The 10 Most Prominent Blockchain Entrepreneurs of 2020
The adoption of Blockchain is an ongoing revolution, that is transforming the way enterprises and industries have been conducting business, ushering a new era in the technological history of the world. The sector is evolving fast, bringing significant change, while innovating scalable solutions and modernizing the legacy architecture. Blockchain has successfully streamlined the complexity of innumerable traditional processes and continues to do so to bring a holistic reformation across verticals.
Any change or upgrade from the old to the new has always been spearheaded by a few brilliant minds, who stand apart from the crowd owing to their forward-thinking mindset and innovative approach. Here’s an honorable mention of some of the key people behind the Blockchain revolution, the pioneers and architects behind the multi-billion dollar crypto and blockchain economy.
Raj Chowdhury
Designation: CEO of HashCash Consultants & Managing Director of PayBito Exchange
Raj Chowdhury leads HashCash Consultants, one of the top blockchain development companies, as CEO. He is also the MD of leading cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform PayBito. Raj conducted the first-ever interbank Trade Finance & Remittance application of blockchain technology between the Emirates NBD (UAE) and the ICICI Bank (India).
Raj is an alumnus of Tufts University was also a research associate in the Microsystems Technology Lab at MIT. He then went on to co-found the Locus International, an organization that worked on GPS mapping data generation. Raj also co-founded Power Enhancing Devices, which was involved in creating the Piezoelectric NEMS application. The application was utilized to extract environmental energy for portable equipment.
A crypto and blockchain pioneer, Raj Chowdhury is closely involved with the International Standards Organization along with various other international regulatory entities. His constant engagement with these global policymakers has helped create standards for interoperability and collaboration within the industry ensuing a positive change globally.
Vitalik Buterin
Designation: Creator & Co-founder of Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin is the inventor of Ethereum, which comes second after Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization and value. He is a Canadian programmer of Russian descent, who is also known to have co-founded the Bitcoin Magazine. Considered a prodigy, Buterin built his first-ever computer game at the age of 7 years, by using Excel macros. At the age of 10 years, he was a full-fledged games developer.
Vitalik Buterin got fascinated by the concept and core ideas of blockchain and started his study of Bitcoin. It acted as motivation and he aspired to launch a cryptocurrency platform of his own, which came true in 2014. He was successful in funding and launching Ethereum via online crowd sale. The birth of Ethereum cemented the relevance of Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for crypto ventures.
Vitalik has designed the Ethereum blockchain network to create and run decentralized applications (Dapps) and develop smart contracts. The tokens that are created on Ethereum are known as ERC-20. Ethereum Blockchain as an open-source code has allowed crypto developers to create and deploy blockchain projects gaining popularity among developers by saving them time, money, and resources.
Changpeng Zhao
Designation: Founder & CEO of Binance
Changpeng Zhao is a prominent personality within the blockchain and crypto world. He is the founder and CEO of the largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. He was also the CTO of OKCoin and a designated member of the Blockchain.info team. Zhao is popularly known as CZ among his crypto enthusiast followers on social media.
His career began as an IT professional at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, after which he went on to join Bloomberg where he developed services and solutions for the traders. His experience of working in the stock market aided him to become a trading specialist. CZ utilized his experience of trading and raising funds by establishing Binance as the world’s largest crypto exchange in a matter of 180 days.
Brian Armstrong
Designation: CEO & Co-Founder of Coinbase
Brian Armstrong is the CEO and co-founder of one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, Coinbase. Growing up Brian studied Java and CSS and went on to acquire a double major in economics and computer science. In the initial days of his career, Brian worked in some of the major IT companies as a programmer.
Things took an uphill turn in 2012 when he managed to acquire his first venture capital funding which helped him to launch crypto exchange Coinbase in California. His exchange garnered early recognition and to this day has managed to hold the position as one of the most preferred platforms for fiat currency to cryptocurrency trade. The Coinbase platform enables the traders to buy Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, and Litecoin by using bank cards.
Jihan Wu
Designation: Co-Founder & CEO of Bitmain
Jihan Wu is the CEO and co-founder of the largest computer chip manufacturing company for Bitcoin mining in the world, Bitmain.
One of the initial adopters of Bitcoin, Wu raised funds from family, friends, and acquaintances in which he used to buy 900 Bitcoins (BTC) in 2011. He ardently supports Bitcoin Cash, which is a hard fork of Bitcoin launched in 2017. JihanWu is also known to be the first one to translate the whitepaper of Bitcoin into Mandarin.
In his early career days, he worked as a financial analyst at a private equity firm, gradually venturing into the domain of digital assets. At present, he is considered as one of the most prominent crypto billionaires.
Daniel Larimer
Designation: CTO of Block.one
A software programmer and a serial technology entrepreneur Danial Larimer has played a key role in the launch of some of the most popular blockchain projects such as EOS, Bitshares, and Steem. He is the CTO of Block.one that created EOS.IO. Larimer also created the delegated proof-of-stake consensus which allows the validation of block creation and transaction via elected delegates in a blockchain network.
He is the co-founder of Bitshares, which is a decentralized exchange, built on the Graphene technology which he invented. In 2016, Dan co-founded the decentralized social media platform Steem. It uses native STEEM tokens to reward the content contributors of the site. In2017, he launched the smart contract platform, EOS along with Block.one developers. Before his advent into the world of blockchain, Dan Larimer worked on defense-related projects for companies like Torc Robotics and Raytheon.
Galia Benartzi
Designation — Co-founder of Bancor Protocol
A well-known name in the blockchain domain, Galia Benartzi co-founded the decentralized liquidity standard Bancor Protocol. A serial tech entrepreneur, she is in charge of Bancor’s business development at present.
In 2017, she launched Bancor which creates Smart Tokens which are cryptos with built-in convertibility that manifests through smart contracts. These Smart Tokens remain interconnected to create automated liquidity networks, which enables currencies generated by the user to thrive. Bancor is the leading decentralized platform that can instantly convert crypto tokens through the utilization of the atomic swap technique.
Benartzi was the co-founder of the first social game development company for smartphones, Mytopia, and has been associated with multiple tech ventures, mostly new-age technologies.
Charlie Lee
Designation: Creator of Litecoin
Charlie Lee is a Japanese computer scientist and the creator of the third crypto to get launched after Bitcoin, named Litecoin. His interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency was influenced by an article written on Bitcoin, after which he started investing in BTC, buying his first in 2011. During the same year, he went on to launch Litecoin, an open-source cryptocurrency. It is one of the first altcoins to make its mark in the world of crypto.
For a while, he worked at the crypto exchange Coinbase. But he left to focus on the development of Litecoin. Like Ethereum, Litecoin to enables developers to build and launch blockchain-based applications on its network.
Brad Garlinghouse
Designation: CEO of Ripple
Brad Garlinghouse is Ripple’s CEO and member of its Board of Directors. He was formerly the CEO of Hightail, a file sharing service along with prior positions as the President of Consumer Applications at AOL, which was preceded by Senior VP and executive positions at Yahoo.
Brad holds a BA in Economics from the University of Kansas and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He has become one of the prominent figures in the blockchain domain through his position as CEO at Ripple.
Pavel Durov
Designation: Founder of Telegram
Pavel Durov is the founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram and an emerging personality in the blockchain industry. He rose to fame through the launch of the social media platform VK. After a while, he and his brother both left that company and went on to launch Telegram which was quick to gain popularity and currently boasts of a 200+ million user count.
He has a controversial advent into the blockchain world, with his company still battling with the regulatory bodies for launching the Telegram Open Network blockchain. According to reports, the project was able to raise $1.7 billion via private token sales in 2018.
Every revolution starts with visionaries. The names mentioned above are the ones who understood and acknowledged the power and potential of crypto and blockchain in its nascent stage. Unitedly they became the force driving the technology towards the upcoming mass-adoption.
