NY Weekly’s Top 10 Crypto
by Sarah Marie June 3, 2021 in Business
Cryptocurrency is the new gold mine, and the industry is fast shaping the financial industry and, by extension, the rest of the world’s opinion about money.
The popularity of cryptocurrency and crypto assets over the years have been popularized by the increase in value of some of the world’s most famous assets, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to mention a few. However, the significant players, traders, and influencers in the cryptocurrency circle are also another major factor responsible for this increased popularity.
Therefore, we have curated a list of ten individuals who have influenced the crypto industry and made the most difference in the year 2020 and will guide the direction of the sector in 2021.
1. Chloe Tucker
Chloe Tucker is the theater-actress-turned-real-estate-agent taking the industry by storm. Known for her YouTube series, Chloe in Manhattan, she has established herself as NYC’s fresh-faced real estate powerhouse. Chloe has joined the city’s top brokerage, Serhant, as an advisor and marketing specialist.
Instagram: @chloeinmanhattan
2. Jeffery Boston Weatherford
Jeffery Boston Weatherford is a multifaceted visionary, award-winning children’s book illustrator, marketing guru, and business consultant who leads a diverse team of investors known as the Hyena Hut. Within this community, Jeffery teaches profitable trading and investment strategies, and his team of experts provide in-depth research about cryptocurrencies before they are trending. The team even developed an automated trading system that generates passive profits from the fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market and established the NFT World Bank. The Hyenas have acquired over a nonillion coins as a collective and show no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Website: www.nftworldbank.com
3. Patricia Baronowski-Schneider
Patricia Baronowski-Schneider is the founder and president of Pristine Advisers, a leading investor relations, public relations, media relations and marketing firm. Patricia has been heavily involved with working with board members, hedge funds, corporations, and investment advisors through her business.
She has been in the IR/PR industry for over 33 years working for firms such as Handy & Harman, Citigate Dewe Rogerson, and The Altman Group. This expert has been heavily involved in IR/PR/Marketing/Media Relations/Raising Capital/Hedge Funds/BDCs/MLPs/ETFs and CEFs as well as corporations and individuals.
Furthermore, Patricia acts as a member of the Farmingdale Chamber of Commerce and has been featured in and on multiple magazines and newspapers and won many awards for her work, bringing a high level of professionalism and excellent interpersonal skills to her field.
Instagram: @pristine_advisers
Facebook: Pristine Advisers
Twitter: @PristineAdvise1
LinkedIn: Patricia Baronowski-Schneider
YouTube: Pristine Advisers
Vimeo: Pristine Advisers
Blogs: www.pristineadvisers.medium.com
Website: www.pristineadvisers.com
4. Jesse Powell
Photo courtesy: Unchained Podcast
Jesse Powell, a California State University graduate, started with digital currencies in 2001 when he founded a firm assisting players in online games with account management and in-game currencies. In 2007, he founded the Verge Gallery and Studio Project, which he ran until 2010 as Sacramento’s largest contemporary commercial art gallery. All the while, his interest in Bitcoin grew.
In 2011, after a visit to Mt. Gox following a security breach, Powell began developing Kraken as a replacement in the case of Mt. Gox’s closure. Kraken was launched in 2013, a year before Mt. Gox’s shutdown. And he had alongside him pioneers including McCaleb of Mt. Gox and Ripple and Brian Armstrong of Coinbase.
Powell has long been a strong proponent of cryptocurrency adoption and a vehement critic of attempts to overregulate the sector, making several scathing public statements about efforts by the attorney general of New York to crack down on crypto.
LinkedIn: Jesse Powell
5. Gavin Wood
Gavin Wood is a tech enthusiast and entrepreneur best known for his works on Ethereum and Polkadot. The University of York graduate invented the Solidity programming language and published the yellow paper for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Gavin Wood was one of the co-founders of Ethereum. He served as its Chief Technology Officer at some point before his departure and the creation of Polkadot, a multi-chain interoperability protocol.
Since leaving the Ethereum project in 2016, Wood has developed blockchain software company Parity Technologies. He also founded the Web3 Foundation, an organization dedicated to popularizing decentralized internet infrastructure, and Parity, a blockchain infrastructure platform with interoperability enabled by the Polkadot ecosystem.
Twitter: @gavofyork
Website: www.gavwood.com
6. Caitlin Long
Caitlin Long is regarded in economics and financial circles as a Wall Street veteran before coming across Bitcoin in 2012.
By 2013, she had immersed herself fully when an article on how to buy and store Bitcoin came into her inbox. Driven by a passion for open ledgers and the goal to make securities markets fairer by issuing and trading securities on a blockchain, Long served as chairwoman and president of the blockchain startup Symbiont until 2018.
She co-founded Wyoming Blockchain Coalition in 2017 and served as a gubernatorial appointee at the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force until 2019. Long currently chairs WyoHackathon, a nonprofit hackathon, and is CEO of Avanti Financial Group.
Twitter: @CaitlinLong_
LinkedIn: Caitlin Long
7. Sam Bankman-Freid
Sam Bankman-Fried is deservedly one of the leading blockchain technologists in the world today and has been described as a man so committed to never missing an opportunity. He is an alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned his degree in physics. He subsequently spent three years as a trader at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street Capital before founding his trading firm and liquidity provider, Alameda Research, in 2017.
In 2019, Bankman-Fried founded FXT, a cryptocurrency and derivatives exchange that has grown quickly to become the sixth-largest exchange by volume, boasting $3.5 billion in valuation. He is also a well-known philanthropist and may have aspirations to political influence, donating $5.2 million to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
Still in his twenties, Bankman-Fried was named to Forbes’ 2021 “30 Under 30” list in the category of finance, suggesting he is also making waves outside the crypto industry. He will continue to work toward his stated aim of attracting more than 1 billion people to decentralized finance and cryptocurrency.
LinkedIn: Sam Bankman-Freid
8. Barry Silbert
Barry Silbert is the founder of two of the most widely known enterprises in the cryptocurrency industry, Grayscale Investments and Digital Currency Group. Silbert received his Bachelor of Arts in Finance from Emory University and went on to work as an investment banker at Houlihan Lokey and subsequently served as the CEO of Restricted Stock Partners.
Grayscale is most well known for its flagship Bitcoin investment trust while DCG provides seed funding for blockchain-related companies and owns and operates Grayscale and Genesis Trading. Silbert is an early investor in crypto, particularly Coinbase and Ripple, and he has been named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and has also made Fortune’s “40 Under 40” list.
Early in the year, Silbert stepped down from his CEO role at Grayscale to concentrate on his role at DCG, which experienced massive growth in 2020.
LinkedIn: Barry Silbert
9. Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin is a prevalent name and should be familiar to anyone who is even remotely interested or invested in cryptocurrencies, for the fact that he is a co-founder of Ethereum, one of the largest digital currency ecosystems in existence today. Vitalik was born in the small Russian town of Kolomna. Buterin, from the very beginning, was drawn to math and computer programming, and by the time he turned six, his family immigrated to Canada.
In 2011, at the age of just 17, Buterin became the co-founder and lead writer for Bitcoin Magazine, widely regarded as the first publication to focus solely on all things crypto. During his time there, his reputation within the underground crypto scene grew to mythical proportions, which earned him an appointment with Ripple. However, the deal fell apart because the company could not facilitate a visa for him.
In 2013, he proposed the white paper for Ethereum, a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. The project gained widespread traction almost immediately after its release, as is evident by the fact that its development was entirely crowdfunded. By mid-2015, the network had gone live with 72 million pre-mined coins.
Twitter: @vitalikbuterin
Website: www.vitalik.ca
10. Kris Marszalek
Marszalek is a self-described lifelong company builder. He is responsible for establishing several startups—including central e-commerce platform Beecrazy, which he sold to iBuy Group Limited in 2013– before venturing into the crypto space.
Kris Marszalek founded a cryptocurrency payment company in 2016 to give everyday users better control over their finances and data. The company, which has since been rebranded in 2018 and taken up the name Crypto.com, is on a mission to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrency and now offers a decentralized exchange service, crypto debit cards.
Before launching Crypto.com, Marszalek served as CEO of Ensogo, an online discount retailer in Southeast Asia.
Twitter: @Kris_HK
LinkedIn Page: Kris Marszalek
Sarah Marie
Sarah Marie is a Digital Strategist by profession for more than 5 years already. She has built relationships and developed strategies that help further grow businesses. She is known for her unrivaled will to win as her content effectively makes businesses take over.