Founded by Barry Silbert in 2013, Grayscale Investments is a digital asset management firm that is a subsidiary of Silbert’s venture capital firm, Digital Currency Group (DCG), which also owns CoinDesk. Grayscale notably manages the Bitcoin Investment Trust, which is a private investment vehicle wholly devoted to bitcoin, and was the first of its kind […]
Bitrefill
Bitrefill, founded in 2014 by Sergej Kotliar, allows users to purchase mobile phone credit and gift cards, and send payments through layer-two scaling solution the Lightning Network. To top up their mobile phone credit, users enter their phone number on Bitrefill’s site and select the amount of credit to add. They are then presented with […]
Dash
Dash, previously called darkcoin, is a cryptocurrency designed specifically for payments. It also has a two-tier network structure. Dash is most notably known for the first implementation of Masternodes. Dash was built in 2014 by developer and creator Evan Duffield. Duffield forked the bitcoin blockchain with the intention of providing additional features, such as lower […]
Patrick Byrne
Patrick Byrne was the CEO of Overstock.com, one of the earliest online retailers to accept bitcoin as payment. Overstock.com is the parent company of blockchain investment firm Medici Ventures and capital markets platform tZERO. Byrne bought Deals.com in 1999 and rebranded the international retailer to Overstock.com. In its early years, Overstock.com gained a reputation for […]
Charles Hoskinson
Charles Hoskinson is the former CEO of computing platform Ethereum and the founder and current CEO of blockchain company Input Output (IOHK). Additionally, Hoskinson is the co-founder of blockchain projects Cardano and BitShares. Hoskinson entered the crypto space in 2013 through Invictus Innovations Inc, a company he founded with developer Dan Larimer to launch the […]
Mt.Gox
Launched in 2010 Mt. Gox was the world’s largest bitcoin exchange until its demise in 2014. By 2013, the Japan-based exchange was handling 70 percent of all bitcoin trades worldwide, but collapsed in 2014 after it was revealed that it had lost 744,408 of its customers’ bitcoins and 100,000 of its own bitcoins, amounting to […]
Dan Larimer
Dan Larimer is a software programmer and entrepreneur who played a role in the creation of multiple blockchain projects including Steem, Bitshares, and EOS. Larimer is the creator of the delegated-proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus model, in which elected delegates validate transactions and create blocks. He is also the chief technology officer of EOS.IO creator Block.one. In […]
Bitstamp
Founded in 2011, Bitstamp is a Europe-based cryptocurrency exchange that offers crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto exchange services. It supports euros, U.S. dollars, bitcoin, ether, litecoin, bitcoin cash, and XRP. It is one of the oldest exchanges in the crypto industry. Bitstamp claims to take a “mature approach to crypto,” and the exchange has been a proponent of […]
Barry Silbert
Barry Silbert is the founder of venture firm Digital Currency Group (DCG), crypto asset manager Grayscale Investments and illiquid assets marketplace SecondMarket. Silbert founded SecondMarket in 2004, where he created the Bitcoin Investment Trust, wholly devoted to bitcoin and the first investment vehicle of its kind in the US. The fund received a $2 million […]
Riccardo Spagni
Riccardo Spagni, also known by his internet handle “fluffypony,” was the lead maintainer of Monero, a privacy-centric cryptocurrency project that aims to obfuscate the linkability of transactions across source, quantity, and destination. Spagni is an entrepreneur who started his career in software development, and upon discovering the Monero project in 2014, dedicated his professional work […]
Pieter Wuille
Pieter Wuille is the co-founder of Blockstream and a top Bitcoin core developer. Wuille is best known for developing committed libraries Segregated Witness, libsecp256k1 and BIP (bitcoin proposal) 66. Born in Belgium, Wuille discovered Bitcoin in 2010. He was working at Google in Switzerland when he stumbled across the project in a chat channel dedicated […]
Antpool
Antpool, one of the largest mining pools in the world supports ten cryptocurrencies and rewards miners daily for their contributed hash power. As of 2020, Antpool represents over 12 percent of bitcoin’s network hash power. The mining pool launched in 2014 and is operated by mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain. Antpool is an open access mining […]
Chainalysis
Founded by Michael Gronager, Jonathan Levin and Jan Moller in 2014, Chainalysis provides cryptocurrency exchanges, international law enforcement agencies and other clients with blockchain transaction analysis software to help them comply with regulations, assess risk and identify illicit activity. The company offers both an investigation software scraping the blockchain for the movements of funds, and […]
Rick Falkvinge
Rick Falkvinge is an advocate for bitcoin cash (BCS) and the creator of the Swedish Pirate Party, a political party that lobbies for individual freedoms and reforms pertaining to file sharing, copyright and patents. Falkvinge began exploring bitcoin in 2011, and has described bitcoin as the “Napster of banking,” in reference to the former peer-to-peer […]
Jihan Wu
Jihan Wu is the co-founder of Bitmain, a multinational semiconductor company that is a major manufacturer of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips used to mine bitcoin and a variety of other cryptocurrencies. Through Bitmain, Wu oversees mining pools ConnectBTC, and the two historically largest bitcoin mining pools by computing power, BTC.com and AntPool. Additionally, Wu […]
Trezor
A subsidiary of Satoshi Labs, Trezor manufactures hardware wallets where users’ private keys are stored in the device. Satoshi Labs was founded by Pavol Rusnak and Marek Palatinus, and produced the first Trezor prototype in 2012. They launched Satoshi Labs in 2013 and also began fundraising. Trezor offers two products, the Model T and Trezor […]
BitPay
Founded in 2011 by Stephen Pair and Tony Gallipi, BitPay is a payment processor that enables businesses to accept bitcoin payments. After onboarding 10,000 merchants to accept bitcoin with their services in 2013, BitPay raised $30 million in a Series A round led by venture capital firm Index Ventures in 2014. In May 2016, Bipay […]
