Original title: 12 Crypto Builders Im Watching in 2024
Original author: David Hoffman, Bankless
Original compilation: Mars Finance, MK
Dear Bankless Nation, We are entering a new era of crypto innovation.
A major milestone in the Ethereum roadmap has become a thing of the past. Emerging first-level chains (L1s) are driving unprecedented innovation in the crypto space. The cost of all computing resources is rapidly approaching zero.
New leaders in crypto are rapidly pioneering or creating new frontiers. Our leaders are constantly evolving, too. I’m optimistic that as we grow as an industry, we also select leaders more carefully and learn from past experiences. Great leaders are critical to the maturation of crypto.
As we enter 2024, some of the leaders in the crypto space are experts in the current crypto metaverse. I have singled out 12 builders (including several pairs of partners) that I will be paying special attention to as we enter the next phase of the crypto space.
Sreeram Kannan // EigenLayer
Founder of EigenLayer, father of modern refinancing, respected philosopher of large-scale coordination
The future that Sreeram Kannan envisions is the future that I long for. His vision of how EigenLayer will enable humans to coordinate at scale brings a breath of fresh air to an industry that has often lost its way.
His connection of technical details with thoughts on abstract principles of scaling trust and coordination puts him and EigenLayer at the center of the next phase of Ethereums scalability — something we didnt even know existed until EigenLayer came up with the concept of re-funding Stage exists!
With the most important parts of Ethereum’s roadmap now a thing of the past, reinvestment becomes the dominant narrative for Ethereum in 2024.
As EigenLayer approaches mainnet launch, the new AVS architecture goes live, and the refinancing market develops, you can feel the excitement coming from the Ethereum community and the broader crypto industry. The big question is: Can Trust-as-a-Service penetrate non-crypto use cases and non-crypto technology companies?
Nick White // Founder of Celestia
Founder of Celestia, data provider, chain weaver, modular geek, minimalist monolithic geek with shaggy hair just back from surfing
Nick White is pushing the modular frontier in crypto. How modular can encryption become? In essence, modularity has properties that are highly resonant with cryptography: antifragility, redundancy, replicability, expressiveness, etc. The Celestia project has become a focus for investment in the modular concept itself.
Proponents of modularity argue that Celestia represents an explosion of innovation space in the modular ecosystem. Is cheap data availability (DA) really the key missing element in the modularity argument? What will this new type of asset TIA look like? Celestias DA enables Ethereum to support more Rollups, which is crucial to the long-term development of Ethereum... But is it also a Trojan horse mechanism launched by Celestia itself based on the Rollup ecosystem? Will TIA become currency?
I follow Nicks movements and try to answer these questions. That’s why I’m especially looking forward to attending the Modular Summit this year, wherever and whenever it takes place!
Neel Somani // Founder of Eclipse
Founder of Eclipse, creator of the Platypus Project, connector of the ecosystem, and explorer of parallel worlds
Neel Somani is starting from first principles to advance the new frontiers he has discovered. Having moved to Eclipse after founding a company that served Rollup, his story about how the argument for Eclipse was formulated provides a wealth of inspiration.
Situated in a position where extremes are often not the best, Neel has found a balance between multiple leading projects - Ethereum, L2s, Solana, and Celestia.
As the SVM ecosystem grows, Eclipses success becomes more feasible. Does the argument for SVM on Ethereum hold water? As the opinions of Solana geeks and modular geeks become increasingly divided, can Eclipse find common ground between the two?
As Eclipse gets closer to mainnet, we will see how a single L2 built on the highly secure Ethereum L1 can bring value to the world.
Regardless, Neel will teach us many valuable lessons along the way.
Keone Hon // Founder of Monad
Founder of Monad, father of Molandak, parallelizer of EVM, parallelizer of database, parallelizer of I/O, promoter of parallelism
Keone has become the spokesperson for the Monad project, which is dedicated to bringing parallelism to the EVM ecosystem. Have the speed and low cost of Solana, and the network effects of Ethereum has become a popular narrative.
Some thought leaders point out that simply parallelizing virtual machines is not enough to be a breakthrough; what really needs to be parallelized is database access. In fact, Keone and the Monad team have already achieved this, which is why MonadDB is a key component of the Monad innovation landscape.
The release of Monad in 2024 is highly anticipated - just look at the Nads (Monad lovers) in the #TheRoom channel in the Monad Discord trying to get their hands on a character in the farm. People have begun to pay attention to this project, trying to find a balance between Ethereum and Solana.
Andrew Huang // Founder of Conduit
The founder of Conduit, the gardener of the chain, the increaser of traffic, the reducer of costs, the copy paste maker of the framework, and the leader at the bottom of the basin
Andrew Huang is working on reducing the cost of deploying new Rollup chains. All costs are being cut. Thanks to Andrew and Conduits efforts, cost, technical complexity and other barriers are disappearing. If you think that Rollups on Ethereum will be as common as blogs on the Internet, then you will be optimistic about Andrews work.
Conduit is a Rollup as a Service (RaaS) provider - think of it as a cloud services platform for Rollup. The economies of scale of RaaS are huge. Reducing the resource cost of Rollup means that more applications can be developed into application chains, and all Conduit-enabled chains will automatically receive the highest level of Rollup security. As Ethereums Rollup-centric roadmap matures, Andrew, Conduit, and other RaaS projects will lead us into this fertile garden ready for Rollup.
Finally, I hope Andrew can break down some limiting beliefs about Rollup. We often think of Rollup as just a faster, cheaper blockchain. I think this view is too simplistic and unimaginative of Rollups future possibilities. Reducing the cost of Rollup will not only make Rollup faster and cheaper, but will also open up a new design space that defines the future possibilities of Rollup.
Ill be following Andrew to see how he brings the world of Rollup from two dimensions to three dimensions.
Jill Gunter // Chief Strategy Officer, Espresso
Espresso strategist, master sequencer, explorer of L2 transaction paths, leader of composability, abstractor of chains, connoisseur of historical anecdotes
Jill Gunter has always been a quiet force in crypto to me. Since joining Espresso Systems as chief strategy officer in 2021, she has provided forward-looking insights into the direction of Ethereum Rollup.
Espresso sits at the intersection of Ethereum and modular chain arguments. Espresso is a serialization module for L2 chains, making it a shared sequencer for multiple chains integrating it. The era of L2 reorganization is approaching, and Jills perspective at Espresso, coupled with her ability to address complex topics, may put her in the spotlight frequently in 2024.
It was a sad day when the final episode of Jills podcast Grind My Gears with Meltem Demirors aired. It was one of the best podcasts in crypto at the time, providing a model for Bankless to follow.
As Rollups rapidly grow in number, construction, and complexity, shared sequencer projects like Espresso will be key to maintaining the shape of the Ethereum superstructure.
I expect Espresso to become even more important in 2024, if not with Jill entering her podcast touring era, then perhaps with CEO Ben Fisch becoming the center of attention.
Luca Netz // CEO Pudgy Penguins
The rebirth of Pudgy Penguins, the maturer of NFT PFPs, the king of distribution, and the executor of industry commitments
In 2021, the NFT industry collectively made many promises about the potential of NFTs. Real-world footprints, game metaverse, and infinite brand value. However, when prices fell, these bullish fever dreams turned rotten and the founders abandoned their projects.
Luca Netz purchased the Pudgy Penguin project in 2022 and gave it a new look, directly pointing to Valhalla. Pudgy Penguin plush toys are now available at Walmart, and Pudgy World is coming soon.
However, the facts seem to indicate that Pudgy Penguins is just the beginning of a much larger plan. While other NFT projects are still looking for a starting point, Pudgy Penguins has already started their race.
What will this frontier bring us? How big of an impact can virtual assets have in the real world? How far can the Pudgy metaverse go?
To find out these answers, you need to follow Luca.
Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart // ETF Experts
Unexpected key figure, spokesperson of traditional finance, coordinator of world view
After years of waiting, the spot Bitcoin ETF has finally launched, and its debut broke all trading volume records for ETF launches. Now, a spot Ethereum ETF may also be approved in May.
Even if the spot Ethereum ETF is rejected (which is unlikely), Eric and James will still be center stage. Even if the spot Ethereum ETF is rejected again (again, this is unlikely), it will just be resubmitted again and again until it is finally approved.
As the crypto market exceeds $2 trillion in value and may reach approximately $10 trillion in the next cycle, more assets below the stack will become interesting targets for ETF applications from a traditional finance perspective. What comes after ETH? I don’t know, but we should have a bingo card for crypto ETF approval. Whenever we drop an X, you can be sure Eric and James will have valuable comments to make about the event.
It doesnt matter if no more ETFs emerge this market cycle. They will appear eventually. Crypto is the birth of a completely new asset class, and currently only one asset has ETFs.
If you follow Eric and James Twitter accounts, its clear that they have been infected by crypto culture. This is a one-way street. They are ours now.
Li Jin // Co-founder of Variant
Co-founder of Variant Fund, passionate advocate, promoter of labor refactoring, thoughtful expressive person, someone who brings emotional warmth to cold code
Unless crypto can have a substantial impact on global culture, it has failed. Crypto culture differs significantly from the culture elsewhere on the internet. Increasingly, everything crypto touches will be affected, for better or worse, by the culture we create.
Li Jin represents the better side of this equation. As crypto improves in terms of product and influence, it will begin to have a more substantial impact on the psychology and culture of those who use its orbit."If you adopt cryptographic protocols, you adopt cryptographic values."
Mainstream crypto products will be cultural products - we see this with friend.tech! Cheap data availability, modular blockchains, and parallel VMs are all great draws, but these investment themes are for the internal community. We need to explore new cultural metaverses and export crypto products to the other half billion Internet users.
Li Jin focuses on the cutting edge of consumer crypto products, which is why I follow what Li Jin focuses on.
podcast
I love podcasts! Ive been listening. Taking the prompt “people I follow” a little more literally, I will be paying special attention to the following podcasts in 2024:
Mike Ippolito // Co-Founder of Blockworks
Co-founder of Blockworks, man of many podcasts, thoughtful thinker, and defender of order
Every time I talk to Mike, I always learn something new and gain a new perspective. Luckily, he has a podcast. Its technical, well-researched, informative, and well worth a listen. Mike seems to have an immunity gene that makes him neutral to the chain, while still retaining the XRP-repelling instinct that we all should have.
Beyond Mike personally, his company Blockworks has become my favorite source of crypto news. Covering journalism in the crypto space is a daunting task, and Blockworks strikes the right balance between journalistic integrity and cryptographic consistency.
Anthony Sassano // Founder of The Daily Gwei
Infinite Creator, Bearded Bald Australian, Gwei Stacker, Amateur Node Operator, Humble ETH Bull, Statue Connoisseur
Anthony Sassano is not like the above characters. When I say “people to watch in 2024,” I’m referring more literally to Anthony Sassano and his The Daily Gwei podcast. If you’re listening to The Daily Gwei every day, you’ve graduated from crypto university and entered maintenance mode.
Anthonys curated The Daily Gwei Discord channel is a bastion of informative and technical Ethereum investors and enthusiasts. Highly recommended to listen to The Daily Gwei.
Deana Burke and Natasha Hoskins // Co-hosts of Too Online Podcast
Co-host of the Boys Club Podcast, dynamic duo, world builder, emotion sharer and vibe conveyer, always down to earth dreamer
One of my favorite new podcasts lately is the Too Online podcast hosted by Boys Club co-founders Natasha Hoskins and Deana Burke.
Natasha and Deana are crypto natives who produce internet-themed content for the crypto-curious and even the crypto-sceptic. In Too Online, each of them will bring a story that happened on the Internet last week and tell it to the other person. This usually has nothing to do with crypto, but always attracts the interest of crypto natives because we are all so online.
After listening to over a dozen hours of intensive crypto podcasts each week, their brisk and enjoyable 30 minutes of internet gossip was like a breath of fresh air and a reminder that 99% of the world still doesn’t care about crypto-native topics ( At least not yet?).
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