cryptocurrency five years ago and became interested in its potential to disrupt the world’s existing financial infrastructure. Before founding Digital Currency Group, he was an early investor in Ripple and Coinbase, which have gone on to become big digital currency businesses.
DCG has grand ambitions of its own. The company operates three different verticals: a venture portfolio that includes heavy hitters like Coinbase and Circle; a digital currency portfolio; and a cohort of wholly owned subsidiaries. Among those subsidiaries are Grayscale, which has created investment trusts for Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic, and Coindesk, the cryptocurrency-centric news outlet. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust this month surpassed $500 million in assets under management, making it a serious player in the industry.
The bottom line: DCG’s broad control over disparate aspects of the cryptocurrency sector, from news to corporate and retail financial products, gives Mr. Silbert far-reaching influence.
What’s next: Grayscale in particular could emerge as a dominant player in the nascent cryptocurrency industry, as it expands its investment products to include other digital currencies and petitions the SEC to upgrade these products to ETF status. In addition, Coindesk’s increasingly prominent role in the media could make it an acquisition target for large companies looking to profit from its expertise.
Name: Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville
Age: 47 and 46
Role: Co-founders, Circle
The context: Mr. Allaire and Mr. Neville have been working together long before starting Circle. They were colleagues at the Allaire Corporation, which was acquired by Macromedia, and Brightcove, which operates an online video platform. Mr. Neville led Macromedia’s technical efforts, serving as its senior architect and principal scientist during his tenure. Mr. Allaire draws connections between the financial world and media: “Money, in our view, is another form of content,” he told The Information. “I first came to blockchain from that perspective.”
Circle is an unorthodox cryptocurrency company: Its consumer-facing payment app, Circle Pay, allows users to send and receive traditional currency. Behind the scenes, however, Circle uses the blockchain to convert those assets to cryptocurrency and back again in order to settle international transactions quickly. While its users might not know they are interacting with the blockchain, Circle is now the second-largest cryptocurrency trading operation in the world, making markets on every major crypto-asset and trading more than $1 billion of digital currency every month, according to Mr. Allaire.
The bottom line: Circle has planted itself as a consumer-facing blockchain payment service while exploring additional ways to profit from the massive amounts of liquidity it provides.
What’s next: The company has been quiet about the details, but Circle has plans to roll out a series of blockchain-based financial products targeted toward retail investors with limited experience in cryptocurrency. “We think that mainstream consumers are interested in ways that they can use savings to invest in digital assets as an investment category,” Mr. Allaire said. The shift could be needed, given that Circle is facing competition from traditional payment apps like Venmo, as well as new platforms like Coinbase’s Toshi.
Name: Brian Armstrong
Age: 34
Role: CEO, Coinbase
The context: Prior to founding Coinbase in 2012, Mr. Armstrong worked as a software engineer at CarWoo.com and Airbnb.
Even the most casual cryptocurrency investors are familiar with Coinbase, a wallet and exchange company with more than nine million users. Coinbase’s simple design and user-friendly interface make it palatable to people just getting started with cryptocurrency. “What we’re doing at Coinbase that’s unique in the industry is making digital currency easy to use, and trusted,” Mr. Armstrong said. The exchange supports just three digital currencies—Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin—while people wanting to trade more obscure digital currencies will have to look elsewhere, at least for the time being. Aside from its wallet platform, Coinbase also operates GDAX, an exchange targeted at professional traders, and Toshi, a mobile app that acts as a both a browser for the Ethereum network and a payment system.
The bottom line: Having seen success in connecting ordinary people with cryptocurrency, Coinbase has an advantage moving into the next phase of the industry, in which businesses will fight to be first to bring digital currency to the masses.
What’s next: Coinbase announced last week that it raised $100 million in Series D funding, valuing the company at $1.6 billion. Some of the money will go toward boosting Coinbase’s engineering and customer support teams, which have been spread thin as Coinbase grew, leading to complaints from users. The company also will put more funding toward Toshi, which is still in a testing stage. Mr. Armstrong says his hope for Toshi is to have it connect the cryptocurrency market to a broader population.
Name: Vitalik Buterin
Age: 23
Role: Programmer and commentator
The context: Mr. Buterin, the prodigious developer who invented Ethereum, is perhaps the most famous figure in the cryptocurrency sector apart from Bitcoin’s anonymous creator(s), known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Buterin’s work developing Ethereum’s “smart contract” feature has already changed the way people conceive of peer-to-peer apps, as shown by the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into ICOs that are built on top of the network. An example of his influence: A fake report of his death in June caused Ether’s price to plummet, wiping out $4 billion in value. Mr. Buterin’s holdings in Ethereum make him one of the biggest beneficiaries of the cryptocurrency boom.
The bottom line: Mr. Buterin is one of the most influential figures in determining the course of Ethereum, whose market cap was more than $28 billion as of Friday, according to CoinMarketCap.
What’s next: His writing on Twitter and his personal blog, as well as comments made at cryptocurrency conferences (at which he is a frequent participant) give Mr. Buterin the ability to shape markets. But he has taken a more reserved approach to ICOs in recent months, announcing that he won’t serve as an advisor for any more ICO projects, and critiquing some projects for how they are using the fundraising method.
Name: Naval Ravikant
Age: Early 40s
Role: CEO, AngelList
The context: Mr. Ravikant, the VC who was an early backer of companies like Twitter and Uber, has turned his focus to cryptocurrency recently, making personal investments in blockchain startups. Along with Juan Benet of Protocol Labs (in which Mr. Ravikant is an investor), he launched CoinList, a platform based off AngelList dedicated solely to funding ICOs. The platform emphasizes compliance, something the cryptocurrency sector has grappled with in the absence of definitive guidance from regulators. Filecoin, the first ICO to be featured on the site, also was the first to accept contributions in U.S. dollars, and was only open to accredited investors.
The bottom line: Aside from being a thought leader in digital currency (and the VC industry as a whole), Mr. Ravikant’s foray into facilitating legal and easy participation in ICOs will help new projects gain exposure and reduce the barriers for accredited investors to get involved.
What’s next: As a big name in Silicon Valley, Mr. Ravikant’s support for ICOs lends credibility to the fundraising method, which has faced opposition from people skeptical of the large fundraising rounds by some companies.
Name: Fred Wilson
Age: 55
Role: Managing partner, Union Square Ventures
The context: The Union Square Ventures partner, who has a high profile in the venture capital world, has transferred that influence to digital currency. Fred Wilson runs a widely read blog on which he muses about cryptocurrency, among other topics. He has been one of the most prominent Bitcoin supporters since its early days, but he also has been critical of digital currency in general: In a recent post, he condemned greed in the cryptocurrency sector. Together with managing partner Albert Wenger, the two men have established USV as one of the most engaged VC funds with respect to cryptocurrency. The firm was an early investor in Polychain Capital, and is beginning to invest directly in ICOs, The Information reported last month.
The bottom line: Mr. Wilson and Mr. Wenger have been active in cryptocurrency both in their commentary and investments, serving as important liaisons between investors and some of the more esoteric aspects of blockchain technology.
What’s next: USV is paving the way for institutional investors to participate in ICOs. Other VCs are likely to soon follow suit, with platforms like CoinList making it even easier for accredited investors to gain exposure to new tokens.
