The year 2018 will be remembered not only by the unprecedented fall in cryptocurrency quotes, but also by the increased activity of the community, from companies and developers to ordinary users. Individuals in this boiling pot of events, ideas and emotions stood out especially, whether through the creation of new services and products or their participation in heated debates and scandalous statements.
BlockchainJournal has compiled its own ranking of top personalities in 2018 in the cryptocurrency industry, which it hastens to share with readers.
Changphen Zhao, CEO Binance
2018 was for Changpen Zhao, a former employee of Blockchain.info and technical director of OKCoin, a real high point. Thanks to his experience not only in the cryptocurrency industry, but also in traditional financial markets, Binance attracted considerable liquidity and quickly gained the status of one of the world's largest exchanges. This experience also helped the company in March, when Binance underwent a failed hacking attempt – then the exchange not only did not lose money, but in fact located the intruders.
The business did not stop at the stock exchange alone – under the leadership of Zhao Binance, which began work only in the middle of 2017, it has now turned into a real business empire. Having opened offices in Malta, in Singapore and other parts of the world, the company also launched its own investment fund, educational academy and research department.
Future plans for Binance include launching its own decentralized exchange on its own blockchain and with support for the native BNB token. It is not surprising that, speaking of the near future, Changpeng Zhao does not hide optimism .
Brian Armstrong, CEO Coinbase
The fall of the markets did not prevent the largest US cryptocurrency company Coinbase from completing the year on a completely positive note. At the end of November, in the framework of the next round of financing, Coinbase raised $ 300 million , after which its capitalization exceeded $ 8 billion, and the annual profit could be about $ 1.3 billion.
Those who are closely following the industry should not be surprised by the numbers – led by 35-year-old Armstrong, this year the company launched many new products and services, enlisted the services of a number of well-known figures in the financial world, and also received important licenses.
So, in 2018, Coinbase presented several products targeted at institutional investors, and also, according to the media, thought about the possibility of launching its own cryptocurrency exchange fund (ETF). In addition, the Californian company added support for new trading pairs, including those with ERC-20 tokens, and also took part in the launch of the USD Coin (USDC) pegged to the dollarblock steakblokoin.
The state of Brian Armstrong himself at the same time reached $ 1.3 billion, and as is often the case among Western billionaires, he began to participate in charity. And he did it quite effectively – in December, the head of Coinbase joined the philanthropic campaign of The Giving Pledge, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Thus, he became the first entrepreneur from the cryptocurrency industry who expressed a desire to donate at least 50% of his capital to charity.
David Schwartz, CTO Ripple
In the past, the chief cryptographer, and from July 2018, Ripple’s technical director, 48-year-old David Schwartz, is one of the creators of XRP, the second-largest digital asset in the CoinMarketCap rating at the end of 2018. He is the one who holds great merit in the recent successes of a Californian startup that has set a goal to transform the global banking system with the help of distributed registry technology.
Rejecting all criticism regarding the centralization of Ripple, David Schwartz states that the company's goal is to create a payment network like SWIFT, which differs from the traditional financial system in that all calculations and money flows occur in an open decentralized network.
During 2018, a number of large financial institutions from all parts of the world joined the RippleNet company, and in October, the commercial launch of its flagship product xRapid , based on the XRP token, was officially launched.
Adam Beck, CEO Blockstream
One of the progenitors of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Adam Beck, calls himself a cipherpunk. His name is inscribed in the white paper of Satoshi Nakamoto, who noted that the cryptocurrency payment system, on which Beck worked, inspired him to create cryptocurrency.
However, in recent years, Adam Beck increasingly loudly declares himself as a successful entrepreneur, and in 2018 as the head of the infrastructure company Blockstream in this field, he achieved considerable success.
Thus, in October, the official release of the sidechain Liquid , a technology that was carried out over three years, took place, is intended for servicing Bitcoin exchanges, processing services and traders, reducing the time needed to carry out large volumes of transactions between different accounts. After some time, the blockstream.info browser saw the light, displaying data not only for Liquid, but also for the entire Bitcoin network.
Also this year, Blockstream was actively working on the Lightning Network protocol, presenting a number of plug-ins and applications based on this technology ( LApps ), as well as adding its support to the bitcoin network data service between the Blockstream Satellite satellites .
Andreas Antonopoulos, Bitcoin Evangelist
In the bitcoin industry, there are not so many people who have the ability to explain the essence of the technology and its revolutionary potential in an accessible and understandable form. One of them is a visionary, evangelist and best-selling author of Mastering Bitcoin and The Internet of Money Andreas Antonopoulos.
While many consider cryptocurrencies exclusively as a method of rapid enrichment, Andreas Antonopoulos takes a different approach, enriching the community with much-needed knowledge and constantly reminding that bitcoin is much more than lambo and meme about tememun.
In 2018, Antonopoulos made another huge contribution to this educational process, completing work on a new large-scale work – he became a new book Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and Dapps . Designed primarily for developers, it is a guide to managing and using Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, RootStock (RSK) and other compatible open blockchains based on EVM.
Elizabeth Stark, CEO Lightning Labs
In the world of cryptocurrency, the vast majority of innovations and technological advances are traditionally the result of the work of the male part of the community. However, over the past two years, this dominance of the stronger sex has been broken, and it became possible thanks to Elizabeth Stark and her contribution to the development of the Microning Payment Protocol.
Designed to scale Bitcoin and make cryptocurrency micropayments instant and practically free, in 2018 the Lightning Network was finally launched, and by the end of December its capacity was already over 500 BTC . Much credit goes to Elizabeth Stark and San Francisco-based Lightning Labs. Its flagship products are the Neutrino open platform for mobile devices and the LND desktop wallet .
Despite the fact that the technology itself is still very young and is still in an experimental stage, a great future is predicted for it. Elizabeth Stark also believes in this: according to her, 2018 should not be called a bear market, but Lightning — in the spring.
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum
One of the co-founders of Ethereum, Vitaly Buterin, for the whole of 2018 remained one of the main newsmakers in the industry, with enviable regularity getting into the news headlines. The uncompromising statements and actions of Buterin became the subject of heated discussions and disputes – it is enough to recall his words about the futility of further growth of cryptocurrency assets and regret about the use of the term “smart contract”.
We also remember his refusal to attend the largest blockchain-conference Consensus in May, the controversy with the Bitcoin Core developers regarding the so-called "saving hard forks" and the future of Ethereum .
Continuing at the same time working on the platform itself, Vitalik Buterin in October announced the future transition of the ecosystem to the Ethereum 2.0 stage. It will be preceded by Casper activation and transition to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, sharding, virtual machine update (EWASM), changes in cross-contract logic and protocol economics. Cherry on the cake was the title of Honorary Doctor of Science awarded to Buterin by the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel.
Dan Larimer, CTO Block.one
Numerous fans of Dan Larimer consider Block.one's technical director, the company behind the EOS project, to be a classic genius to whom heaven sent too many ideas and talents to stay in one place for a long time. There is certainly some truth in this: if it had not been Larimera, the crypto community would never have seen projects like BitShares and Steem.
Today, the creator of the DPoS consensus algorithm (Delegated Proof of Stake) and the Graphene technology is responsible for developing the EOSIO blockchain, which lies at the heart of the EOS cryptocurrency and positions itself as a competitor to Ethereum . Despite the somewhat crumpled launch of the main network of the project in June 2018 and frequent criticism , EOS completed the past year in the top five of CoinMarketCap and boasts a rather powerful developer community. In addition, throughout the year, EOS was the constant leader of the cryptocurrency rating , published monthly by the China Information Technology Industry Development Center (CCID).
Larimer himself, remaining true to himself, has already hinted that he can begin work on a new project. According to him, in the process of developing EOS, he thought about creating a token that would be invulnerable, non-programmable and would only perform the currency role. The preliminary name of the project is MonerEOS .
Alexander Ivanov, CEO Waves Platform
The Waves platform was the first truly successful blockchain project created by Russian developers. Back in 2016, the project successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign, then collecting about $ 16 million , which allowed him to create the foundation for further progress.
These results appeared already in 2018, when smart assets and smart accounts were launched in the Waves core network, atomic swaps were introduced, which made it possible to sell ERC-20 tokens on the decentralized Waves DEX exchange, and the Tokenomica cryptocurrency exchange was announced to launch Malta supports both digital assets and fiat currencies.
Another major success of the project headed by Alexander Ivanov was the $ 120 million investment received in December to develop the corporate blockchain Vostok, which is expected to be launched in 2019.
Roger Wer, Jihan Wu, Craig Wright (Bitcoin Cash collective image)
Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Wer, head of the Chinese company Bitmain Cihan Wu, who in the past has unsuccessfully tried to impersonate the creator of Bitcoin Craig Wright for quite a long time, has caused a lot of ambiguity in a significant part of the community. But if, until the end of the summer of 2018, their efforts to promote Bitcoin Cash as a “true Bitcoin” usually caused only ironic smiles, the situation changed dramatically when Craig Wright announced his intention to return to Satoshi’s true “vision.”
By launching its own version of the Bitcoin Cash implementation, Craig Wright and his company nChain initiated the separation of the chain and the “hashreit war” , which significantly affected Bitcoin, provoking a massive collapse of the entire cryptocurrency market in the second half of November and early December.
By the end of the year, the situation had stabilized somewhat: Craig Wright went his own way , Roger Wer and Cihan Wu continued to control the Bitcoin Cash chain, and the market managed to partially recover. Nevertheless, the industry will probably still feel the consequences of these events for some time, and the initiators of this drama themselves, who at some point very recklessly relied on the price increase for BCH, faced serious financial losses. And what the year 2019 will bring to them is an extremely urgent question.
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