Brendan Eich

Sergey Nazarov@SergeyNazarov

Co-founder of Chainlink — the industry-standard oracle platform powering the majority of DeFi and bringing capital markets onchain. $27T+ in transaction value enabled. Launched Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) at SmartCon 2025 and DataLink for institutional data publishing. Appointed to CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee. Attended White House Digital Asset Summit and was present when the GENIUS Act was signed. CoinDesk Most Influential 2025.

Vitalik Buterin@VitalikButerin

Co-founder of Ethereum — the programmable blockchain powering DeFi, NFTs, and the onchain economy. Lead researcher and philosophical voice of the Ethereum ecosystem. 2025 milestones: Pectra upgrade expanded blob capacity, gas limits increased toward 60M, zkEVM proving times improved 60x. Proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V architecture. Prolific blogger on cryptography, mechanism design, AI, privacy, and decentralized governance. CoinDesk Most Influential multiple years running.

Sandeep Nailwal@sandeepnailwal

Co-founder and CEO of the Polygon Foundation — one of Ethereum's most widely used scaling networks. Became CEO in June 2025, taking unilateral control to refocus strategy. Sunsetting Polygon zkEVM in 2026. Doubling down on Polygon PoS (GigaGAS upgrade: 100K TPS target) and AggLayer cross-chain interoperability. 1.4B stablecoin transactions in 2025, 14M monthly users. Mastercard, Stripe, and Revolut integrations live.