11 Highly Influential Crypto Investor Experts To Watch in 2018 and Beyond

Eleven Influential Crypto Experts And Investors To Watch

There are plenty of names in the cryptocurrency world that consumers are familiar with, like Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, and Bitcoin startup investor Roger Ver. However, there are a lot of people in the crypto sphere that have had impressive predictions and performance through the years.

Here’s eleven people, eleven influential crypto experts, that you may not have heard of but should definitely consider in your next crypto decision. This list was based on the recommendations of XTRABYTES, which also supports the language adaptions for any DApp.

Vinny Lingham

Vinny Lingham is from South Africa, but most people know him as the founder of Gyft and Civic, an app for issuing gift cards and a blockchain startup for identity storage, respectively. Recently, he has been on Shark Tank South Africa as he works on developing a startup hub for technology.

In these ventures, he has been known for making impressively accurate predictions about the price of Bitcoin. On August 21^st, he said:

“If the Bitcoin ETF is approved this week, the bear market will probably end. I think there is < 20% chance of the approval happening, but it certainly would be a very bullish signal.”

He went on to say that the healthy bear market helps to show the different between “the tourists from the locals. It’s like when a hurricane hits – the locals stay behind and rebuild stronger and better infrastructure, and when the tourists come back, things just seem a lot more expensive and they don’t know why!”

Charlie Shrem

Charlie Shrem has been a Bitcoin advocate for quite some time, but he is better known as one of the co-founders of the Bitcoin Foundation. However, his decision to work with the Silk Road marketplace sans money-transmitting license sentenced him to two years in 2014, though he ultimately only served one year.

He also was on a documentary about Bitcoin called The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. Right now, his goal is to develop a debit card with Dash that would let users within the United States apply their tokens and coins to actual purchases. While that project is in the works, he has joined Jaxx as the director of business and community development.

Peter Todd

Peter Todd works at Bitcoin as an open-source developer, and his hope is that cryptocurrency will eventually have more effective regulations controlling it. He spoke in an interview where he heavily criticized the Lightning Network, due to the C programming language. He believed that its vulnerability puts it at risk for crashing.

Lately, his opinion has been less negative. In one tweet on July 30^th, he responded to Cody Wilson’s comments about protecting the Second Amendment, saying,

“Winning this fight could prove crucial for Bitcoin and other crypto projects: if you can't post technical blueprints to guns, banning technical blueprints to crypto too doesn't seem far-fetched.”

Learn more about him at his website, which is https://petertodd.org/.

Adam Back

Adam Back is known for his invention of Hashcash, and his knowledge has proven to be helpful in the way that the industry advertises anti-spam software. Hashcash is a program that employs the use of the proof-of-work protocol so that anyone that spams others is charged a fee, which they presently cannot face. The company is also helping to integrate blockchain technology to other countries, hoping to provide new use cases.

Right now, Back is Blockstream’s CEO, which was recently reviewed in an article called “How Blockstream is scaling up Bitcoin-related technologies.”

Joseph Lubin

Joseph Lubin helped to found Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation, and ConsenSys. When Lubin was interviewed by podcast Hidden Forces on episode 57, he talked about Ethereum’s issues with scalability. He also spoke with Bloomberg TV about the benefits of Bitcoin bubbles.

In that August 15^th interview, he said:

“People are rushing in because they see the promise of the technology. But then, we build more fundamental infrastructure, we see a correction, and the potential gets even more impressive… I absolutely expect that there is a strong correlation between the rise in price and the growth of fundamental infrastructure in the ecosystem.”

Gavin Wood

Gavin Wood would Ethereum’s first CTO, but after two years, he was ready to go. Since then, he’s been working on other endeavors, even founding Parity Technologies and co-founding Grid Singularity.

He hasn’t kept in the media much, keeping to himself on most subjects. However, he made comments in a recent article by CoinJournal on August 23^rd regarding the Berlin Blockchain Week, saying.

“The Berlin mentality is ready to try anything, distrustful of authority and success and yet warm to the unfamiliar and gritty. Google stay away: Berlin will not dance to any tune, but its own.”

Da Hongfei

Da Hongfei co-founded NEO, which is a platform that has smart contract technology, which they hope will make them a strong competition against Ethereum. He is also the CEO of OnChain, which is working with the government in China to establish regulations for blockchain technology. Between these two endeavors, he has quite an influence on the advancement of the Chinese blockchain industry.

When he was featured in an article on the online publication of Financial Review, he said,

“Blockchain is meant to be transparent, but the trading on the exchanges is not very transparent. I do believe there are manipulations of the price of different tokens these days and there are no regulations right now,” he said.

“So, I believe if it’s regulated there will be less fraud and Ponzi schemes and it will bring the mainstream financial institutions on board, so we can do real business on the blockchain. [And] if there is a public blockchain that is compliance ready, it will eliminate regulatory uncertainty.”

Marek Palatinus

Marek Palatinus, who also goes by “Slush,” works at Satoshi Labs as the CEO. He’s been fairly bold about his confidence in Bitcoin, though he’s maintained a healthy distance between himself and Ethereum. In one of the rare posts on Twitter on this subject, he posted on June 11^th, saying,

“Writing smart contract is like launching a rocket to Mars rather than building a web app for your new startup. This article sums up why I'm so half-hearted to existing smart contract platforms.”

The article he references is called “The Truth about Smart Contracts,” and it can be found at https://medium.com/@jimmysong/the-truth-about-smart-contracts-ae825271811f.

Rong Cheng

Rong Cheng is known as both the founder and CEO of a smart web project called Elastos. His goal was to develop this kind of opportunity where “decentralized applications are detached from the internet,” and the system runs on distributed nodes. He’s been working to make this project a reality for the last 18 years, long before blockchain technology was even a reality.

He is now working to combine his project with NEO and held an interview with Huobi Global on July 2^nd to explain further.

Elizabeth Stark

Elizabeth Stark is responsible for founding Lightning Labs, which created the blockchain protocol by the same name for faster payments between nodes. Most experts see this protocol is the main solution for Bitcoin’s scalability. She spoke with Bitcoin Magazine to discuss the protocol, which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjpMiW0pOAs.

He also is a co-founder for the Open Video Alliance.

Alexander Tapscott

Alexander Tapscott, song of Don Tapscott, co-authored a major book called “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World.”

This book is available for purchase on Amazon.com, which also features the eBook version. He is the CEO of an investment firm, which is called NextBlock, leading him to eventually be interviewed as part of an article called “Permissioned Systems Will Become More Isolated.”

Summary

There are a lot of people that think that the bear market is a sign that the industry is almost a thing of the past, but that’s far from true.

As professionals in the industry persevere, it’s certain that there are many people working to keep it alive, which will hopefully evolve into a more bullish endeavor.