News with the tag "Most Influential 2024"

For decades, prediction markets were a backwater, a science experiment. In 2024, Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket, turned them into a multibillion-dollar business and a popular barometer of the political winds, cited by everyone from Donald Trump to CNN . In so doing, he demonstrated a real-worl...

Under Fred Thiel's leadership, MARA Holdings (MARA) — previously known as Marathon Digital Holdings — has become not only one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world but also the second-largest corporate owner of bitcoin, with about $3.9 billion worth on its balance sheet. Thiel joined the mining...

The relentless efforts by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley and chief investment officer Matt Hougan’s to bring institutional money into crypto for the past seven years finally paid off when spot ETFs for both bitcoin and ether were approved by the SEC earlier this year. The digital asset manager launched ...

There are many in the Web3 space who have only recently jumped into AI. Illia Polosukhin isn’t one of them. Long before he co-founded the decentralized app blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked at Google as an AI researcher and co-wrote the seminal 2017 paper “ Attention is All you Need ,” whi...

Howard Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, is a prominent Wall Street bond broker and a member of an exclusive club: It's a primary dealer that gets to trade directly with the Federal Reserve. So when Lutnick — Tether's U.S. Treasuries dealer — said this year that Tether actually has the money it say...

Evan Cheng didn’t just build another blockchain when he created Sui. He engineered a paradigm shift. Over the past year, Sui, one of the darlings of the bull market, has blown past $1.5 billion in total value locked (TVL), up from just over $200 million at the start of the year, thanks to the market...

Here's the new political calculus for a U.S. congressional candidate: You nod to crypto and say you're on the pro-innovation side, and chances are, a million dollars (or more) could drop from the sky to pay for TV spots that highlight your strengths or pillory your opponent. In any of hundreds of le...

As (literally) a thousand DePIN projects bloomed in 2024, they could thank one decentralized physical infrastructure network in particular for showing the way: Helium. The original DePIN (before DePIN was a word), Helium was started by Amir Haleem, Shawn Fanning, and Sean Carey all the way back in 2...

Taproot Wizards, a collection of 2,108 JPEGs inscribed on Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol, headed into 2024 on the heels of a $7.5 million seed funding round , which was promptly exceeded by the sale of Quantum Cats , a digital art collection of brightly-colored felines. The sale of 3,000 NFT-li...

After eight long, harrowing months locked up in a Nigerian prison, Tigran Gambaryan is finally back home in Atlanta, recovering from his ordeal. The Nigerian government finally agreed to release Gambaryan on humanitarian grounds in October to allow him to return to the U.S. to receive medical care f...