2020 is coming to an end, and the cryptocurrency frenzy is sweeping again. On December 27th, Bitcoin hit a record high, reaching $28,400.
For Bitcoin and its fans, this is a major moment in a decade of ups and downs. From about US$7,100 at the beginning of the year to US$28,000 today, the crazy increase of nearly 30% is inseparable from the promotion of these people.
1. V God
At 20:00 on December 1, Ethereum 2.0 launched the genesis block, and Phase 0 (beacon chain) was officially launched. From Ethereum to ETH2.0, it is undoubtedly an epic upgrade. As the founder and soul of Ethereum, God V is on the list.
The full name of God V is Vitalik Buterin (Vitalik Buterin). His experience is comparable to that of the protagonist in fantasy novels, and it can be said that he is a person who is favored by heaven. V God’s past has been circulated a lot, so I won’t repeat it again.
Of course, the realization of ETH2.0 is not accomplished overnight. According to V God’s plan, the transition from ETH 1.0 to ETH 2.0 needs to be implemented in four stages, and it will take at least 2-3 years.
2. Andre Cronje, founder of YFI
In the DeFi fire, yearn.finance must not be avoided, and the founder Andre Cronje (AC) must be mentioned.
yearn.finance is the first DeFi aggregator created by AC, which can automatically move warehouses between DeFi protocols that provide liquidity mining to help users maximize asset returns. It was born in the early days of liquid mining and pioneered the concept of machine gun pool. Coupled with a token design with no pre-mining, no investment institutions, and no team rewards, YFI was wildly sought after by the cryptocurrency community as soon as it went online.
If there is also a traffic dispute in the currency circle, then YFI was once the top stream in the circle. It skyrocketed more than 10,000 times in 43 days and completed the 8-year market of Bitcoin in 30 days.
At that time, DeFi was booming, the community continued to innovate and develop, and the price of YFI currency rose all the way, which also made more people aware of AC, and AC’s influence in the circle was gradually showing.
Andre majored in law when he was studying. After graduation, he started to get involved in computer-related fields because of his work, and he has more than ten years of software architecture development experience.
He first came into contact with the cryptocurrency field in 2017. At that time, in order to have a deeper understanding of the industry, he not only read the code by himself, but also shared his learning process and experience on social networking sites.
In 2018, AC officially entered the cryptocurrency industry. He served as a technical consultant for multiple projects and participated in the development of several projects at the same time. In the same year, he and his friends developed an encrypted wallet, but because it was a bear market at the time, the team was unable to support the project operation and ended in failure.
In addition, AC has also opened up a personal column on the Crypto Briefing website, where it will publish its views on a project or code review results, including well-known projects such as Cosmos and Grin. As AC expressed opinions on more projects, his coding technology was also recognized by some industry developers, and gradually accumulated a certain degree of popularity.
At the beginning of 2020, AC established iearn.finance out of pocket. During that time, DeFi did not explode on a large scale, so the iearn platform was only known to a small group of people.
In mid-2020, Compound issued governance tokens and introduced a new method of liquid mining. Subsequently, AC also issued the governance token YFI. During that time, YFI developed like a bamboo, and many related imitations appeared in the market.
Near the end of the year, Year (YFI) announced in a high-profile manner that it had “gobbled up” 5 well-known projects in the industry, including Pickle (a revenue aggregator similar to the YFI machine gun pool), Cream (a fork project of Compound), and Cover (decentralized insurance) , Akropolis (DeFi project on Polkadot), Sushiswap. The token prices of these projects have risen across the board. The AC department is beginning to take shape.
3. Brock Elmore, core developer of YAM finance
Brock Elmore is the co-founder of Topo Finance and the founder of the crypto investment fund Block Torch Capital. The fund was established in 2017 and is a family office hedge fund that uses proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms and in-depth knowledge of blockchain technology. Generate risk-adjusted returns that exceed the market.
YAM was initially described as “the smallest viable currency experiment”. It was launched with a high profile on August 11. In less than two days, its market value soared from zero to $57 million. But late on August 12, the company announced that it had found an error in the rebasing contract. After that, Brock Elmore issued a Twitter apology, saying “I’m very sorry, I failed…” and its market value fell to zero. The DeFi community united to save this project, but to no avail. The rebase function of the project makes it a global competition, where investors speculate on the price of tokens.
Although the scribble ending is short-lived, YAM is “a very successful crypto economy experiment, although it is a risky and careless experiment.” YAM proved that “by using various DeFi communities, one can build on top of other communities. Successful project community.”
4. Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap
V God commented on him: He is a real good person.
On July 6, 2017, it was the fermenting period of the increasingly feverish wave of cryptocurrencies. The narrative blueprint of Ethereum also slowly unfolded, and the entire blockchain world was hot. But to Hayden Adams, a mechanical engineer at Siemens, this hot summer was like falling into an ice cave-his first job after graduation was finally over with layoffs.
However, Hayden Adams has not had time to taste the pain of resignation in the future. A friend who worked at the Ethereum Foundation gave him a frustrated suggestion: “Mechanical engineering is originally a dying field, and Ethereum is the future. , So you can just start trying to write smart contracts!”
After that, Hayden Adams learned Ethereum, Solidy and Javascript. To expand his skills, he decided to do a real project. Under Karl’s suggestion, he decided to design an automated market maker product. From October to November 2018, Hayden Adams built a proof of concept, including a smart contract and a website. At that time, the contract had only one liquidity provider and only allowed exchange transactions for a few tokens.
On November 2, 2018, Uniswap was officially launched. As of October this year, the cumulative trading volume of the two versions of Uniswap has reached 31 billion U.S. dollars, which is equivalent to an average daily trading volume of more than 40 million U.S. dollars. Among them, Uniswap set a single-day trading volume record of 995 million U.S. dollars on September 1. Exceeded Coinbase.
Before Uniswap, there were still multiple challengers in DEX, such as DDEX, 0x, Loopring, but they were all product models with order book. The extremely poor transaction depth leads to a bad experience. Only Uniswap’s original AMM market maker has subverted the industry in one fell swoop. The original DEX on-chain contract can still be played like this.
5. Juan, the founder of Filecoin
The creator of IPFS and Filecoin — Juan Bennett. Juan graduated from Stanford University with a major in computer science and is the founder and CEO of Protocol Labs.
Before founding Protocol Labs, Juan had served as the CTO of Loki Studios during his graduate studies at Stanford and was also the co-founder of the company. He led the team to develop a geographic-based augmented reality game Geomon.
If Satoshi Nakamoto is the founder of the blockchain and V God is hailed as the father of smart contracts, then Juan has further combined blockchain technology with industrial applications and made a cross-epoch significance. In May 2014, Juan established his own company, Protocol Labs, and received funding from YC in the summer of that year. YC is a world-renowned entrepreneurial incubator and invested in many excellent early-stage entrepreneurial projects.
Not only that, the Filecoin project founded by Juan broke the financing record of the blockchain industry in 2017, making Filecoin&IPFS well known to more people, and Filecoin&IPFS will be a highlight for the future development of the blockchain.
6, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor
During MicroStrategy’s quarterly earnings conference call in July 2020, Saylor announced his intention to let MicroStrategy explore the purchase of bitcoin, gold or other alternative assets instead of holding cash. In the following month, MicroStrategy used its cash reserves of $250 million to purchase 21,454 bitcoins.
MicroStrategy then added another $175 million worth of Bitcoin in September 2020, and another $50 million worth of Bitcoin in early December 2020. On December 11, MicroStrategy issued 650 million convertible bonds and plans to use them to invest in Bitcoin.
As of December 21, 2020, the company held approximately 70,470 bitcoins, with a total purchase amount of approximately US$1.125 billion, and an average purchase price of approximately US$15,964 per bitcoin (including fees and expenses).
7. Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of Grayscale’s parent company, Digital Currency Group (DCG)
Barry Silbert (Barry Hilbert), is the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group.
The company helps build the foundation of the digital currency and blockchain technology industry by launching, incubating and investing in breakthrough companies that will transform the global financial services ecosystem and usher in the “Internet of Things.” DCG has always been an active seed investor in the digital currency industry, with more than 50 investments in 15 countries, including BitGo, BitPay, BitPagos, BitPesa, Chain, Circle, Coinbase, Gyft, Kraken, Ripple Labs, TradeBlock, Unocoin and Xapo.
Grayscale Fund was founded by Barry Silbert in 2013. As the prototype of DCG and one of DCG’s earliest projects, it aims to become an authority in the field of digital currency investment.
Barry Silbert was an early holder of Bitcoin and participated in the New York consensus that led to Bitcoin. DCG currently has created/acquired/held nearly 100 blockchain or digital currency related projects, and has gradually grown into the industry’s most non-negligible digital currency asset management and investment group. Although DCG is unlikely to be listed in the near future, it is likely to surpass Coinbase this year and become the most valuable cryptocurrency company in the United States.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given gray investment company gray ETFs a de facto monopoly, and other passive fund management companies will not be able to compete with them. Today, gray ETFs have accumulated more than $10 billion in asset management. And this siphon effect will also affect the cryptocurrency market in 2021.
8. Central Bank
This year, CBDC is undoubtedly a hot spot of global attention. Among them, China has become a leader in the development of digital currency, and the possibility of expanding payment systems and circulation overseas is also increasing. This has accelerated the development of digital currencies in major economies.
The People’s Bank of China started research on legal digital currency earlier. In 2014, a special team was established to start special research on issues such as the digital currency issuance framework, key technologies, issuance and circulation environment, and related international experience. At the end of 2017, upon approval, the People’s Bank of China organized some powerful commercial banks and related institutions to jointly develop the digital RMB system (DC/EP). DC/EP has basically completed top-level design, standard formulation, function research and development, joint debugging and testing under the premise of adhering to two-tier operation, cash (M0) substitution, and controllable anonymity.
Data shows that as of the end of August 2020, digital renminbi has been implemented in more than 6,700 pilot scenarios across the country, covering areas such as life payment, catering services, transportation, shopping and consumption, and government services.
It should be emphasized that the central bank’s digital currency has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, nor does it have a direct impact on the cryptocurrency market, but the concept of digital currency will take root over time, even if the cryptocurrency market is still subject to national policies The cold processing of DCEP, due to the traceable nature of DCEP, will also increase people’s demand for encrypted digital currencies to a certain extent.
9. Boca GavinWood
For the current Gavin (Chinese name: Lin Jiawen), he has a lot of titles: the co-founder of Ethereum, the founder of Polkadot and Parity Technologies, and the lead developer of Polkadot. These titles are undoubtedly industry experience.
GavinWood first worked nine to five at a game company, and later became a freelancer, occasionally providing consulting services to others in programming. After being introduced by a friend, he got acquainted with God V. His technically strong identity made him one of the eight co-founders of Ethereum, and served as CTO, and immediately devoted himself to the construction of Ethereum.
In January 2014, GavinWood completed Ethereum’s PoC-1 (Proof of Concept-1), which is also the initial prototype of the C++ version of the Ethereum client; in March, he completed the Ethereum Yellow Paper. Some professionals once lamented “This Yellow Paper” It is estimated that there are no more than one hundred that can be directly understood in the world.” In August, he invented a high-level language for smart contract development-Solidity, which has almost become the de facto standard for smart contract development in the future.
The preparation of the Ethereum Yellow Paper is particularly significant to the ecological contribution of Ethereum, laying the foundation for the birth of multi-version clients in the future. It is no exaggeration to say that he almost completed the early technical architecture of Ethereum by himself. In the same year, he officially announced the launch of the Polkadot project at the Parity Tech conference, dedicated to solving the problems of cross-chain communication and data transmission, and became a representative project of the third-generation blockchain.
Today, the Polkadot ecology has also become a gathering place for many projects or subjects. According to official statistics, nearly 200 projects and subjects converge in the Polkadot ecology, covering multiple functions and sectors such as DeFi, privacy, and smart contracts.
Polka is opening branches and leaves, and Gavin Wood is also realizing his ideal step by step.
10. Sam Bankman Fried, founder of crypto derivatives trading platform FTX
Sam Bankman-Fried is the CEO of Alameda Researc and the derivatives trading platform FTX.com. His trading skills originate from Jane Street, one of the world’s well-known ETF liquidity providers.
Who would have thought that FTX is also one of the largest donors among the new US President Biden’s donors. In the data displayed by opensecrets, the name of FTX.US is clearly listed. The founder Sam Bankman-Fried himself also confirmed the donation. He said that the donation was made through Alameda Research, an encrypted quantitative company he runs.
