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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.

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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.

Yat Siu: Fighting for Digital Property Rights

The Animoca co-founder, a big investor in NFTs, GameFi and memecoins, wants to make on-chain capitalism secure so that digital democracy can flourish.

In the late 19th century, an Australian statesman named Sir Richard Torrens created a government-backed, centralized registry that guaranteed land titles. Property rights had existed before then. But they were captured in complex chains of historical deeds. Torrens’s innovation, which eventually became known as the Torrens System, provided clear, government-guaranteed ownership rights which is credited as creating the financialization of real estate by making it a secure and tradable asset.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and Animoca’s Brands – a Web3 culture VC that primarily incubates NFTs and GameFi – is looking for the “Torrens moment” in digital property rights. Leading the charge is CEO Yat Siu.

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“Digital property rights can provide the basis for a fairer society,” Siu told CoinDesk recently, building on an argument he made in an interview with CoinDesk last year that “property rights and capitalism are the foundation that allows for democracy to happen.”

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

“The roots of communism came from feelings of inequality. There’s a correlation between this, Web3 and financial literacy,” he told CoinDesk in February. “Web3 can save the capitalist narrative by turning users into stakeholders and co-owners.”

Animoca’s Return

Animoca didn’t have an easy go of it during the bear market of 2022-2023, when crypto was barely hanging on and it looked like NFTs and GameFi would be a thing of the past. As the bear market thawed, however, the sector came back to life, and 2024 has been a different year entirely, with Animoca’s impressive returns once again making it and Yat Siu some of the most influential stakeholders in crypto.

The CoinDesk Metaverse Select Index (MTVS), a measure of the health of the sector, is up 192% in the last three months, outperforming the CoinDesk 20, an index of the largest digital assets, by 74 percentage points.

CryptoRank data shows that Animoca portfolio companies have a collective market cap of $35.6 billion, up almost 37% in the past 30 days alone.

Siu and Animoca are approaching the coming year with newfound confidence, doubling down on Hong Kong with a new 28,000-square-foot office.

By the end of the next year, Siu expects substantial progress will be made around the world in establishing regulations governing digital asset ownership. This, he explained, “will empower users by providing them with explicit rights over their digital property — rights that are currently already available via blockchain technology, but poorly understood in many jurisdictions.”

The incoming Trump administration is said to be considering known pro-crypto personalities to run the country’s top commodities regulators. And regulators around Asia, including Hong Kong, are consulting with the industry to build better digital asset rules — the first step in codifying crypto property rights.

What’s Next

Siu is working on more than property rights. Next up is what Siu calls the utility-driven memecoin.

“Memecoins will increasingly become more interconnected with NFTs and launch their own games,” he said, envisioning a world where IP crosses over between crypto properties in much the same way that comics become movies and games in the traditional world.

Memecoins, Siu argues, will begin transitioning from products of mere internet notoriety to utility-driven experiences, which will “enhance the intrinsic value of NFTs within our cultural framework,” he said, also predicting that NFT’s will againbe a major narrative in 2025.

Siu said that this shift underscores the growing importance of the intersection of community, culture and technology.

And with the market eyeing this intersection with more confidence, Animoca may be in search of more HK real estate as 2025 comes to a close.

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.”

Helium’s Frank Ong: Building Out DePIN’s First Big Success Story

Helium was a DePIN long before DePIN was a word. Long-time COO Mong is gratified to see (literally) a thousand projects emulating its economic model in 2024.

As (literally) a thousand DePIN projects bloomed in 2024, they could thank one decentralized physical infrastructure network in particular for showing the way: Helium. The original DePIN (before DePIN was a word), Helium was started by Amir Haleem, Shawn Fanning, and Sean Carey all the way back in 2013. It took until 2019 for the team to deploy IoT hotspots, allowing users to share wireless coverage and earn tokens.Of course, it’s harder to deploy hardware to people’s homes than it is to issue a memecoin on Pump.Fun. And as chief operating officer at Helium for the last seven years, Frank Mong has seen the struggle to deploy hardware up close. There are now more than 350,000 Helium hotspots deployed in 80-some countries.

“You have hurdles of building physical products and that’s everything from structures to electronics,” Mong said. “And those take time. And I think in the early days of Helium, at least for me, seven plus years ago, I recall that even when we do build a network, it takes time for things to be built physically to use that network.”Mong says it’s “very gratifying” to see so many DePINs come to life this year (1,300 is one estimate). “We’re seeing new companies come out this year in 2024 with all kinds of ideas and use cases for Helium’s economic model to really power through real-life physical infrastructure. It is quite amazing to see,” he said.

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Mong particularly likes mapping as a DePIN category and recommends that people watch Hivemapper.

Helium Mobile has 100,000 subscribers and the company is making money by onboarding customers from regular mobile providers, acting as an extra network inside buildings in cities like New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Helium launched on its own blockchain before switching to Solana in 2023.

Mong hails from the Tenderloin in Downtown San Francisco, which he calls “the slums of the city.”

Helium continues to deploy at a lightning rate. In Portugal, its hotspots form parts of smart cities and smart utilities. U.S. Pacific Gas and Electric is using Helium for wildfire detection, and the U.S. Geological Survey uses the network for flood detection in Madison, Wisconsin. Nova Labs (the company that created the open-source tech) also has a beta test underway with Telefonica in Mexico to provide hotspots in certain neighborhoods, showing how Helium, and DePIN, is increasingly becoming part of real infrastructure.

Mong says it’s a long road, but worth the struggle. “The initial part is taking that leap. You have to just jump off the cliff and believe that you’re going to land safely. That’s probably the hardest part. Once you do it, the journey is amazing,” he said.

“Just realize that it’s going to take a long time. Physical products take time to iterate and you have to have the patience to enjoy the journey.”Looking forward to 2025, he adds: “I hope that the innovation of crypto software continues to thrive and continues to grow. Along the way, I hope responsible actors show up and come to a table with real useful products and services for consumers.”

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

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.

Donald Trump: The Crypto President

His July speech at the Bitcoin Conference, in Nashville, was a turning point for crypto, promising an easier path for the industry heading into 2025.

The morning after Bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time, Donald Trump took a victory lap.

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“CONGRATULATIONS BITCOINERS!!! $100,000!!!” he posted on his platform Truth Social. “YOU’RE WELCOME!!!”

The price of Bitcoin has been on a tear over the last month, rising over $30,000 — some 45% — since Trump won election to a second term as president of the United States. While some price action after the election was was predicted whoever won the election, the speed at which bitcoin hit triple-digits was widely seen as a direct result of Trump’s win. The industry hopes that, with Trump in the White House next year, it will finally get regulatory clarity clearing a way for further growth and expansion of the digital assets sector.

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

The first time he was president, Trump did not do a whole lot for the cryptocurrency industry. While some of his regulators were ostensibly pro-crypto, by and large his administration proposed rules and took on enforcement actions seeking to limit the size of the industry.

That has all changed that all changed as Trump took the stage at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville on July 27, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet,” free Ross Ulbricht, fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler and take a dramatically different approach to crypto than the Biden Administration.

“They don’t understand it,” he said of Democrats at the time. “They are blocking your path. They’re blocking your way. But I’ve made it a lot easier for you because the SEC has been very, very tough on you.”.

In doing so, Trump elevated an already-emboldened crypto industry to a new level in the political discourse. While the industry — largely funded by the executives of the now-defunct FTX empire — threw a fair bit of money around in 2022, that campaign war chest was not deployed as strategically or as effectively as it was in 2024. And it shows signs of only becoming more overt. And the industry at large has celebrated what it views as a potentially friendlier four years of policymaking than outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration provided.

For these reasons, Donald Trump, alongside executives who encouraged his pivot to crypto this electoral cycle, including Amanda Fabiano, David Bailey and Ryan Selkis, is among CoinDesk’s Most Influential figures in 2024.

Popular discourse

2024 was the year that crypto has really broken out as an election issue. Candidates at multiple levels mentioned crypto as they ran for office, ranging from the presidential contest to candidates for the House of Representatives and Senate.

Trump actively solicited support from the crypto industry for months. Before Nashville, he issued several non-fungible token launches, stretching back to 2022. He’s involved in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project heavily supported by his sons which recently received a $30 million infusion from Tron and HTX’s Justin Sun, allowing Trump himself to directly profit off the venture.

One lawmaker, who did not wish to be identified, pointed to the amount of crypto money donated to his campaign,and the possibility of even just a few more votes, as reason enough for Trump to appeal to the crypto industry earlier this year.

“If crypto is going to define the future, I want [it] to be mined, minted and made in the USA. It’s going to be,” Trump said in his Nashville appearance. “It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it’s going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way and that’s what’s going to happen.”

Since the election, crypto has enjoyed a surge in popularity. Mainstream news organizations are writing about the sector’s quirks again, while companies trying to tie digital assets to the more traditional financial markets have filed a flurry of applications to list exchange-traded products for Solana and XRP.

Some of Trump’s initial picks seem poised to support the crypto industry. Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, said he was “excited” by Trump’s “embrace of crypto.”

“Crypto is about freedom. The crypto economy is here to stay,” Bessent said during a Fox News appearance earlier this year. “To me, one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin is a generation of investors who maybe post the Great Financial Crisis had been looking for investment opportunities, maybe they soured on markets, crypto is bringing in young people, it’s bringing in people who haven’t participated in markets.”

Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, is an adviser to crypto projects including Securitize and Reserve, and joined The Digital Chamber’s board in 2018.

And just Thursday night, Trump named venture capitalist David Sacks as his “AI and crypto czar.” It’s unclear as of press time just what responsibilities this position will have, but Sacks is a longtime crypto booster. His company, Craft Ventures, has invested in a plethora of crypto companies, ranging from Bitwise to Lightning Labs.

2025

When Trump takes office next month, he’ll do so having eked out a narrow popular vote win and with a Republican trifecta — the Grand Old Party will hold the majority in the House and Senate. This means there is a real chance Republicans can enact a comprehensive crypto-friendly legislative regime. Ahead of November’s election, some Republicans used that as a talking point.

“We have a real opportunity to do big things,” Congressman Andy Barr (R-Ky.), one of several lawmakers vying to run the powerful House Financial Services Committee, told me. “The digital asset agenda, both stablecoins and market structure, needs to be a prominent feature of the House Financial Services Committee’s legislative agenda.”

Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who will take charge of the Senate Banking Committee next year, said Trump “has been very clear on his position of being pro-crypto” at an event in August.

“That position puts the entire Republican apparatus on the table, leaning in, looking for a solution,” he said.

The Republican party platform said it would pursue policies that support crypto innovation and “end Democrats’ unlawful … crackdown” while supporting self-custody. Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said at the same event in August that “the Republican platform was written by basically Donald Trump.”

“He’s supportive of digital assets,” she said. “He has spoken positively about digital assets. He wants to move the needle in this area.”