Prizmabet

Howard Lutnick: Tether’s Big Backer

The CEO of prominent bond broker Cantor Fitzgerald played a major role in validating Tether this year by vouching for its reserves.

Howard Lutnick’s firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, is a prominent Wall Street bond broker and a member of an exclusive club: It’s a primary dealer that gets to trade directly with the Federal Reserve. So when Lutnick — Tether’s U.S. Treasuries dealer — said this year that Tether actually has the money it says is backing its huge USDT stablecoin, that put a final nail in the coffin of conspiracy theories claiming otherwise.

Lutnick’s other source of influence is being a supporter of crypto — well, he’s specific: just bitcoin and stablecoins — in close orbit around President-elect Donald Trump, serving now as co-chair of Trump’s transition team and a nominee to run the Commerce Department.

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It’s not clear how responsible Lutnick was for Trump’s turnaround on crypto (going from somewhat opposed during his first presidency to full embrace on the campaign trail this year), but if Lutnick whispered the “pro” argument in Trump’s ear, it couldn’t have hurt.

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

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Fred Thiel: The Michael Saylor of the Bitcoin Mining Industry

The CEO of MARA Holdings has gone all-in on bitcoin, adding billions of dollars worth of the world’s largest cryptocurrency to MARA’s balance sheet.

Under Fred Thiel’s leadership, MARA Holdings (MARA) — previously known as Marathon Digital Holdings — has become not only one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world but also the second-largest corporate owner of bitcoin, with about $3.9 billion worth on its balance sheet.

Thiel joined the mining company in 2018 as a director and was appointed CEO in 2021. Since then, he has navigated through the bull market of 2021 and the subsequent brutal crypto winter. His company has been focused on a bitcoin-centric business model, while other miners had to pivot to artificial intelligence-related computing as the industry faced reduced margins following the recent bitcoin halving event.

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Under Thiel, MARA went all-in on bitcoin by becoming the first miner to follow MicroStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor’s lead and buy large amounts of the digital asset on the spot market. The company was even able to successfully raise $1 billion recently to buy more bitcoin, making Thiel perhaps the Michael Saylor of the bitcoin mining industry.

Hunter Horsley and Matt Hougan: The Spot Crypto ETF Champions

The two Bitwise executives have worked tirelessly to get crypto exchange-traded funds approved by the SEC, and this year they finally succeeded.

The relentless efforts by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and chief investment officer Matt Hougan’s to bring institutional money into crypto for the past seven years finally paid off when spot ETFs for both bitcoin and ether were approved by the SEC earlier this year. The digital asset manager launched funds for both, taking its assets under management to north of $10 billion, and a third ETF for Solana may be in the offing soon as well.

But their efforts in the crypto space go much further than that, as the two regularly share insights with their sizable social media followings about their work, pushing the narrative that large banks, multi-family offices and other highly relevant institutional investors are “working to open up access to Bitcoin.”

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When it came to which U.S. presidential candidate they thought would be better for crypto, Horsley and Hougan continued to stay laser-focused on crypto, saying that the industry would win no matter who took office in January. Following Trump’s victory, however, Hougan declared that we are now entering the “Golden Age of Crypto.”

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

ZachXBT: Master Sleuth of Crypto

Nobody catches blockchain criminals better.

Since 2021, pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT has built an unmatched reputation for the relentless pursuit of crypto thieves and scammers. The detective generally provides this service free of charge, as a crypto fighter for the people. Probably because, as a victim of crypto fraud himself, ZachXBT knows what it feels like.

Discovering that there is no recourse to being scammed, he took it on himself to use blockchain’s transparency and his own uncanny ability to detect patterns to sniff out Ponzi schemes, pump and dumps and rug pulls.

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On August 19, while waiting for a flight, ZachXBT was casually monitoring blockchain ledgers when he noticed the first stirrings of what would become the largest crypto theft ever caught: a $600,000 Bitcoin sale. An unusually large transaction. The deal ignored steep fines no serious investor would accept. ZachXBT traced subsequent, even larger trades through a maze of false fronts, until by the time his plane landed, he was able to identify both the victim and the thieves — of a $243 million fortune.

The target subsequently hired ZachXBT to work with the authorities to capture the criminals, which he did within a month. It was the first time ZachXBT accepted a commission for his work. He otherwise depends on donations — which he receives to the tune of roughly $1.3 million a year.

In interviews (where he has also revealed his use of the male pronoun) ZachXBT has been clear that it’s the satisfaction he gets from fighting crypto crime that motivates him. It does seem to be that and his dedication to making his investigations transparent that has attracted his 700K followers on X and 45.5K on Telegram.
This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

Greg Osuri: Delivering on DePIN

The co-founder of the Akash Network is utilizing DePIN to make computing power more affordable to individual users.

For much of 2024, it felt like the three biggest trends in crypto were DePIN, DePIN, and DePIN. And one of the biggest players in DePIN is the Akash Network, which was co-founded by accomplished software developer and founder of AngelHack Greg Osuri.

Think of Akash as an open-source “super cloud” that lets people buy and sell compute, which is now a coveted resource in the age of AI. This is the core concept of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure, aka DePIN — using blockchain technology to organize resources (in this case, compute) that are otherwise fragmented. Akash is meant as a long-term alternative to Nvidia’s centralized chips, intended to make computing more affordable to individual users.

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“Akash gives you the right to compute, freedom from censorship, liberty of free thought,” Osuri has said. “$AKT [Akash’s native token] is the currency of compute.” And people are using it. Akash reported that in the third quarter of 2024, year-over-year user fees surged by an eye-popping 1,729%.

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

Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer and Francisco Alarcon: Upgrading Bitcoin With Covenants

The founders of the popular Taproot Wizards JPEGs want to do more now to “make bitcoin magical again.”

Taproot Wizards, a collection of 2,108 JPEGs inscribed on Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol, headed into 2024 on the heels of a $7.5 million seed funding round, which was promptly exceeded by the sale of Quantum Cats, a digital art collection of brightly-colored felines. The sale of 3,000 NFT-like collectibles netted 300 BTC, worth around $13 million at the time and now worth more than double that.

Founded by Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer and Francisco Alarcon, Taproot Wizards says its mission is to “make bitcoin magical again,” harking back to a 2013 meme describing BTC as “magic internet money.” The project is now turning its focus to upgrading Bitcoin itself using the proposed OP_CAT protocol, a program that was initially built into Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, but removed after concerns were raised about excessive memory usage and potential vulnerabilities.

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There is now an initiative to upgrade the network by including OP_CAT, which could enable more sophisticated applications on Bitcoin. It works by introducing “covenants,” or rules that can determine how a specific transaction will function. The Taproot Wizards founders are among the biggest proponents of OP_CAT, and created the Quantum Cats collection as a marketing campaign for the proposal.

“CAT-based covenants would allow Bitcoin users to trade between BTC and stablecoins on-chain, borrow with BTC as collateral, bridge their bitcoin to other chains and use new types of layer 2,” says Wertheimer.

Erik Voorhees: Merging Crypto and AI

The founder of DEX ShapeShift has launched a new AI platform that’s meant to be a safer and more neutral alternative to ChatGPT and Claude.

“Crypto + AI” is personified by Erik Voorhees. His career has spanned the eras. In 2012, when Voorhees launched the blockchain-based gambling game “Satoshi Dice” — which once accounted for half of all Bitcoin transactions — he pioneered a novel use case for cryptocurrency.

The founder of the decentralized exchange ShapeShift is now applying the ethos of bitcoin to the next wave of AI, launching Venice.AI with the humble goal of “unfettered civilizational advancement.” In announcing Venice on May 10, Voorhees explained that the app is similar to ChatGPT or Claude but “without all the Orwellian stuff,” and that Venice doesn’t censor conversations or “inject bias, safetyism, or political propaganda.”

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Somewhat amazingly, Venice seemed to ship instantly. It’s now live, creates uncensored images, and is part of the open-source Morpheus network. And as Voorhees says, “You can use Venice even without an account, in less than five seconds, from anywhere on earth via desktop or mobile.”

Illia Polosukhin: A Crypto+AI Pioneer

The co-founder of NEAR is working to create a full ecosystem for decentralized AI.

There are many in the Web3 space who have only recently jumped into AI. Illia Polosukhin isn’t one of them. Long before he co-founded the decentralized app blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked at Google as an AI researcher and co-wrote the seminal 2017 paper “Attention is All you Need,” which is widely credited as pioneering the “transformer” technology that powers popular large language model (LLMs) AI apps such as ChatGPT. His AI credentials are impeccable.

“AI is a really powerful force,” Polosukhin told me in 2023, “but what we don’t want is it to be controlled and biased by a single company.” So now Polosukhin is marrying his original love (AI) with NEAR’s mission of decentralization, working to create an entire ecosystem for decentralized AI, from compute to training to agents.

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At NEAR’s recent [Redacted] conference in Bangkok, there were literal signs everywhere showing just how seriously Polosukhin is taking this: “AI is NEAR.”

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

Russian Lawmaker Proposes Creating Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: Report

Anton Tkachev proposed “assessing the feasibility of creating a strategic BTC reserve in Russia by analogy with state reserve in traditional currencies.”

A deputy in the Russian parliament proposed the creation of a strategic bitcoin (BTC) reserve to tackle sanctions imposed on the country, state-owned news agency Ria reported on Monday.

Anton Tkachev of the New People party, which formed in 2020 and has 16 out of the 450 seats in the State Duma, asked Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to “assess the feasibility of creating a strategic bitcoin reserve in Russia by analogy with state reserve in traditional currencies.”

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The reserve would help counter the threat posed to Russian financial stability by sanctions, inflation and the volatility of traditional currencies that the country holds, such as the Chinese yuan, U.S. dollars and the euro, according to the proposal.

“In conditions of limited access to traditional international payment systems for countries under sanctions, cryptocurrencies are becoming virtually the only instrument for international trade,” Tkachev said in the proposal.

The proposal appears to echo U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to establish a strategic BTC reserve as a store of value to alleviate the pressures of the country’s national debt.

Microsoft Shareholders Vote Down Bitcoin Treasury Proposal

The negative vote was expected even as MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor tried to convince Microsoft shareholders otherwise.

Microsoft (MSFT) doesn’t appear to be adding its name anytime soon to the list of corporate entities holding bitcoin (BTC) after its shareholders voted against a proposal that would have directed the board of directors to study such a move.

Titled “Assessment of Investing in Bitcoin,” the proposal was put forward by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The think tank group suggested that Microsoft should consider diversifying 1% of its total assets into bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation. According to the latest data by Bloomberg, Microsoft holds $78.4 billion of cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet.

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The board last month had urged shareholders to vote against the proposal.

The preliminary vote result was announced minutes ago at the company’s annual meeting.

Shares of MSFT were trading for $446 in the minutes after the decision was announced, roughly flat for the day. Already under pressure on Tuesday, bitcoin prices fell a bit more following the news, now lower by 4% over the past 24 hours to $95,700.

Michael Saylor gets involved

A 3-minute presentation by Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Bitcoin Development Company MicroStrategy (MSTR), which has seen its stock price surge as much as 2,500% since adding bitcoin to the company’s treasury strategy more than four years ago, was meant to convince shareholders otherwise.

Saylor argued that Microsoft had surrendered $200 billion in capital over the past five years by issuing dividends and stock buybacks instead of purchasing bitcoin.

From the beginning, though, Microsoft’s board had concerns over bitcoin due to the inherent volatility of the asset. The company, according to the board, prioritizes stable and predictable investments to mitigate as much risk as possible.