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More Than Half of Crypto Tokens Debuted in 2024 Were Malicious: Blockaid

As much as $1.4 billion was lost to crypto scams and fraud in 2024, Blockain said.

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Blockchain security firm Blockaid said a full 59% of crypto tokens introduced this year were “malicious in nature.”

The number of nefarious tokens being sold into the open market ties in with the rising memecoin narrative that has been consistent throughout this cycle.

There are now 10 memecoins with a market cap of $1 billion or greater and this relative success has led to copycat tokens being launched on Ethereum, Base and Solana among other chains.

Rug-pull scams remain a prevalent threat, making up 27% of malicious tokens, Blockaid said.

It’s worth noting, however, that the amount lost to cryptocurrency hacks and scams shrank dramatically. The FBI said that in 2023, $5.6 billion was lost to crypto scams, while this year the total is $1.4 billion, according to Blockaid’s report.

Blockaid’s data stems from an on-chain detection and response (ODR) platform that processed 2.41 billion transactions, 780 million dapp connections, and 220 million tokens in 2024.

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Aptos Labs CEO Mo Shaikh Quits; Avery Ching to Take His Place

The Aptos co-founder is sticking around as a strategic adviser, though.

Mo Shaikh, co-founder of Aptos Labs, announced that he’s stepping down as CEO of the company.

Aptos is a layer-1 blockchain that claims to offer enhanced scalability, security and transaction speeds. The platform leverages a unique blockchain programming language called Move, which was originally created for Facebook’s shuttered “Diem” project.

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In a lengthy post on X, Shaikh, who co-founded Aptos with Avery Ching three years ago, expressed pride in the progress made by the company, which included raising a mammoth $400 million in venture capital funding and building “one of the most robust ecosystems, trusted by over a thousand builders and innovators around the globe.”

https://twitter.com/moshaikhs/status/1869851984129569194

Ching, Shaikh said, will assume the role of CEO and lead the company into its next phase of growth.

In his X post, Shaikh acknowledged the work of Aptos’ partners and investors, including firms like BlackRock, Google, Mastercard and PayPal.

“None of this would have been possible without the unwavering support of our incredible investors. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Dragonfly, Blocktower, Haun Ventures, Hashed, IRONGREY, a16z, Apollo, Coinbase, Parafi, Scribble, PayPal, Franklin Templeton, and the amazing angels who believed in our vision,” he wrote.

Shaikh said he will remain with the company as a strategic adviser and plans to take time to reflect on the future of blockchain and financial systems. “I will always remain a champion of Aptos and its mission,” he wrote, adding that he will “look forward to continuing to help Aptos maintain its role as the world’s leading blockchain.”

Michael Saylor: The Architect of MicroStrategy’s Huge Bitcoin Bet

Most companies were leery of Saylor’s strategy when he started amassing bitcoin back in 2020. Some are no longer skeptical.

Michael Saylor’s decades-old software development firm MicroStrategy blazed the path for corporate bitcoin purchases beginning in 2020. Through massive securities sales, he’s managed to fund the purchase of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin for his company. Tesla and Block dabbled in the strategy in years past. After the ugly crypto winter put a damper on that, in 2024, other publicly traded companies like Semler Scientific copied the idea. Is it a fad like adding “Blockchain” to corporate names in the 2010s to juice stock returns, or is hoarding bitcoin on balance sheets (including the U.S. government’s) something enduring? Saylor has bought the original crypto through thick and thin, so the test will be whether the trend persists beyond the current red-hot moment following Donald Trump’s election. But there’s no denying Saylor’s laser eyes sparked something.

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This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [ADD LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].

Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart: The Bloomberg ETF Bros

The two analysts had their fingers on the pulse of one of crypto’s biggest financial stories of 2024.

Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart sit on one of the most traditional finance (TradFi if you’re hip to the lingo) perches out there: Mike Bloomberg’s gazillion-dollar news, data and analysis business. Yet, as all of crypto anxiously awaited word in early 2024 on whether U.S. regulators would approve bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the Bloomberg analysts were must-listen-to experts in crypto.

Their day jobs entail examining all things ETF. For a few weeks or maybe months, there was no hotter story for them than bitcoin, and Balchunas and Seyffart were in the social media trenches, armed with de rigueur memes, telling degens and pros alike whether it was likely to be a “yay” or “nay” for the widely anticipated products. (They correctly leaned toward “yay.”)

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Balchunas caught a very early glimpse of how intense the buzz around bitcoin ETFs could get, tweeting way back in 2013: “Crazy: Just the mere reg filing of a bitcoin ETF has already gotten more press/tweets than the dozens of new & useful ETF launches combined.”

Robin Linus: Scaling Crypto’s Premier Network

The developer behind BitVM is facilitating the building of more and more applications atop Bitcoin.

Robin Linus shook up the crypto development landscape in October 2023 with a whitepaper presenting a theoretical method for making Bitcoin more programmable. “BitVM,” as it was known, was followed by a second iteration, “BitVM2”, in August 2024, revealing improvements that could bring the concept closer to implementation.

The introduction of BitVM by Linus, a core contributor at ZeroSync Association, a Swiss non-profit organization based in the canton of Zug, was hailed as a breakthrough because it didn’t require any changes to Bitcoin’s code. Just the publication of Linus’s original design for BitVM helped to inspire a fervor for building projects on Bitcoin.

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The aim of BitVM2 is to enable a rollup — essentially a separate auxiliary network built atop Bitcoin — that can handle faster and cheaper transactions, but without compromising the network’s security. This could then allow a bridge that could be used to securely transfer BTC to the rollup, and later bring the BTC back so that deposits can be withdrawn.

Linus’ work is providing the foundations for some of the most notable ventures in the Bitcoin development sector, such as Rootstock’s “BitVMX” project, and hybrid Bitcoin and Ethereum layer-2 BOB (“Build on Bitcoin”), which aims to make the original blockchain network the center of the DeFi universe.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [INSERT LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].

Sergio Demian Lerner: Making Bitcoin More Programmable

The founder of Rootstock is working to create a framework for running programs on Bitcoin and enabling the development of more sidechains and Layer 2s.

While the Bitcoin ecosystem has been enjoying a fresh wave of development and engagement over the last two years, some projects have been working to expand the utility of the original blockchain for far longer. One of these is sidechain Rootstock, which launched in 2018.

Founder Sergio Demian Lerner is a Buenos Aires-based programmer known for his early research on Satoshi Nakamoto’s mining activities and later for contributing to the development of Ethereum. Rootstock is now in the midst of its “BitVMX” project, designed to improve Bitcoin’s programmability by harnessing Robin Linus’ BitVM design that was unveiled in late 2023.

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“BitVMX framework provides the foundations to run any CPU on Bitcoin,” the project’s accompanying whitepaper says. BitVMX’s aim is to put the theory behind Linus’ BitVM paradigm into practice by creating a framework for running programs on Bitcoin and enabling the further development of sidechains and layer 2s.

Rootstock plans to complete the project by late Q1 2025, according to a roadmap on its website. “The BitVMX Bridge will revolutionize the bridging technology on Rootstock, by introducing a trust-minimized Bitcoin/Rootstock bridge. This will rely on the 1-of-n honest assumption, and will not require changes to the Bitcoin consensus protocol,” Rootstock explained in its roadmap.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [INSERT LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].

Ray Chan: Bridging Web2 and Web3 With Memes

The CEO of Memeland turned memes into cultural currency with 9GAG. Now, he’s using crypto to transform them into tools for engagement and community.

2024 has been the year of the memecoin supercycle, with demand for the tokens surging to unprecedented heights. Memes are now a $141 billion business, according to CoinGecko, making up around 11% of the entire crypto market (excluding bitcoin and ether).

Memeland CEO Ray Chan has become a prominent figure in the supercycle, leveraging his expertise to blend humor and culture with blockchain, bringing the culture of memes he helped create in Web2 over to Web3.

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In 2008, during the Web2 era, Chan founded 9GAG, where he curated the best online memes and made them the internet’s language of humor and identity.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

In 2024, Chan spun Memeland out of 9GAG and transformed it into a blueprint for how blockchain, culture and community could reshape the internet via NFTs and GameFi. While those two things aren’t anything new in Web3, Memeland has distinguished itself in a crowded field by emphasizing community and creativity over mere speculation.

Redefining the Fan-Creator Relationship

Chan’s strategy has focused on making blockchain technology accessible, fun and inherently social. In many ways, this is the bridge between Web2 and Web3, given that memes aren’t a complicated decentralized financial system like a new automated market maker created by PhDs — they’re silly pictures of dogs and cats.

Chan sees Web3 as a chance to redefine how fans and creators interact through its approach to “proof of fandom,” in which creators can interact with fans while also building an ownership layer, something that’s not possible in the Web2 world.

This synching of fans with ownership is what’s missing in Web3, and what Chan sees as bringing in the masses.

“We don’t need more investors in Web3. We need more customers,” is how he put it in a fireside chat at Taipei Blockchain Week in 2023.

David Tse: Bringing Staking to Bitcoin

It’s been a banner year for Babylon, the staking protocol co-founded by Tse.

David Tse is the co-founder of Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, one of the foremost projects in the burgeoning sector of introducing utility to the world’s oldest blockchain that is commonplace in other networks. While the Bitcoin network itself does not allow staking (being a proof-of-work blockchain), Babylon’s protocol allows users to stake BTC to secure other chains, offering the security of the original cryptocurrency to the wider crypto world.

Babylon enjoyed a banner year in 2024, raising $70 million in a funding round in May and receiving a stunning response from stakers on its mainnet launch in August. For security purposes, the launch was capped at 1,000 BTC, a threshold that was reached after just an hour and change. The protocol was opened for a second round in October and drew 24,000 BTC in around one hour and 40 minutes.

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Tse, who also serves as an engineering professor at Stanford University, said that the inflows were “way beyond our expectations.” The sector could be primed for further growth throughout 2025 and beyond, given the consistent ascension of BTC dominance of the crypto market in the last 18 months. Therefore, expect to hear much from Tse and the rest of the team at Babylon as interest and development in Bitcoin staking grows.

Steve Yun: Driving Web3 Adoption Via Telegram

The president of the TON Foundation has millions tapping their phones to earn crypto.

What do hamsters, crypto and Iran’s military have in common? At one point in the summer of 2024, the Telegram “mini-game” Hamster Kombat was so popular — reportedly attracting 300 million users — that Iran Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari accused the West of trying to disrupt elections by distracting Iranian voters with the game, as part of the “soft war” on Iran’s government.

Hamster Kombat, Catizen, Notcoin and other simple tap-tap-tap games are played on Telegram’s blockchain-powered TON, aka The Open Network. As the president of the TON Foundation, Steve Yun is responsible for overseeing overall TON adoption. He’s off to a strong start, as TON hasexploded in growth and now has a market cap of over $17 billion (as of this writing), making it the 13th largest project in all of crypto.

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Many Web3-enthusiasts in the U.S. haven’t fully engaged with TON, as the platform has withheld certain features such as a Telegram native crypto wallet due to regulatory issues. But that will likely soon change. After SEC Chair Gary Gensler announced he planned to resign early next year, Yun, tweeted “TON is going to the U.S.”

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

Pavel Durov: Free Speech Hero Against the State

The Telegram founder’s short stay in a French prison this summer was a free speech inflection point.

It was not until August 24, 2024 that Pavel Durov burst into the forefront of the public consciousness. Not that the 120th richest person in the world with $15.5 billion (Forbes) isn’t notable just for that. But it’s Durov’s social media accomplishments that truly distinguish him—and his public stand for internet freedom that underscores his dynamic role in that world.

Durov’s first achievements in social media took place in his native Russia, when he cofounded the social networking site VKontakte (VK) in 2006. Disputes surrounding the site and subsequent interference from the Russian government prompted Durov to leave his native country in 2014, just a year after developing the groundbreaking networking site Telegram with his brother, Nikolai. In 2017, it moved the company HQ to the United Arab Emirates.

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In August, Durov told the court that he had come for an arranged meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, which Macron denied. The charges leveled against him were based on the notion that his Telegram site was insufficiently monitored, and thus allowed for the free flow of criminal activity.

To Durov’s thinking, the internet is free. The exchange of ideas ought to be facilitated, not suppressed. His arrest was in fact the fruit of a long term joint surveillance operation dubbed “Purple Music,” and carried out by the French government in cooperation with the UAE. Both governments wanted the key to Durov’s encryption codes — just as the Russians had.

The French claimed to be concerned with cybercriminals, drug traffickers and Islamic extremists, while the UAE was focused on the possible use of the Telegram app by dissidents and pro-democracy activists, despite having invested $75 million in Telegram in 2021.

Pavel Durov is free on bail while his case is pending, but forbidden to leave France. His case continues to pit internet titans against the state, in a preview of a clash we’re likely to see more of in the coming years.
This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.