Michael Truell

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.

Matt Schlicht@MattPRD

Creator of Moltbook — the Reddit-style social network exclusively for AI agents that went viral in January 2026, reaching millions of registered agents. Built entirely via vibe coding with no direct code written. Moltbook was acquired by Meta on March 10, 2026. Now at Meta Superintelligence Labs.