Beyond Bitcoin: The Next Generation of Crypto Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2025

The crypto industry has changed a lot in the last couple of years, largely due to its widespread acceptance as a payment method and investment opportunity.  This has introduced a new generation of crypto entrepreneurs who have made their fortune by doing more than just buying and selling Bitcoin.

In this article, we’ll go over a few such entrepreneurs working in various crypto-related fields.  These entrepreneurs are entering the market at a time when it’s rapidly changing and increasingly regulated, making their experience very different from that of the industry pioneers.

Shayne Coplan (Polymarket)

Shayne Coplain was born in 1998 in New York.  He attended New York University, majoring in computer science, but dropped out before completing his studies.  He participated in the Ethereum ICO in 2014 and founded Polymarket in 2020.

In 2025, he was named the youngest self-made billionaire when Polymarket was valued at about $8-9 billion.  The platform has done a lot to bring the prediction market into the mainstream, and this year, ICE invested in the company, thus acknowledging the shift in the outlook.  According to experts such as those at CCN, more traditional finance businesses will follow suit.

Cindy Leow (Drift Labs)

Cindy Leow is the co-founder of Drift Labs, a leading decentralized finance platform working on Solana.  She’s 26 and currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Strategic Finance & Data Science at Minerva University.  Leow worked as a Portfolio Manager at 256 Capital.

Drift Labs has raised over $52 million, including investments from big players such as Polychain and Multicoin Capital.  The company’s main goal is to change how users trade on-chain by eliminating the need for centralized intermediaries.

Uma Roy (Succinct)

Uma Roy is 26 and ranked 21 on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.  She graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science.  Before founding Succinct, she worked at Google and Gantry.  Succinct has raised $43 million from investors (including Paradigm) and is focused on zero-knowledge proofs and proofs of work.

As blockchain scaling becomes the industry’s focus, privacy will be the key focus, and that’s the area Succinct will try to fill in the years to come.  The efforts will focus on a more idealistic side of crypto: community governance and open-source technology.

Sunny Aggarwal & Dev Ojha (Osmosis Labs)

The co-founders of Osmosis, a major decentralized exchange (DEX), are 27 and 25 years old, respectively.  Aggarwal studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) with a minor in Political Economics at Berkeley, but, as many other entrepreneurs do, he dropped out to pursue a career in crypto.

Osmosis has raised $36 million in funding.  It’s a decentralized exchange that allows users to trade across different platforms and manage liquidity.  It does so using open-source software and gives users the chance to manage their assets themselves.  This market is already filling up and becoming very competitive, and the platform will have to compete on service quality.

Ed Craven (Stake.com co-founder)

Stake.com is a crypto-backed casino that 29-year-old Ed Craven has cofounded with Bijan Tehrani.  The company was founded in 2017 and anticipated the wave of change in public attitudes toward online gambling.  Now that it has completely shifted in favor of the practice, Stake is one of the pioneers, with the experience needed to compete.

The company leveraged blockchain technology’s innovative features to make online gambling safer and simpler.  The biggest difficulty it’s facing now is the introduction of stricter regulations.

Austin King & Tyler Tarsi (Co-founders of Omni Network)

Austin King is Co-Founder & CEO of Omni Network.  Before founding Omni, he worked at Ripple.  He’s also a founder of Strata Labs, which he founded while studying computer science.  Tyler Tarsi worked at Stovell AI Systems and is now the CTO of Omni.

Omni raised $18 million when it launched, and since then it’s focused on building infrastructure to reduce fragmentation across Ethereum rollups.  The company has built a strong team and is planning to compete on the quality of its technology first and foremost.  It helps that they are early to this new niche industry.

Jason Zhao (Story Protocol / Poseidon)

Jason Zhao grew up in Texas and studied philosophy and computer science at Stanford.  He founded Story Protocol in 2021.  The goal of the project is to treat intellectual property as an asset that could be distributed via blockchain.  Zhao stepped back from actively running the company in 2025 and focused on an AI app called Poseidon.

Story Protocol has raised over $130 million from investors and has built its customer base very quickly.  However, many of those customers have criticized the way Zhao left the company to pursue an AI project.  Zhao will remain one of the most influential entrepreneurs to follow in 2025 and beyond because he’s at the intersection of crypto and AI, where the best talent should be at the moment.

Kenneth O’Friel & Dominika Stobiecka (Co-founders of Toku)

Dominika Stobiecka has worked at Deutsche Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, while Kenneth O’Friel has worked at Bank of America.  This is a somewhat unusual path for a crypto entrepreneur, since traditional finance only recently entered crypto.

The company raised $20 million in funding, and it serves clients in crypto/Web3, mostly those that need compliant token payments/grant distributions.  As the Web3.0 space grows, it will need more of these “boring but essential” services, which is why Toku has a bright future.

Tux Pacific (Entropy)

Tux Pacific is the founder and CEO of Entropy.  They made headlines as one of the first trans persons working in the crypto industry.  They taught themselves cryptography after dropping out of college.  Before starting the company, they worked at NuCypher.

Entropy raised $1.95 million and another $25 million in the seed round.  Entropy is a decentralized crypto custodian / trustless custody protocol.  The goal is to allow users to retain control of their assets while making them usable across blockchains.  Privacy will be the topic of the day now that cryptos are widely adopted, and it’s the niche to watch.

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