This year, one list wasn’t enough. For the first time ever, Fortune has assembled a supplementary honor roll of the most impressive, young superstars transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.
The Ledger 40 Under 40 list, compiled by Fortune’s fintech team, shines a light on the pioneers building some of the world’s fastest-growing businesses. They’re innovating around digital payments, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and blockchains, or distributed accounting ledgers—the tech upon which much of this financial revolution is based.
Some faces will be familiar from the main, annual list (see, for example, No. 20). You may also recognize the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler (No. 8), who turned the proceeds from a legal settlement over the origins of Facebook into a billion-dollar Bitcoin investment. Others are less well-known but just as much worth knowing. Jihan Wu (No. 3), cofounded Bitmain, the world’s biggest Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer. Rachel Mayer (No. 16) leads the investing app for Circle, one of the top U.S. crypto startups—helping cryptocurrency trading go mainstream. And Christine Moy (No. 18) is now the blockchain guru for JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank.
Given the 40-slot constraint and the somewhat arbitrary age cutoff (under 40 years old as of July 14, 2018), it is impossible to honor all of the people whose contributions deserve to be recognized. We aim here to highlight the work of a few dozen practitioners in a still-nascent industry we expect to continue gaining in importance. (One note: Some honorees expressed a desire to keep certain information private, such as their ages, due to security concerns or other personal reasons. For this inaugural list, we have decided to respect their wishes.)
Visit Fortune.com/the-Ledger-40-Under-40 for the full roster, and get ready for Brainstorm Finance, a new conference we’ll be hosting on this theme—the intersection of finance and technology—in Montauk, N.Y., June 19–20, 2019.
A version of this article originally appeared in the August 1, 2018 issue of Fortune.
