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For the 10th anniversary of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of business leaders paving the way for future generations, ten bitcoin and blockchain leaders have been added to the list. While it took a couple of years for Forbes to start counting bitcoin entrepreneurs, so any entrepreneur using the underlying blockchain technology, this year’s list shows just how important the sector created by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto has become.
The most talented young leaders in the cryptocurrency space are truly among the most talented young leaders in the world. Period. As evidence of the scale of the impact cryptocurrencies are having, this year’s 30 Under 30 list included seven people in the finance category, one in venture capital, one in energy, and one in manufacturing.
Click here to read the whole Forbes List 30 Under 30.
If cryptography is your only thing, scroll down here to see who made this year’s list.
Volt Capital
Soona Amhaz, 27
Founding partner, Volt Capital
San Francisco, California
Amhaz is the founder of Volt Capital, a contrarian crypto fund that manages capital on behalf of investors such as Albert Wenger of USV and Brian Singerman of Founders Fund. So far he has led eight investments, supporting startups including Magic, Valiu, Cozy, BuyCoins and the Matrix League. For Amhaz, investing in cryptocurrency is personal: his family residing in Lebanon suffered the depreciation of the country’s currency, prompting Amhaz to help them convert some to bitcoin to preserve what they had left behind.
Alameda
Sam Bankman-Fried, 28
Founder, FTX
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
The founder and CEO of quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research, which manages $ 2.5 billion in assets, primarily from the Serum (SRM) coin that Bankman-Fried helped create. In 2019 he founded the FTX crypto derivatives platform, which recently raised $ 40 million with a valuation of $ 1.2 billion. FTX trades cryptocurrency futures. He owns about 50% of the company, which has so far generated approximately $ 50 million in revenue this year, with a profit of $ 30 million.
Augur
Joseph Krug, 25
Co-founder, Augur
San Francisco, California
Pantera Capital’s co-chief investment officer helps manage $ 442 million across three cryptocurrency-related funds. The largest fund has increased 240% this year to $ 227 million in initial coin offerings (ICOs), including Ethereum competitor Polkadot, now valued at $ 5 billion, and a cryptocurrency fund has increased 135% annually to $ 40 million. Before Pantera Krug organized the first ICO on Ethereum by raising $ 5.7 million for Augur, a peer to peer betting platform with a total market value of $ 152 million.
Forbes
Alexander Liegl, 28
Co-founder, Layer1 Technologies
San Francisco, California
“Bitcoin mining means converting electricity into money,” says Alexander Liegl. So it helps to be where electricity is cheaper. Liegl is betting $ 50 million in funding from the likes of billionaire Peter Thiel who found the cheapest juice in West Texas, where wind turbines outnumber oil wells. In exchange for cheap energy, Layer1 helps the local power grid manage its load. If the wind stops blowing, Liegl agrees to shut down his bitcoin mining machines. “We act as insurers for the energy grid,” says Liegl. It costs him around $ 1,000 to mine a single Bitcoin, which is currently trading at around $ 13,000 on the open market.
Zap
Jack Mallers, 26
Founder, Zap Solutions
Chicago, Illinois
CEO of Zap, a bitcoin investment and payments company that transacts on the Lightning Network. Zap recently closed a $ 3.5 million seed round led by Greenoaks Capital and employs around 20 people. It recently announced it is working with Visa as the payment and credit card giant introduces customers to bitcoin. Mallers’ father founded and sold one of the largest futures brokerage firms in Chicago and introduced him to bitcoin in 2013.
BlockFi
Flori Marquez, 29
Co-founder, BlockFi
Brooklyn, New York
The co-founder of the BlockFi cryptocurrency lending platform, which allows cryptocurrency holders to lend cryptocurrency at rates up to 8.6%. The platform also offers cryptocurrency services and has raised over $ 100 million in shares from venture capital firms including Galaxy Digital, Susquehanna, and Winklevoss Capital. Having generated $ 4.5 million in revenue in 2019, BlockFi has 100,000 funded accounts and is on track to earn $ 120 million in revenue this year and is preparing for an IPO.
Paradigm
Charlie Noyes, 21
Partner, paradigm
San Francisco, California
An investment partner at the Paradigm Capital cryptocurrency fund, he currently oversees $ 100 million in positions for the largest cryptocurrency fund in the world. Noyes was a personal seed investor in Tagomi’s $ 12 million Series A investment in the institutional cryptocurrency trading platform, which led to the exit from Coinbase in 2020. He also led a $ 1 million seed investment in Uniswap, a token that is now trading at a valuation of $ 3 billion.
CoinList
Brian Tubergen, 29
Co-founder, CoinList
New York, New York
The founder of CoinList, an investment platform that helps promising cryptocurrency companies raise funds and allows investors to trade those companies’ cryptocurrencies. Since inception in 2017, CoinList has raised over $ 800 million for cryptocurrency firms, which are backed by venture capital firms including Sequoia, a16z, USV, GV, Bain, and Lightspeed. A former intern at Google, Microsoft and Facebook, Tubergen began his career as a product director at AngelList after graduating from Princeton University.
Amiti Uttarwar
Amiti Uttarwar, 28
Bitcoin protocol engineer, Bitcoin Core
Incline Village, Nevada
The first female known contributor to Bitcoin Core received a joint grant of $ 150,000 from OKCoin and HDR Global in June, making her one of the few paid programmers to develop the underlying bitcoin code. Daughter of Indian immigrants, Carnegie Mellon University graduate and veteran of Silicon Valley startups, she represents a new movement of software engineers developing open source money. He started The Bitcoin Zine, a publication covering the lighter side of bitcoin development.
Authenticiti
Andrew Yang, 27; Jeong Woo Park, 25; and Athanasios Karachotzitis, 26
Co-founders, Authenticiti
This blockchain-based supply chain data platform was launched in 2016. They raised $ 2.1 million to centralize siled business systems of modern supply chains and aggregate data into a single source. A pilot project aggregated order-to-cash data between GE Aviation and Lockheed Martin’s siled systems to provide real-time shared visibility into gasket shipment. Revenue is expected to reach $ 2.6 million in 2020.
