People Profiles
10 long-form people profiles from the DeFi Intel research desk. Each entry runs 2,000–3,500 words with a 7–9-section structure, executive summary, and bull/bear/watch-points rail.
Vitalik Buterin — Co-founder, Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of Ethereum and, for more than a decade, the most influential public intellectual in cryptocurrency. He authored the original Ethereum white paper at nineteen, helped launch the netwo…
Michael Saylor — Executive Chairman, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy)
Michael Saylor is the executive chairman of Strategy, the publicly listed business-intelligence company he renamed from MicroStrategy in early 2025 to mark its full reorientation around a single thesis: that Bitcoin i…
Brian Armstrong — Co-founder & CEO, Coinbase
Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and chief executive of Coinbase, the largest US-listed cryptocurrency exchange and the first major American crypto firm to take a public-company path through the SEC's enforcement era…
Arthur Hayes — Co-founder, BitMEX; CIO, Maelstrom
Arthur Hayes is the co-founder and former chief executive of BitMEX, the Seychelles-domiciled derivatives exchange that pioneered the perpetual swap and dominated crypto futures volume from 2016 through 2019. He resol…
Sam Bankman-Fried — Founder, FTX (defunct); convicted of fraud, 2023
Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the Alameda Research trading firm, both of which collapsed catastrophically in November 2022 in what remains the largest fraud in the history of …
Changpeng Zhao — Founder & former CEO, Binance
Changpeng Zhao, universally known as CZ, is the founder and former chief executive of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by spot and derivatives trading volume for the entirety of its post-2018 …
Larry Fink — Co-founder, Chairman & CEO, BlackRock
Laurence Douglas Fink is the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with more than eleven trillion dollars in assets under management at the close of 2025. He has occ…
Jesse Powell — Co-founder & Chairman, Kraken (former CEO)
Jesse Powell is the co-founder of Kraken, one of the longest-operating cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States and the third-largest by US dollar spot volume at the close of 2025. He served as Kraken's chief exe…
Jeff Yan (Iliensinc) — Co-founder, Hyperliquid
Jeff Yan, who has often used the pseudonym Iliensinc in public communications, is the co-founder of Hyperliquid, the onchain perpetual-futures venue that grew from a 2022 founding to become the dominant decentralised …
Stani Kulechov — Founder & CEO, Aave Companies
Stani Kulechov is the founder and chief executive of Aave Companies, the development entity behind the Aave money-market protocol, the GHO stablecoin, and the Lens Protocol social-graph network. The original ETHLend p…
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