Following the most interesting and influential personalities in blockchain is a good way to stay up to date on crypto news and learn about promising projects and assets. Here are 20 blockchain entrepreneurs, coders, investors, and event organizers that worth following this year. 1. Mykola Udianskyi Nikolay has 7+ years of experience developing and funding crypto projects. He has helped launch five of the world’s top 50 crypto exchanges, including Coinsbit, which entered the global top 10 after just two years in the market and whose audience exceeds one million. Nikolay Udiansky is also known as the founder of the crypto marketing agency PRMR.com and the cybersecurity company ASSUR. His latest project is EVO Country Club, a Silicon Valley-like ecosystem project designed to ensure comfortable living and working conditions for IT experts and their families. 2. Andre Cronje Andre Cronje is a blockchain developer and the creator of one of the most popular decentralized protocols, Yearn Finance. He was also involved in the creation of Hegic, Pickle, Cover, PowerPool, Cream V2, Akropolish, Sushiswap, and others. Today, he is one of the most popular and influential people in decentralized finance. Andre Cronje has 20+ years of software development experience, but for the past five years, he has been working exclusively in the field of fintech and blockchain. Cronje also developed several solutions to reduce the cost of financial products for the non-banking sector in Africa. 3. Bohdan Prylepa Bohdan Prylepa is a recognized expert in strategic and business development, brand-building, financial modeling, startup monetization, fundraising, and creating investment portfolios. He has over seven years of experience in digital marketing, IT, and web development. Bohdan Prylepa is perhaps best known as the co-founder and CTO of the crowd investment platform MLCI Inc., aimed at supporting innovative startups. Bohdan is also a co-founder and CTO of Prof-it, a software company that develops web and mobile pages, apps, and software. 4. Sergei Sergienko Sergei Sergienko is known as one of the leading voices of the blockchain community in Australia and Oceania, where he’s been active since 2016. Among his projects is the well-known crypto freelance platform LaborX. Lately, Sergei has been involved in the booming NFT space in both Australia and Russia, becoming the first entrepreneur in Australia to sell an NFT for $100,000. He has also partnered with a large Australian investment bank to help bring together crypto and legacy financial institutions in the country. 5. Ilya Churakov Ilya Churakov is an IT and blockchain entrepreneur with 16 years of expertise in asset management and private banking. He is best known as the CEO of DAO Consensus, a business community with representatives in 30 countries that has gained 7,000 new active members in the past three months alone. Ilya’s other projects include the digital asset bank Crypterium, which raised $55 million during the ICO and now has 200,000 customers in 180 countries. Ilya Churakov even holds the world record for the largest-ever webinar: in 2012, an online event he hosted gathered 12,000 participants. 6. Carl Runefelt Carl Runefelt’s YouTube channel The Moon has almost 400,000 subscribers, making him one of the most influential educators in the crypto space. After starting out as a boy working at a grocery store, he went on to speak on international stages in front of thousands of people. Runefelt’s most famous quote is “Bitcoin is the best form of money in the history of mankind” – and it is this message that he tirelessly spreads on YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere. 7. Guy Yanpolskiy Guy Yanpolskiy is a marketer, adviser, and PR specialist with over 15 years of experience. He has been active as a blockchain advisor since 2013, raising over $10 million in funding for his own projects and the startups he advised, including a single $6 million allocation from a fund based in Dubai. Guy also co-founded the PR and marketing agency Genirium, as well as the YAFO business development agency, the tech-focused media site Future Time, Solomonic Exchange, and the Guy Way Network. He is a well-known international speaker and participated in over 100 blockchain events in 2019 alone. 8. Sergei Khitrov Sergei Khitrov is a serial blockchain entrepreneur. Among other projects, he founded the crypto exchange listing agency Listing.help and the international cryptocurrency forum Blockchain Life. The Blockchain Life summit in Moscow was one of the very few major offline industry events to take place in 2020. Apart from exchange listings and event organization, Sergei Khitrov is also active in blockchain investment. He owns the Jets.Capital investment fund and sits on the Russian parliament’s Blockchain Expert Council. 9. Eman Pulis Eman Pulis is the CEO of SiGMA Group and the Malta AI and Blockchain Summit, Med-Tech World Summit, and Medical Cannabiz World Summit – some of the best-known international events in their respective industries. Eman’s ambition is to see technology like blockchain, IoT, AI, and big data embraced by large business verticals like iGaming and MedTech. He works toward this by holding his shows on the same dates as other major events, showing that emerging tech and traditional verticals can work in synergy. 10. Slava Demchuk Slava Demchuk is best known for his project AMLBot, a consumer application that has democratized AML services and allows individuals and small businesses to conduct their own crypto AML checks and identify risky assets. This is the first time that regular users and project teams have received access to enterprise-grade blockchain analytics, making Slava Demchuk an influential figure in the sphere of fintech security. Slava’s most recent project is AMLSafe, a crypto wallet with an enhanced security system and built-in AML check functionality to avoid regulatory and financial risks. 11. Tone Vays Tone Vays is one of the best-known Bitcoin evangelists: his YouTube channel was instrumental in educating the community. He is also one of the most popular public speakers in the industry, appearing at over 30 blockchain events a year. In addition to his busy speaking schedule, Tone hosts three events of his own: Unconfiscatable in Las Vegas, Understanding Bitcoin in Malta, and The Financial Summit in Bali and Dubai. Tone Vays also has a reputation as a shrewd crypto analyst, having correctly predicted the 2018 bear market. He is now bullish with his $150k BTC price target for late 2021 to early 2022. 12. Pedro Rivera Pedro Rivera, known on CryptoTwitter as @BlockchainPedro, is an educator, cryptocurrency advocate, investor, and community builder. Having created the well-known community @cryptomondayssanjuan through a combination of meetups, events, and hackathons, he now splits his time between Puerto Rico and Dubai, where he is working on building a crypto community on a similarly large scale. Above all, Pedro is known for his talent to create shared visions and goals and bring together like-minded, talented people – as well as for his infectious positive vibes. 13. Herbert Sim Herbert Sim, also known as the “Bitcoin Man,” was one of the original crypto influencers, having founded Crypto Chain University – the world’s first repository for blockchain research papers – back in 2010. The former global operations director at Huobi and CMO at Cryptology, nowadays Herbert Sim trades as a hobby and invests in promising crypto projects. Among the startups he has funded are the iGaming and blockchain news portal FortuneZ.com and the blockchain-powered health and lifestyle app BeFaster.fit. 14. Marcello Mari Marcello is a crypto space veteran, a member of SingularityNET’s founding team, and a sought-after crypto and blockchain speaker. Marcello’s most recent initiative is SingularityDAO, a spin-off of SingularityNET that focuses on bringing sophisticated AI tools to the DeFi industry, making smart fintech investments available to everyone using advanced AI tools. Marcello Mari is also behind the first NFT artwork produced in collaboration between an AI and a human: the NFT of Sophia the Robot. 15. Yael Tamar As the co-CEO and co-founder of SolidBlock, Yael Tamar is one of a handful of women CEOs in a male-dominated space. She works tirelessly to promote blockchain innovation in real estate and to establish a bridge between traditional finance (CeFi) and DeFi. Yael also founded Women in Block – an organization that highlights the accomplishments of women in the blockchain industry – and was listed as one of the top 25 blockchain and cryptocurrency speakers and 100 most inspirational women in blockchain. 16. Henri Arslanian Henri Arslanian is known for his 500,000+ LinkedIn followers and his iconic weekly LinkedIn show The Crypto Capsule. LinkedIn named Henri as one of its “Top Voices” in economy and finance, while Blockchain Asset Review has ranked him among the most influential crypto leaders in Asia. As a TEDx and global keynote speaker, Henri is a regular on the global conference circuit in addition to being a regular commentator on TV like Bloomberg and CNBC. His latest book, The Future of Finance, entered Amazon’s global top 10 best-seller list in financial services and was recognized as one of the “Best FinTech Books of All Time” by Bookauthority. 17. Roham Gharegozlou Roham is the CEO of Dapper Labs, the creator of CryptoKitties, Flow, and NBA Top Shot. Roham’s other best-known project is Axiom Zen – an award-winning venture studio that raised funding from such investors as Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. In total, Axiom Zen products have touched over 200 million consumers around the world. The venture studio gave rise to a number of successful ventures, including ZenHub, Toby (Chrome extension of the year, according to Google), and Dapper Labs. Roham is also active as an angel investor. His portfolio includes such SaaS companies as Intercom, Toutapp, and Teampay. 18. Anthem Hayek Blanchard Anthem Hayek Blanchard co-founded several well-known fintech and IT companies, including the provider of ransomware-proof software Hera Software Development Inc., the gold-backed cryptocurrency company AnthemGold Inc., and the precious metals dealer Anthem Vault Inc. Anthem also served as director of strategic development and marketing with GoldMoney. In his spare time, Anthem teaches Bitcoin classes to beginner crypto users and leads groups of students on field trips to local crypto ATMs. He even established a help line for first-time crypto owners. Anthem’s passion is empowering people to manage their own crypto portfolios and understand the joys and pitfalls involved in the space. 19. Denis Smirnov Denis Smirnov is a well-known blockchain advisor in the Russian-speaking world. After 10 years in digital marketing and new media, where he worked with companies such as Sanoma Independent Media, Yandex, and GameLand, in 2013, Denis shifted his focus to distributed computing and cryptocurrencies. Denis is actively engaged in raising blockchain awareness in the media and in building the crypto community in Russia. He has authored several learning courses about blockchain and cryptocurrencies (including the first course on DeFi at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow), as well as co-founded the UniDAO and Solomonic Exchange projects. 20. Michael Ross-Johnson Michael Ross-Johnson is the CEO of Chatex, one of the largest Telegram-based cryptocurrency exchanges. Chatex was designed with the aim to provide Telegram’s 500 million users with fair and easy access to digital money. Michael has 8+ years of experience promoting digital products and launching products in the European and African markets. Each of the influencers on our list focuses on a slightly different aspect of the blockchain industry. Together, they constitute a multifaceted set of gifted opinion leaders who are moving the cryptocurrency space forward.
