The Ledger 40 Under 40

the ledger 40 under 40

For the first time ever, Fortune has assembled a supplementary honor roll of the most impressive, young superstars who are transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.

<a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Click here to read the 40 Under 40 list.</a>

Armstrong is building <a href="http://fortune.com/tag/coinbase/">Coinbase</a>, the biggest U.S. Bitcoin exchange, into what his team hopes will become “<a href="http://fortune.com/video/2018/05/18/coinbase-institutional-adam-white/">the Google of crypto</a>”—as relevant to the next wave of the web as Google was to the last. While it has a way to go, it’s on the right track: During this winter’s investment mania, Coinbase catapulted into the mainstream, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/27/bitcoin-exchange-coinbase-has-more-users-than-stock-brokerage-schwab.html">eclipsing Charles Schwab</a> in total accounts. Now the company is investing in upstarts and making acquisitions—including one that secured it a path to several tantalizing <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/06/coinbase-broker-dealer/">financial licenses</a>. 
 
(Also <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/brian-armstrong-20/">No. 20</a> on the main <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/">Fortune 40 Under 40 list</a>.)

Brian Armstrong

Buterin describes his open-source blockchain platform <a href="http://fortune.com/ethereum-blockchain-vitalik-buterin/">Ethereum</a> as a “world computer.” The skinny visionary’s experiment, which began as a white paper, now has a market valuation of about $48 billion, making it the second-most-valuable crypto network next to Bitcoin. Ethereum caught a lucky break this year when the <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/15/sec-ethereum/">SEC said</a> it would <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/14/ethereum-price-sec-ruling-bitcoin-security/">not regulate Ether</a>, the network’s native coin, as a security. Rumor has it Google recently tried to hire Buterin to lead its own whispered crypto endeavors, but he declined. 
 
(Also <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/vitalik-butterin-22/">No. 22</a> on the main <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/">Fortune 40 Under 40 list</a>.)

Vitalik Buterin

Wu is the undisputed king of cryptocurrency mining hardware and crypto mining pools. His firm <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/07/jihan-wu-cryptocurrency-mining/">Bitmain</a>, based in Beijing, is reportedly valued at $12 billion after a recent round of funding. Wu has been known as a big proponent of <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/05/bitcoin-bitcoin-cash-price-fork/">Bitcoin Cash</a>, a controversial fork of Bitcoin. Earlier this year, his company <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/15/crypto-exchange-circle-bitmain-value/">led a $110 million financing round</a> for Circle, the crypto startup with the highest valuation in the U.S. <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/08/bitcoin-mining-billionaire-bitmain-jihan-wu/">Wu told Fortune</a> earlier this year that he's interested in "stablecoins," virtual coins that have a fixed price, and that he plans to diversify Bitmain by developing AI chips.

Jihan Wu

The Irish-born brothers are a couple of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Patrick and John dropped out of MIT and Harvard, respectively, and sold their first business—an online auction management company—for a reported $5 million in 2008. Then they embarked on the idea that would become <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/17/stripe-blockchain/">Stripe</a>, now a payments behemoth <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/payments-stripe-valuation/">valued at $9.2 billion</a>. The company processes tens of billions of dollars in digital commerce transactions each year, inking deals with the likes of Amazon, Lyft, and Facebook. 
 
(Also <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/john-and-patrick-collison-17/">No. 17</a> on the main <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/">Fortune 40 Under 40 list</a>.)

Patrick and John Collison

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What if you could buy stocks with your smartphone—and <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/robinhood-stock-trading-funding/">avoid annoying trading charges</a> to boot? That’s how millions of young investors use Robinhood. Bhatt and <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/22/cryptocurrency-robinhood-vlad-tenev/">Tenev</a>, who met as Stanford math whizzes, launched the company in 2013 as an egalitarian challenge to old guard brokerage houses. Five years later, it has shot to a <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/10/robinhood-stock-crypto-trading/">valuation of $5.6 billion</a>. This year they <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/12/robinhood-litecoin/">added Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies</a> to the trading mix and now hope to build Robinhood into a full-blown digital bank. 
 
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(Also <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/vlad-tenev-and-baiju-bhatt-24/">No. 24</a> on the main <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/">Fortune 40 Under 40 list</a>.)

Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt

With degrees from both Wharton and the London School of Economics, Yared has rapidly scaled the ranks of Goldman Sachs since she joined as an analyst in 2006. In her current role, she helps lead the bank’s investments in fintech as well as the commercialization of its technology. She also has a big hand in setting up <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/21/goldman-sachs-bitcoin/">Goldman’s new Bitcoin trading operation</a>.

Rana Yared

Chi-Hyung grew his cryptocurrency exchange UpBit into South Korea’s largest just three months after its launch in Oct. 2017. The platform, held by Song’s Dunamu, handled about $4.7 billion in daily transactions in one of the world’s <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/03/12/south-korea-cryptocurrency-ico/">most important markets for crypto</a> at the end of last year. The exchange also has tens of millions of dollars in backing from South Korea’s most popular chatting app, Kakao. Now Song is eyeing global expansion in his position as chairman of the board at Dunamu.

Song Chi-Hyung

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, turned the proceeds from a legal settlement over the origins of Facebook into a <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/04/winklevoss-twins-bitcoin-billionaires/">billion-dollar Bitcoin investment</a>. Since becoming incredibly <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/04/winklevoss-twins-bitcoin-billionaires/">wealthy</a> on their early virtual money bets, the Winklevoss twins have emerged as <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/02/08/winklevoss-bitcoin-value/">elder statesmen for cryptocurrency</a>. Winklevoss Capital has become one of the most influential crypto funds, and the brothers have worked tirelessly to persuade regulators to permit the first bitcoin ETF (a task still unfulfilled for now). They also run one of the top digital asset exchanges, Gemini.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss

The next time you're splitting a bill with your friends using Venmo, PayPal's smashing success of a social payments app, you can thank <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/2016/bill-ready-10/">Ready</a>. This Kentuckian took the helm of payments startup Braintree in 2011. A year later he brought Venmo into the fold for about $26 million. A year after that <a href="http://fortune.com/paypal-fortune-500-digital-payments/">PayPal</a> bought Braintree for $800 million. Venmo's indomitable rise owes to Ready's leadership. In the past year, PayPal bestowed a promotion upon him: He's now chief operating officer at the $104 billion payments giant.

Bill Ready

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He’s been called the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia,” but it’s time to ditch the epithet and recognize Durov’s achievements in their own right. After having his <a href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/facebook/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Facebook</a> clone, VKontakte, the second-most-popular website in Russia, ripped away from him by alleged Kremlin cronies in 2014, Durov focused his efforts on <a href="http://fortune.com/telegram-pavel-durov-mobile-world-congress/">Telegram</a>. The encrypted-chat app has amassed more than 200 million monthly active users since its founding five years ago. It has even hosted one of the most extravagant “<a href="http://fortune.com/2018/01/08/telegram-ico/">initial coin offerings</a>” to date, <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/03/30/bitcoin-price-telegram-ico-presale/">raising a reported $1.7 billion</a> in exchange for promised crypto coins. Now Durov, a newly minted billionaire, is fighting <a href="http://fortune.com/video/2018/04/18/russia-will-stop-at-nothing-to-squash-telegram/">bans in Russia and Iran</a>, where government leaders claim Telegram facilitates insurrection. 
 
(Also see <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/pavel-durov-25/">No. 25</a> on the main <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/">Fortune 40 Under 40 list</a>.) 
 
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Pavel Durov

Formerly the blockchain program lead at <a href="http://fortune.com/longform/jpmorgan-chase-tech-blockchain/">JPMorgan Chase</a>, Baldet left America’s biggest bank this year to found a blockchain startup, <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/14/blockchain-jpmorgan-chase-amber-baldet-clovyr/">Clovyr</a>. While on Wall Street, she brought the hoodies (hacker-coders) and the suits (bankers) together, and she led the team that built <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/10/04/jp-morgan-chase-blockchain-ethereum-quorum/">Quorum</a>, an Ethereum-adapted blockchain built for business. Earlier this month, Baldet, who is an <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/amber-baldet-31/">alum</a> of the flagship <a href="http://fortune.com/40-under-40/">Fortune 40 Under 40 list</a>, was appointed to the board of the Zcash Foundation, a non-profit group that governs the privacy-centric cryptocurrency <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/18/jp-morgan-bitcoin-zcash-wilcox/">Zcash</a>.

Amber Baldet

Larimer voiced concerns about Bitcoin’s transaction speed to Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's mysterious, pseudonymous creator, as early as 2010. When Nakamoto didn’t bite, the programmer decided to build his own projects addressing the issue. A serial blockchain creator within the cryptosphere, he has helped co-found three separate prominent enterprises, including decentralized exchange Bitshares; blockchain social media firm Steem; and EOS, a platform for decentralized apps, developed by the startup <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/18/investors-are-lining-up-to-buy-this-cryptocurrency-with-no-purpose/">Block.one</a>. In June, <a href="http://fortune.com/video/2018/06/01/blockchain-startup-eos-4-billion/">EOS raised $4 billion</a> in what is considered the largest initial coin offering ever, while Block.one has won the backing of investors including venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Dan Larimer

At the time of the Tezos ICO last summer, the blockchain company set a new record for so-called “initial coin offerings,” raising $232 million. After a turbulent year in which <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/10/19/tezos-ico/">lawsuit drama hamstrung development</a>, Breitman is finally <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/02/22/tezos-coin-ico-launch-foundation/">through the woods</a>. Her firm launched an early, test version of the Tezos network, one of the crypto industry’s most highly anticipated projects, last month.

Kathleen Breitman

Benet has created a new way to store and share files online: the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). His goal is to <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/04/why-the-internet-needs-ipfs-before-its-too-late/">improve upon—and replace—HTTP</a>, a content-serving protocol that has come to dominate the Web. Benet, a computer scientist who graduated from Stanford and startup accelerator YCombinator, also created FileCoin, a crypto token designed to incentivize people to store files in a peer-to-peer system. The project <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-record-ico-funding/">raised $257 million</a> in one of last year's biggest "initial coin offerings," or ICOs.

Juan Benet

The M&amp;A veteran oversaw more than 40 acquisitions during her tenure at LinkedIn, and now Choi is helping <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/03/05/coinbase-bitcoin-linkedin-emilie-choi/">guide Coinbase’s expansion plans</a>. The company’s chief operating officer, Asiff Hirji, says she will be presiding over everything from “acqui-hires” to “middle and large-scale acquisitions." Choi has wasted no time in her new gig: Coinbase has already bought several startups this year, including <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/23/coinbase-paradex/">Paradex</a>, a decentralized exchange provider, and <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/06/coinbase-broker-dealer/">Keystone Capital</a>, a financial firm that comes with a broker dealer license.

Emilie Choi

Mayer sold her company Trigger—which provided real-time trading signals, including those based on <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/01/05/stocks-trump-tweets/">Donald Trump’s tweets</a>—to <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/15/crypto-exchange-circle-bitmain-value/">Circle</a>, the payments and crypto trading company, in late 2017. Now, the Venezuelan entrepreneur is running Circle’s flagship retail investing product: an app called <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/15/crypto-invest-circle-rules/">Crypto Invest</a> that lets users buy a mix of seven different cryptocurrencies with just a tap.

Rachel Mayer

The cryptocurrency community cheered on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange for launching <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/09/bitcoin-mainstream-finance/">Bitcoin futures</a>. But before that came BitMEX, a crypto derivatives marketplace that allows for leveraged bets of up to 100 times the principal on digital assets from Bitcoin to Cardano. Billing itself as the most liquid crypto futures exchange, BitMEX handled an average $2.1 billion in trades at the end of 2017—far more than the $50 million that changed hands with the CBOE on <a href="https://blog.bitmex.com/bitmex-technology-scaling-part-1/chart-1-2/">its first day of launch</a>. The brain behind it all: Arthur Hayes, a Citigroup and Deutsche Bank alumnus who has built his startup on customers in Asia and Eastern Europe, and who, unlike many on this list, does not own Bitcoin.

Arthur Hayes

Following the <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/02/chase-blockchain-jpmorgan-amber-baldet/">departure of Amber Baldet</a> (see No. 11), JPMorgan Chase tapped Christine Moy to lead the bank's blockchain program. The Wall Street giant, which created <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/10/04/jp-morgan-chase-blockchain-ethereum-quorum/">Quorum</a>, an open-sourced the Ethereum-based blockchain, is now mulling the fate of that distributed ledger technology. <a href="http://fortune.com/longform/jpmorgan-chase-tech-blockchain/">JPMorgan Chase</a> has been rumored to be considering a spin-off of Quorum—but for now, Moy is steering the tech's development, including running pilots, such as the execution of a $150 million fixed income security, a Yankee certificate of deposit, on that ledger.

Christine Moy

Square’s first product manager now leads its peer-to-peer mobile payments Cash app. He helped oversee its expansion this year into <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/11/15/square-cash-bitcoin/">Bitcoin trading</a> starting last year. Grassadonia was also instrumental in fast-tracking the company’s application for a <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/25/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-new-york-bitlicense/">BitLicense</a>, New York’s required cryptocurrency credential with the strictest standards in the country, which Square was <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/18/cryptocurrency-square-jack-dorsey-new-york-bitlicense/">granted in June</a>.

Brian Grassadonia

Goldman’s pick this spring to help launch its first official <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/21/goldman-sachs-bitcoin/">Bitcoin trading operation</a> was a dark horse. Now all of Wall Street is watching what the little-known Schmidt, a former hedge fund quant trader, will do. While the bank is currently only offering clients access to Bitcoin futures and other derivatives tied to cryptocurrency prices—not Bitcoins themselves—Schmidt will play a major role in Goldman’s exploration of whether (or not) to expand into trading digital assets directly.

Justin Schmidt

A longtime crypto veteran with an MBA from Wharton, Birla has been instrumental in building Ripple's blockchain tools for banks around the world. He’s also developing experimental uses for XRP, the world’s third most valuable digital currency. At Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen this year, <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/17/stripe-blockchain/">Birla made the case</a> that blockchains will greatly expand financial inclusion by serving the underbanked in emerging markets.

Asheesh Birla

Stark set out to solve one of Bitcoin’s biggest problems: Scaling. Her startup, Lightning Labs, has developed tech that can offload some of the burden of transaction processing from Bitcoin's main network. Along with other contributors, her company helped design the Lightning Network, a layer of tech that enables faster, cheaper Bitcoin payments. Before becoming an entrepreneur and raising millions from the likes of tech veterans such as Jack Dorsey, she taught classes on the Internet and peer-to-peer technologies at Stanford and Yale.

Elizabeth Stark

Carlson-Wee is a true crypto OG. He wrote his college thesis on Bitcoin, and then put most of his life savings into cryptocurrency. After leaving Coinbase, where he was employee number three, Carlson-Wee founded <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/06/26/polychain-capital-bitcoin/">Polychain Capital</a>, where he now serves as chief investment officer. The crypto fund counts famous Silicon Valley investment funds as its clients, and it recently crossed $1 billion in assets under management.

Olaf Carlson-Wee

Rossiello launched <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/30/bitcoin-payment-firm-bitpesa-gets-big-boost-from-famous-investor/">BitPesa</a> as a Bitcoin-based cross-border payment system for merchants in <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/13/africa-bitcoin-bitpesa-ethereum/">Africa and Asia</a>. It quickly caught on and companies are using it to do deals everywhere from Ghana to Japan. Now, Rossiello has her sights set on expansion: In February, BitPesa acquired European money transfer service TransferZero, a Spanish fin-tech startup that is helping BitPesa to grow its global footprint.

Elizabeth Rossiello

Livingston's billion-dollar chat app, <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/08/18/kik-funding-tencent/">Kik</a>, first became popular with teens who liked not having to tie usernames to phone numbers. Last year Livingston, a longtime Bitcoin-phile, jumped on the “initial coin offering” bandwagon and <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/07/21/cryptocurrency-digital-money-ico/">held a token sale</a> that raised <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/08/kik-chat-app-stellar-blockchain/">about $100 million</a>. Now he intends to form an alliance with other similarly positioned startups around his self-minted crypto tokens, <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/05/25/chat-app-kik-ethereum-token/">dubbed Kin</a>. His gambit aims to land on a non-advertising based business model that can compete against—or at least co-exist with—that 800-pound gorilla named Facebook.

Ted Livingston

Before getting into crypto, Srinivasan, a sometime Stanford professor, cofounded Counsyl, a genomics startup, with his brother. He later launched 21.co, a well-financed Bitcoin mining startup that eventually morphed into Earn.com, a crypto-social network based on paid messages. Coinbase <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/16/bitcoin-buy-coinbase-earn-com-balaji-srinivasan/">bought Earn.com</a> for a rumored $100 million in April—a deal that many industry watchers described as an "acquihire." Now Srinivasan, a <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/05/29/bitcoin-crypto-tokens/">top crypto prognosticator</a>, has taken a seat next to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (see No. 1) as the company's chief technology officer.

Balaji Srinivasan

In 2015, Liu arrived at a hyped crypto mining startup called 21 where she found a struggling, indebted mess. Her leadership as chief financial officer gave rise to a new company called Earn.com, which sought to monetize email messages with Bitcoin. Three years later <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/16/bitcoin-buy-coinbase-earn-com-balaji-srinivasan/">Coinbase bought Earn</a> for more than $100 million in one of the biggest crypto acquisitions to date.

Lily Liu

Like many crypto-rich entrepreneurs, Tristan D’Agosta shirks the limelight. The sometime music composer's cryptoasset exchange Poloniex soared after it became one of the first to list Ethereum in 2016. In February, Fortune broke the news that fintech startup Circle <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/02/26/circle-cryptocurrency-trade-bitcoin/">bought his exchange</a> in a deal valued at $400 million. Circle has been cleaning up Poloniex’s backlog of customer service inquiries ever since.

Tristan D'Agosta

After starting the company in his garage with just 1,000 euros in 2011, Slovenian-born Kodrič has built Bitstamp into one of the world’s top five cryptocurrency exchanges by trade volume. Boosted by a $10 million investment from hedge fund Pantera Capital, Luxembourg-based Bitstamp has also expanded <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/17/bitcoin-ethereum-blockchain-bitstamp/">to trade other digital assets</a> such as Ethereum and XRP. In 2016, the exchange became the first licensed crypto exchange in Europe.

Nejc Kodrič

She may have ignored Bitcoin while working on her PhD in 2011, but Narula’s work on distributed systems and databases during her higher education years proved an apt segue into the crypto world. Now Narula, a former Google engineer, is director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Within that university research group, Narula is addressing cryptocurrency’s biggest barriers to widespread acceptance, including scalability and privacy. Today, many look to DCI’s research in order to make sense of the field.

Neha Narula

Steiner is an applied mathematician who served as Ethereum’s original security chief. She now leads Parity, one of Ethereum's most popular software clients. Under her purview, Parity had to deal with a software wallet hack that froze hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto tokens. Now she's devoting attention to <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/14/olaf-carlson-wee/">Polkadot</a>, a project that aims to make blockchain tech interoperable.

Jutta Steiner

After mining Bitcoin in his Princeton dorm room, the computer science whiz racked up stints at quant hedge fund D.E. Shaw and Google. Then he started <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/20/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-stablecoin-basis/">crypto project Basis</a> (originally known as Basecoin) with an ambitious mission: to build “an algorithmic central bank." In April, the startup <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/18/term-sheet-term-sheet-wednesday-april-18/">received $133 million</a> from investors including Bain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz to develop its so-called stablecoin, a cryptocurrency whose supply will be mathematically controlled in order to keep its price pegged to the U.S. dollar.

Nader al-Naji

Camp got into the crypto scene in 2011 while attending a graduate program at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley think tank. She later headed growth for <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/10/16/ibm-blockchain-stellar/">Stellar</a>, a blockchain project that boasts a top 10 cryptocurrency by market value, known as Lumens. After serving as a partner for the startup accelerator 500 Startups, she founded a startup of her own called Stronghold. Her fintech firm is now <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/17/ibm-stablecoin-cryptocurrency-stellar/">working with IBM</a> to create stablecoins, crypto tokens whose price doesn't fluctuate.

Tammy Camp

Brandon Chez prefers to keep a low profile—despite a contentious <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-programmer-at-the-center-of-a-100-billion-crypto-storm-1516708800">doxing by the Wall Street Journal</a> at the beginning of the year. In 2013, he spun up the now heavily trafficked website <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/">CoinMarketCap.com</a>, which tracks the prices for more than a thousand cryptocurrencies. The site has become the de facto homepage—indeed, the heartbeat—for the virtual money industry. A measure of Chez’s influence: When he <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/01/08/coinmarketcap-removes-korean-exchange-prices/">delisted South Korean exchanges</a> without warning on Jan. 7th, the move wiped out $100 billion of total cryptoasset market value.

Brandon Chez

In July, Simpson revealed that her new cryptocurrency hedge fund, <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/07/12/steven-cohens-bitcoin-crypto-autonomous-partners/">Autonomous Partners</a>, had raised dollars in the “lower eight digits” from investors including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Union Square Ventures, Craft Ventures, and Cohen Private Ventures, a fund launched by <a href="http://fortune.com/steve-cohen-billionaire-point72-hedge-fund/">billionaire Steve Cohen’s</a> family office. Simpson got her start in the crypto space in 2014, after she took a trip to Zimbabwe and witnessed the devastating effects of hyperinflation. That experience led her to research cryptocurrency once she returned stateside and, eventually, to land a job as one of the earliest employees of the multi-signature cryptocurrency wallet-maker, BitGo.

Arianna Simpson

Once known as "Bitcoin Jesus," Ver is now the most outspoken evangelist for <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/05/05/bitcoin-bitcoin-cash-price-fork/">Bitcoin Cash</a>. The controversial fork of the Bitcoin network represents the “big-block” version of the original Bitcoin blockchain, meaning its designed to handle greater transaction throughput. Fluent in Japanese, Ver runs Bitcoin.com from Tokyo and remains the epicenter of a large cryptocurrency community there.

Roger Ver

Last year’s crypto-mania brought a <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/31/coinbase-bitcoin-exchange-complaints/">customer relations crisis</a> for Coinbase as it struggled to meet a surge in volume. Coinbase responded by <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/01/22/coinbase-tina-bhatnager-twitter/">hiring Bhatnagar</a>, a battle-tested Twitter veteran. In a few short months, she put out the fires. Now the company’s customer reputation is on the rise.

Tina Bhatnagar

Demirors was previously the number two at Digital Currency Group, one of the world's top crypto investment companies. While there, she helped push now-household names, like Coinbase and Ripple, into the limelight. In her new role as chief strategy officer at CoinShares, a cryptoasset manager, and founder of her <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/04/27/bitcoin-price-cryptocurrency-women-meltem-demirors/">personal crypto fund Athena Capital</a>, she is continuing to open the crypto world to institutional investors. On the side, Demirors has lectured about blockchains for the University of Oxford.

Meltem Demirors

Gharegozlou founded Axiom Zen, a venture studio named by Canadian Business magazine as one of Canada’s most innovative companies. But he’s best known for giving the world <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/02/13/cryptokitties-ethereum-ios-launch-china-ether/">CryptoKitties</a>, digital cats that can be traded on a public blockchain. This silly game represents perhaps the first popular example of a "dApp," also known as decentralized application, on the Ethereum network. In March, Axiom Zen spun CryptoKitties into its own companies and raised <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/cryptokitties-andreessen-horowitz-cryptocurrency-ethereum/">$12 million in funding</a> from storied venture capital firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

Roham Gharegozlou

De Filippi’s ground-breaking book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Law-Rule-Primavera-Filippi/dp/0674976428">Blockchain and the Law</a>, brings a profound new legal and philosophical depth to the world of blockchain. She and co-author Aaron Wright, a Cardozo Law School professor, are the first to offer a guide to the law of smart contracts and autonomous computer programs. Blockchain disputes have yet to arrive in the courts, but when they do judges will look to de Filippi as a leading authority.

Primavera de Filippi

Our ranking of the most influential young people who are transforming business at the leading edge of finance and technology.