Sergey Nazarov

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.

Brendan Eich@BrendanEich

Creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla. Founded Brave — a privacy-first Web3 browser with a built-in crypto wallet and the Basic Attention Token (BAT) ad model. Brave has 70M+ monthly active users, making it one of the largest crypto consumer products in existence. Brave Wallet supports ETH, SOL, and onchain DeFi natively.

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.