CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024

Welcome to this year's Most Influential.

It was a huge year. A profound year. A year of achievement and promise. The gloom that started 2024 melted away at the end.

With the approval of bitcoin ETFs in January, and the re-election of Donald Trump in November, everything about the mood in crypto changed. New investors came into the market and funding flowed across categories.

Bitcoin reigned supreme, zooming through $100K in December. Bitcoin dominance was at 70%-plus. And the U.S. president-elect had promised a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, perhaps to buy the U.S. as much as 5% of total supply.

Bitcoin ETFs had the most successful launches of any in history, with $145 billion already invested. Bitcoin found a widely acknowledged role – as digital gold – and looks more and more like a base layer to a new financial system.

Ethereum sputtered (or so they said) with critics complaining about lengthy development roadmaps and inferior performance (compared to Solana and other new L1s). Still, ETH was up 58% (compared to bitcoin’s YTD of 120%) and 500-plus Layer-2s bloomed. Base, Optimism and Arbitrum, in particular, gained real-world traction.

Solana, with SOL up 111% YTD, hummed with memecoins and many less ephemeral projects. Telegram, now a real blockchain player, purred with tap-to-earn gaming, garnering hundreds of millions of players around the world. DePIN (or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) took off as a category, promising real-world infrastructure (telecoms, electricity, mapping, and more) and a different form of crypto adoption. Polymarket showed that prediction markets could be better than polls, and became as relevant to crypto traders – and everyday people – as CNN. AI became part of everything.

Stablecoins remained the most popular form of crypto (by transaction volume) and looked ever more like a global payment layer. USDT dominated and, and, flush with profits, Tether invested in a range of non-USDT projects, hoping one day to trade legally in the U.S., too.

Crypto showed real political power, helping elect Trump and 50+ other Congressional candidates. PACs like Fairshake look well-placed for 2026.

Europe, though not as dynamic as Asia or the U.S., implemented MICA, becoming the first region with a comprehensive policy framework. Hong Kong and Singapore led the way in APAC.

How We Selected Most Influential 2024

It’s the tenth time CoinDesk has selected the people who defined the year in crypto: Our Most Influential list. (Here was the first edition in 2015.)

MI highlights personal achievements in the last calendar year. People are chosen for their projects, ideas, leadership, personality, or notoriety. The nominees speak to narratives and trends, from ETFs to code development.

There is a top 10 of the most Most Influential – people we feel had outsize influence or led the most important projects. Then, we profile another 40 people who were only a little less influential.

[NOTE: Certain prominent people in crypto – Vitalik Buterin, say – would naturally be Most Influential every year. But we choose not to feature the same names each time.]

Hopefully, you’ll have time to read through some of the profiles from our writers and like their work on social media.

Thanks to Pudgy Penguins for the illustrations.

Happy Holidays!

TOP 10

Andy Ayrey, Truth Terminal

Ansem, memecoin influencer

Cynthia Lummis, U.S. Senator

Donald Trump, President-elect

Fairshake, PAC

Jing Wang, Optimism

Larry Fink, BlackRock

Shayne Coplan, Polymarket

Sreeram Kannan, EigenLayer

Tigran Gambaryan, Binance

NEXT 40

Adam Sullivan, Core Scientific

Arthur Hayes, 100X. Bitmex

Avery Ching, Aptos

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State

Brian Nelson, U.S. Treasury

David Tse, Babylon

Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, Bloomberg

Eric Semler, Semler Scientific

Eric Wall, Udi Wertheimer, and Francisco Alarcon, Taproot Wizards

Erik Voorhees, Venice.AI

Evan Cheng, Mysten Labs

Frank Mong, Helium

Fred Thiel, MARA

Greg Osuri, Akash

Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald

Hunter Horsley and Matt Hougan, Bitwise

IIlia Polosukhin, NEAR

Johnny Ng, Hong Kong lawmaker

Julia Leung, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission

Justin Sun, TRON

Keone Hon, Monad

Lily Liu, Solana Foundation

Luca Netz, Pudgy Penguins

Luuk Strijers, Deribit

Mahesh Ramakrishnan, EV3 Ventures

Matthew Long, UK FCA

Michael Saylor, Microstrategy

Paolo Ardoino, Tether

Patrick McHenry, U.S. House of Representatives

Pavel Durov, Telegram

Pump.fun, memecoin launchpad

Ray Chan, Memeland

Richard Teng, Binance

Robin Linus, BitVM2

Rune Christensen, Maker/Sky

Satoshi Nakamoto

Sergio Demian Lerner, Rootstock

Steve Yun, TON

Yat Siu, Animoca

ZachXBT, sleuth