Top 30 Crypto Influencers and Educators to Follow in 2018 (Part 2)

This is part two of our post covering the top 30 crypto and blockchain influencers and educators to follow in 2018. If you have not read the part one, you can find it here.

16. Don Tapscott

Don Tapscott is a business strategist who focuses on organizational transformation and the role of technology in business. He is also an entrepreneur, author and speaker.

The goals behind his involvement with blockchain have been to further understanding and explain how the technology can change businesses and societies. With his son Alex Tapscott, he co-authored the book The Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World.

Tapscott brings his many decades of experience to showing how enterprises and societies can change in the face of innovation, and to predict how we should expect blockchain to affect the future.

17. Ameer Rosic

Ameer Rosic is a Canadian serial entrepreneur and a marketing expert. He is also an investor and a blockchain evangelist. He is best known within the crypto space for founding Blockgeeks, a platform launched in 2016 to teach skills in decentralized app development.

Blockgeeks is an especially notable platform because lack of skills within the blockchain industry has been identified as a major obstacle to the adoption of the technology.

Rosic is making it easy to access the skills needed for designing, coding and deploying decentralized applications on the blockchain. Blockgeeks offers paid plans, as well as valuable free guides and content in both text and video formats.

18. Tim Draper

Tim Draper is an early-stage investor and entrepreneur and the founder of Draper University. The list of startups he has invested in through his Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) investment firm includes big names such as Skype and Tesla.

He is best known within the crypto space for buying nearly 30,000 bitcoins from the U.S. Marshals Service in a 2014 public auction. The bitcoins were seized in 2013 from Silk Road, a darknet marketplace.

Draper is also known for making accurate predictions on the movement of the bitcoin price. In 2015, when the price of bitcoin stood at around US$200, he predicted that it would reach US$10,000 by 2018. It turned out he was right.

Draper has predicted bitcoin will US$250,000 by 2022, and many people are watching the price movement to see if he will be right once again.

19. Joseph Lubin

A graduate of Princeton University with a degree in electrical engineering and another in computer science, Joseph Lubin is a co-founder of Ethereum. He is also credited with helping set up the Ethereum Foundation, the body that handles a majority of the governance issues of the open-source project.

Aside from being a developer, Lubin is an entrepreneur who holds interests in many startups both inside and outside of the crypto space.

Lubin is the founder of ConsenSys, a company that is building and deploying the next generation of decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain.

20. Barry Silbert

Barry Silbert is the founder of Digital Currency Group (DCG), an investment and incubation firm for blockchain-related startups. The portfolio of DCG includes Bitcoin brokerage firm Genesis Trading, blockchain news site CoinDesk, and digital currency asset-management firm Grayscale Investments.

Silbert graduated with a bachelor’s in business administration and finance from the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.

DCG is playing a major role in building the blockchain ecosystem of services through seed funding and information dissemination, and by holding industry events such as the annual Consensus blockchain technology summit.

21. William Mougayar

The first blockchain-related book of speaker, investor and author William Mougayar is titled The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology. He is also an advisor and board member for several blockchain companies, including the Ethereum Foundation, Coin Center, OpenBazaar, OMERS Ventures and Steemit.

His main focus in the blockchain space has been on digital tokens and how they are used to raise funds in ICOs. He shares his stories, reviews and opinions about ICOs through a blog on Startupmanagement.org.

Mougayar is the founder and host of the annual token summit in New York. At the event, startups explain their projects, while investors interrogate the business models and the viability of their tokens.

22. Jeff Garzik

Developer and an entrepreneur Jeff Garzik is credited with putting CNN on the web by designing and developing the first website for the cable network in 1995. He came across Bitcoin in 2012 and became a core developer of the project.

He took part as the lead developer of the core software that would implement the scaling solution proposed in the 2017 New York Agreement, which the Bitcoin community has since disowned.

Garzik is the founder of Bloq, a company building solutions to influence how Bitcoin and other decentralized applications on the blockchain are adopted.

23. Adam Back

Dr. Adam Back is credited with implementing proof of work (PoW) for the first time through his anti-spam hashcash algorithm. Through proof of work, the computers on the Bitcoin network and those of similar cryptocurrencies arrive at consensus on the status of their shared ledgers.

Back is among the few people Satoshi Nakamoto cited in the Bitcoin white paper. He co-founded Blockstream, a startup that builds blockchain solutions for both public and enterprise use. He is a regular speaker at blockchain events, where he discusses security and privacy on the blockchain.

Through Blockstream, Back is making efforts to scale Bitcoin through solutions such as the Lightning Network and sidechains. He is also a strong supporter of online security and privacy.

24. Balaji Srinivasan

As the CTO at Coinbase, Dr. Balaji Srinivasan holds a bachelor of science degree, master of science degree and PhD in electrical engineering, as well as a master of science in chemical engineering, all from Stanford University.

He teaches at Stanford. He also teaches online through massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some of his courses attracting over 250,000 students from around the globe.

Dr. Srinivasan is also a co-founder and board member at Coin Center, a nonprofit organization that helps regulators and similar entities formulate policies relating to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications.

He is one of the few academicians within the industry who have the capacity to teach and explain concepts of blockchain technology to the general public in an accessible manner.

25. Dr. Julian Hosp

A medical doctor, author and entrepreneur, Dr. Julian Hosp has become a common speaker at Bitcoin events. He has made it his goal to spread adoption of cryptocurrencies around the globe.

He is the founder of TenX, a wallet service with a debit card feature that lets you spend cryptocurrencies anywhere in the world without having to convert to fiat. He has also built a huge social media following through the content he shares.

Hosp has given himself a target goal of reaching 1 billion people, teaching them about blockchain and cryptocurrencies for the first time.

26. Bruce Fenton

Between 2015 and 2016, Bruce Fenton served as the executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the development and adoption of Bitcoin. He still serves as a member of its board.

He is an investor in various blockchain startups and also a consultant on the economic impact of blockchain solutions. He is the founder of Chainstone Labs, a financial technology company that tokenizes securities and digital and hard assets.

Fenton is the founder and host of the annual invitation-only blockchain industry VIP retreat called the Satoshi Roundtable. The meeting plays a role in shaping the scaling direction of Bitcoin.

27. Paul Vigna

As a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Paul Vigna covers cryptocurrencies, decentralized applications and blockchain technology. He was one of the first mainstream journalists to identify themselves as experts on cryptocurrencies. He started writing about the topic on the MoneyBeat blog, which the journal started in April 2013.

He has written two books on blockchain technology: The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything and The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order.

Vigna is one of the few mainstream journalists with a deep knowledge of the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

28. Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss

Twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss have built themselves a reputation as internet entrepreneurs. They first came into the public eye when they sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their social networking website idea after he worked for them and then went on to launch Facebook.

After several years of court battles, Facebook settled with them, and the twins set their eyes on other ventures, one of which was cryptocurrencies. Known to hold one of the largest stashes of bitcoin, they founded the Gemini crypto exchange in 2014.

Since 2016, the Winklevoss twins have been making efforts to create the first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) registered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Their latest application was rejected in late July.

29. Wences Casares

An Argentine native who founded the South American country’s first internet service provider, Wences Casares is also credited with starting the Argentine online brokerage firm Patagon. The Spanish bank Banco Santander acquired the firm and turned it into Santander Online Worldwide. Casares sits on the board of PayPal.

He is known within the crypto space for being the founder of Xapo, a cold-storage service for cryptocurrencies. The company manages vaults around the world, where they hold the private keys to Bitcoin wallets on behalf of customers.

Xapo holds one of the largest amounts of bitcoin in cold storage. In a report, Bloomberg estimated Xapo to be storing over US$10 billion.

30. Joseph Poon

Joseph Poon is a developer who focuses on blockchain scalability and how different blockchains interact, and also on token mechanisms and crypto-economic incentives. He is best known within the crypto space for being the brain behind the Lightning Network, a blockchain scaling solution.

The Lightning Network enables blockchains to scale by making it possible for users to record on the blockchain only the net of their transactions, instead of the full details of each one separately. Blockchains that have adopted the Lightning Network include Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Poon is most recently working on Plasma, another scaling solution targeted at making blockchains able to transact millions of smart-contract transactions per second. Ethereum has shown an interest in adopting Plasma as part of its scaling strategy.