55 BUIDLers Driving the Decentralization Movement Forward (September, 2018)
DEVELOPERS!! DEVELOPERS!! DEVELOPERS!!
Steve Ballmer has immortalised these words by shouting them at a Microsoft Conference.
But, as the #BUIDL movement caught on in the CryptoSphere where BUIDLers are the new Rockstars. Not you Product Managers, not your Growth Hackers, but BUIDLers are at the center of the action……
This series appreciates the 55 BUIDLers in the Blockchain Community in. Before we delve deep into this, here are the criteria used for selection of these BUIDLers.
List Criteria
1. Products they are Building
The products and the impact of these products being built by our 50 BUIDLers is the most important criteria used in curation of this list. The factors involved how long they have been involved with the project, whether the project is live yet and the Project’s involvement with its community members.
2. Current Community Involvement
The second most important criteria used in curation of this list is the Community Involvement of these #BUIDLers. The ideal #BUIDLers are the ones who regularly interact with their community and #BUIDLers to continuously improve their product while involving community in all decisions.
3. GitHub Activity
GitHub Activity of the project/#BUIDLer is also one of the most important ideas involved in the curation of this list. After all,
Code is the ultimate truth.
4. Previous Experience (if any)
Any previous experience in building Blockchain products serves as an additional advantage for the #BUIDLers.
However, this list is NOT final and there will be continuous additions to the list. You can become a part of the list by applying here.
Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik is the co-founder and inventor of Ethereum, second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation. Ethereum platform is described decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one that facilitates the creation of new cryptocurrencies and other decentralised applications.
Previously, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and is the most prominent advocate of Blockchain technology to the world.
You can follow him on Twitter here
Charlie Lee
Charlie Lee is a computer scientist, best known as the creator of Litecoin. He serves as the chairman and managing director of the Litecoin Foundation.
Before creating Litecoin, he was the Director of Engineering at Coinbase. A Xoogler, he is one of the prominent people in favour of decentralization out there.
You can follow him on Twitter here
Gavin Andresen
Gavin Andresen is a developer known for his work in creation of Bitcoin.
When Satoshi left the Bitcoin development scene, he was the one declared by Satoshi Nakamoto as the lead developer of the reference implementation for bitcoin client software.
In 2012 he founded the Bitcoin Foundation to support and nurture the development of the bitcoin currency, and by 2014 left his software development role to concentrate on his work with the Foundation.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Jameson Lopp
Jameson Lopp is one of the most popular ambassadors of Blockchain technology out there. Currently, an engineer at BitGo, he also created Statoshi.info, which displays bitcoin node stats in real time.
He is also the organizer of Bitcoin SIG, a group which discusses bitcoin related matters. Along with all this, Lopp publishes his views regularly on notable bitcoin publications such as Coinbase.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Gav Would
Gavin Wood is best known for his role in the creation of second most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum. He proposed Solidity, a contract-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts.
Along with this, He founded Parity Technologies and is currently working on PolkaDot, a heterogenous scalable multi-chain.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Elizabeth Stark
Elizabeth Stark is cofounder and CEO of Lightning Labs, where she is building a programmable financial layer for the internet through fast, scalable blockchain transactions.
Further, she is a fellow at Coin Center, the leading digital currency policy organization, and an advisor at Chia, a prominent blockchain company.
You can follow her on Twitter here.
Charles Hoskinson
Charles Hoskinson is a Colorado based technology entrepreneur and mathematician best known for role in creation of Ethereum and Cardano.
Currently, he is serving as the CEO of IOHK, a technology company leading development of Cardano and Ethereum Classic. The company’s mission is to use p2p technologies to bank the unbanked population of the world.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Oleg Andreev
Oleg is a protocol architect at popular blockchain startup Chain. He is the author of the Gitbox app, as well as the CoreBitcoin and BTCRuby libraries. He is one behind the popular Mycelium iOS crypto wallet.
Previously, he was working as a designer atRussian social network VK.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Juan Benet
Juan Benet is the founder and CEO of Protocol Labs and inventor of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a new protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open.
An alumni of Stanford, Benet is also the founder of Filecoin, a cryptocurrency-incentivized storage network. In 2017, FileCoin ICO raised more than $250M which was highest at its time.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Preethi Kasireddy
Preethi Kasireddy is theFounder & CEO at TruStory. Preethi first got introduced to blockchain technology in 2014 during her time at a16z, when they made the investment in Coinbase.
Prior to that, she was a partner at the top venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and an Investment Banker at Goldman Sachs. She studied Systems Engineering at USC.
You can follow her on Twitter here.
Muneeb Ali
Muneeb Ali is the Co-founder of Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps backed by Naval Ravikant, USV, Y Combinator and many other prominent investors.
Before this, Muneeb received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University specializing in distributed systems.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Ryan Shea
Ryan Shea is the Co-founder of Blockstack along with Muneeb Ali, a new internet for decentralized apps backed by Naval Ravikant, USV, Y Combinator and many other prominent investors.
Along with this, he has also been a part of prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the past. Similar to Muneeb, he is also an Alumni of Princeton University.
Alex Yocom-Piatt
Alex Yocom-Piatt is one of the founding members of Decred, an open, progressive, and self-funding cryptocurrency with a system of community-based governance integrated into its blockchain.
Jake Yocom-Piatt
Jake Yocom-Piatt is one of the founding members of Decred, an open, progressive, and self-funding cryptocurrency with a system of community-based governance integrated into its blockchain.
Jake is a cryptocurrency pioneer who has been using, funding and directing the creation of open-source software for 10+ years, he has been an expert source for the Chicago Tribune and a variety of industry publications.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Dave Collins
Dave Collins is the Lead Developer at Decred, an open, progressive, and self-funding cryptocurrency with a system of community-based governance integrated into its blockchain.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Vlad Zamfir
Vlad is a researcher at Ethereum Development Team working on development on Casper.
Vlad is well known for his active involvement in the Ethereum community, as well as his consistent research in the blockchain technology space
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Peter Wuille
Peter Wuille is one of the top Bitcoin Core developer and the co-founder of Blockstream. He regularly contributes to Bitcoin Core and is responsible for important improvements to Bitcoin like BIP 66, libsecp256k1, and Segregated Witness.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Jed McCaleb
Jed McCaleb is the co-founder and former CTO of Stellar.org. Prior to co-founding Stellar, he founded and served as the CTO of the company Ripple until 2013. Previously, he also created the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.
McCaleb has always been interested in p2p technology and is also known ford the peer-to-peer eDonkey and Overnet networks as well as the eDonkey2000 application.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Wladimir van der Laan
Wladimir van der Laan is a Bitcoin Core Developer and the Lead Maintainer of the Bitcoin repository on GitHub.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Joseph Lubin
Joseph Lubin is a Canadian entrepreneur known for his role in the creation o Ethereum, a decentralized cryptocurrency platform. Currently, he serves as the founder and CEO of ConsenSys, the largest startup in the CryptoSphere.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Zooko Wilcox
Zooko Wilcox is creator of ZCash, a cryptocurrency focused on privacy.
He has more than 20 years of experience in secure distributed systems, free and open source software, and startups. He is known for his work on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, ZRTP, “Zooko’s Triangle”, and more. He is one of the co-founders of the Tahoe-LAFS project. He is also the CEO of Least Authority Enterprises which provides people and enterprises a convenient and safe way to store files in the cloud.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
ArthurB
Arthur Breitman is the brain behind Tezos, a blockchain project that aims to offer “the world’s first ‘self-amending’ cryptocurrency.
Prior to Tezos, Arthur was working as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Riccardo Spagni
Riccardo is a member of Monero Core Team, who stewards of the Monero Project, and is also the lead maintainer of the Monero project.
With an academic background in informatics and logistics. Ricccardo spent many years in software development. He also founded Globee in 2017, a muti currency payment processor.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Ryan Taylor
Ryan Taylor is CEO of Dash Core Group, the organisation behind Dash, an innovative payments-focused open-source digital currency. He is a known expert in the payments industry, with over 15 years of experience at the intersection of financial services and technology.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Amber
Amber Baldet is the Founder and CEO of blockchain startup, Clovyr. Prior to this, she was the blockchain program lead at JPMorgan Chase. As Fortune says,
“While on Wall Street, she brought the hoodies (hacker-coders) and the suits (bankers) together, and she led the team that built Quorum, an Ethereum-adapted blockchain built for business.”
Along with this, she was recently appointed to the board of the Zcash Foundation, a non-profit group that governs the privacy-centric cryptocurrency Zcash.
You can follow her on Twitter here.
Oliver Beddows
Oliver Beddows is the Co-founder and Technical Lead at Lisk, the blockchain application platform. Along with this, he also serves as the Director of LightYear, a Blockchain product development studio and consultancy with special focus on coding, marketing and support.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Amir Bandeali
Amir Bandeali is the Co-founder and CTO at 0xProject, an Open Protocol For Decentralized Asset Exchange on the Ethereum Blockchain. Prior to this, he was a fixed income trader at DRW Investments.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Andy Milenius
Andy Milenius is the CTO of MakerDAO, a unique dapp that creates a Stablecoin called Dai. Before joining this team, he worked as a Software Engineer in the Developer & Productivity Tools organization of Amazon Web Services.
He holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Yaniv Tal
Yaniv Tal is the Project Lead at Graph, a protocol for building decentralized applications quickly on Ethereum and IPFS using GraphQL. Prior to this, he was the Founder and CEO of Workflo Inc and TapSavvy.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Jannis Pohlmann
Jannis Pohlmann is the Co-founder and CTO at Graph Protocol along with Yaniv Tal. Prior to this, he was a Software Engineer at Workflow Inc.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Ethan Buchman
Ethan Buchman is the CTO at Tendermint, a consensus system for blockchains. In addition to working on Tendermint, Ethan works on Cosmos, a network of blockchains. Previously, he was the Chief at CoinCulture CryptoConsulting.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Jae Kwon
Jae Kwon is a blockchain software architect and co-founder of Tendermint, and the president of the Interchain Foundation.
After graduating from Cornell in 2005 with a B.S. degree in computer science, he worked as a professional developer in Silicon Valley, including at Alexa, and at Yelp where he led the mobile application development team.
He has also been an active contributor in the Open Source community for a long time.
You can follow him on Twitter here
Brina Bondy
Brian R. Bondy is the founder & lead developer for Brave Software. Previously, He was an employee at Khan Academy, Mozilla and Evernote. Prior to that, He co-founded VisionWorks Solutions.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
JUN
Jun Hasegaqa is prolific entrepreneur behind Omise, a South Asia based payment gateway. Previously, he served as the Founder and CEO of LIFEmee Inc.
Jue has over16 years of experience in web & product design.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Dominik Schiener
Dominik is an Italian entrepreneur and co-founder of IOTA, where he’s focused on building the Machine Economy through Open Source Software. He has been in the Blockchain space since 2011, with his first startup ventures in Switzerland and the UK.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Aaron Davis
Aaron Davis is the Founder of Metamask, a browser extension tool that acts as a bridge that allows you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser without running a full Ethereum node. Prior to this, he was an employee at Apple Inc.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Dan Finlay
Dan is the Co-Founder of Metamask along with Aaron Davis, a browser extension tool that acts as a bridge that allows you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser without running a full Ethereum node. Very different to his peers, Dan has a background in comedy, writing, and teaching.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Tim Coulter
Tim Coulter is the Founder and CEO of Truffle, a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum. Along with this, Tim is a Full Stack Developer at Consensys and one of most active Ethereum Community members.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Michael Wuehler
Michael Wuehler is the founder of Infura, an Ethereum as an API service enabling infrastructure for decentralized applications.
Along with this, He is Blockchain Evangelist at ConsenSys and also the founder of Ethereum NYC.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Richard Burton
Richard Burton is the creator and founder of Balance — an Ethereum wallet that supports all ERC-20 tokens. Previously, He worked as a volunteer designer on Ethereum in the early stages of the project for a month and through this gained a very broad understanding of the blockchain. Richard has also spent time working with Stripe and the Recurse Center.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
soona amhaz
Soona Amhaz is Founder and CEO of Token Daily, a central home for crypto/blockchain updates. She is the one behind Token Daily newsletter, one of the best crypto newsletters out there. Prior to this, she was an employee at Alation, a data catalog at Startup.
You can follow her on Twitter here.
Grin Protocol Team
There is no doubt that Grin Protocol is one of the most awaited products under development stage in the Cryptocurrency space right now.
Grin’s team consist of 3 main anonymous developers hiding under nicknames. However, the team is prompt a resolving issues and that keeps them in a league of their own.
You can know more about the project here.
Nick Johnson
Nick Johnson is best known for his work as a Core developer on Ethereum. Along with this, he was the lead developer on ENS project as well.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Roman Volosovskyi
Roman Volosovskyi is the Lead Clojure Developer at Status, an open source mobile Ethereum client.
Nathan Ginnever
Nathan Ginnever is an Ethereum developer who worked on the IPFS javascript project as well as Zcash GPU mining software. He is the founder of blockEDU free and open education platform. Currently, he serves as the Founder of Finality Labs.
You can follow him on Twitter here
Daniel Larimer
Daniel Larimer is one of the most cryptocurrency serial entrepreneur behind some of most popular projects out there.
Larimer created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares (2014), was co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit (2016), and is CTO of EOS, with the company block.one.
He is the behind DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake Algorithm) consensus algorithm and Graphene technology.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Nicolas Barry
Nicolas Barry is the CTO at Stellar, a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. Prior to this, He helped build large scale systems at Microsoft and Salesforce.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Ameen Soleimani
Ameen Soleimani is the Founder and CEO of SpankChain, a blockchain based economic and technological infrastructure for the adult industry built on Ethereum.
Before SpankChain, he used to work at Consensys as a Resident Expert on State Channels. There, he contributed to the AdChain project and helped launch AdToken, which raised $10M in 23s and holds the world record for the fastest selling token launch in history.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Nadav Hollander
Nadav Hollander is the co-founder of Dharma Protocol, a decentralized lending protocol. Prior to this, he has worked as an intern at Google and Coinbase.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Kayvon Tehranian
Kayvon Tehranian is the Senior Software Developer at Dharma Labs, a protocol for generic P2P tokenized debt agreements.
An alumni of Princeton, Kayvon previously worked at companies like Google and McKinsey.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Pierre Bertet
Pierre Bertet is UI & Interaction Developer at Aragon, a decentralized app (dApp) on the Ethereum blockchain that allows anyone to create and manage a decentralized organization.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Adam Ludwin
Adam Ludwin is the co-founder and CEO of Chain(now Interstellar). Chain builds the cryptographic ledgers that underpin breakthrough financial products. Prior to Chain, Adam was an investor at RRE Ventures in New York.
Along with this, he holds an MBA degree from Harvard University.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Kartik Mandaville
Kartik Mandaville the founder and CEO of SpringRole, the startup aiming to become the LinkedIn on Blockchain. SpringRole is backed by notable investors such as — Science, Bloomberg Beta and high profile Angels like Gil Penchina and Mike Jones. Along with this, Kartik also serves as the Senior Technical Advisor at Science-Inc.
Prior to to this, he was CTO as Science Inc. An alumni of Carnegie Mellon University, Kartik was a part of the IBM Watson project and worked on genome analysis with machine learning.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Ryan Selkis (TwoBitIdiot)
Ryan Selkis has been an active entrepreneur, investor, and analyst within the crypto community since 2013.
Prior to founding Messari, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and founding team member at Digital Currency Group and CoinDesk.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Taylor Monahan
Taylor Monahan is the founder & CEO of MyCrypto. Previously she founded MyEtherWallet.
She is a dropout from New York University.
You can follow her on Twitter here.
Some Honorable Mentions
Varun Deshpande
Varun Deshpande is the Co-founder of Nuo, a decentralised and transparent crypto banking platform for emerging markets.
Prior of this, he founded two companies namely Beewise, a financial identity platform to help commerce driven apps personalize their user experience and increase revenue and an online job portal named TopTalent.in.
He is an alumni of BITS, Pilani.
You can follow him on Twitter here
Anandan Jayaraman
Anandan is the Founder and CEO of Pulse, an end-to-end protocol and decentralized application suite seeking to disrupt push marketing and search advertising for high-value products and services. Prior to this, Anandan has worked in leadership roles at SAP, Epiphany, and Siebel Systems, and was CxO at multiple data science startups.
He holds a MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and is an alumnus of the Stanford Executive Program (SEP).
Bevan Barton
Bevan Barton is the Founder and CEO of Peepeth, a social network powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
Previously, he was the President at AppStone which offers educational products for aspiring iPhone developers.
Will Chung
Will Chung is the Founder of DIRT Protocol, a protocol for building Token Curated Registries. Prior to this, he was the Lead Ecommerce Enginner at Pebble and founded a startup named Noteleaf(YC’11).
You can follow him on Twitter here.
Jaynti Kanani
Jaynti Kanani is Co-founder & CEO at Matic Network, providing free, instant and secure Ethereum based cryptographic token payments and transfers. Prior to this, he was a Data Scientist at Housing.com.
You can follow him on Twitter here.
If you believe that you are building something really cool, you can become a part of the list by applying here.
If you wish to nominate someone to this list, you can tweet out to us Xpo Network.
About the Author
Ankit Kumar Singh is the Product & Community Evangelist at Prism Labs, makers of Xpo.Network, a Community Development Platform.
