Despite an overwhelmingly bleak year for the crypto industry, some executives and founders are still getting recognition.
Forbes has recently published its Fintech ’30 under 30′ list, and a surprising number of crypto executives and founders are included.
African money transfer app founder Ham Serunjogi made the cover of its 2023 update of young entrepreneurs. It also honored many prominent crypto leaders.
The list covers traditional financial services, fintech, crypto, and blockchain. There were more than a thousand nominations, but only 30 made the cut.
Judges included cofounder and CEO of Brazil’s digital bank Nubank, David Vélez. Nonfungible token marketplace OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah also helped pick the top 30. (No, Sam Bankman-Fried was not among them this year!)
Crypto Founders Keep Building
Forbes acknowledged the 70% decline in crypto prices over the past year. However, it also acknowledged the work that industry founders and executives have done during the tumultuous year.
“Despite the steep fall in cryptocurrency prices over the past year, digital asset entrepreneurs continue to gain rapid traction and have a broad impact, and they made a strong showing on this year’s list.”
The list included Uniswap founder Hayden Adams at 28 years old. He launched the decentralized exchange and token swap platform in 2018, and it has been highly successful. Uniswap has processed more than $1 trillion in trade volume since its launch.
Avalanche co-founder Kevin Sekniqi also made the elusive list. The high-throughput blockchain has also been extremely successful despite the crippling bear market.
Other prominent crypto figures that made the list included The Graph Foundation director Eva Beylin and Castle Island Ventures partner Ria Bhutoria. Connext Labs cofounders Arjun Bhuptani and Layne Haber were also mentioned as was Jump Crypto president Kanav Kariya.
Blockchain Capital partner Kinjal Shah, Frax Finance founder Sam Kazemian, and MoonPay founder Victor Faramond were included as well.
30% Crypto Related Entrepreneurs
Around one-third of the fintech thirty have ties to the crypto industry. This gave it more weight despite the bleak year. The majority of those listed are associated with investment banking or venture capital.
Vitalik Buterin made the prestigious list in 2018, as did Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee. The fintech 30 under 30 from 2021 infamously included former FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Furthermore, nine crypto companies made the Forbes ‘Fintech 50’ list earlier this year.
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Source: https://beincrypto.com/crypto-founders-make-the-cut-for-forbes-30-under-30/