The Breakdown - The 10 (Other) Most Crypto Influential

Starting point is 00:00:04 Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, December 11th, and we are doing something fun today, something that is one of my favorite activities of the year, checking out end of the year list. So I'm talking biggest trends, most important people, you name it. I don't know that I'm going to have a. chance to really do my own list this year about trends or about anything else, given that this whole

Starting point is 00:00:43 podcast is a daily podcast thing. But what I thought would be fun today is to quickly breeze through CoinDesk's most influential list. It just came out over the course of this week. They put 50 people on there and then share a few folks that I thought I would put on if I were editing. Now, I will say this up front. I don't believe that most influential lists like this are meant to be definitive or singular or exclusionary to anyone who wasn't on them. I think they're about provoking thought, about reflecting on the year that was, about having a chance to, in the context of the CoinDesk editorial room, probably debate internally a bunch of different things. So me adding 10 more isn't a knock on who CoinDesk put on there, and I'm not going to go through and rank and review

Starting point is 00:01:25 anyone that they did. But so that you know who was on there, I'm going to start by quickly breezing through that list of 50 folks, and then I'll get into 10-ish more that I might have had on my personal list. So CoinDisc didn't rank order their list, but they had a top 10 and then the rest of the top 50. So the top 10 includes Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX. Roham, Gary Goslu, the CEO of Dapper Labs, which is NBA Top Shot, Bitcoin's taproot developers, Jack Mahler's, the founder and CEO of Strike, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Tesla, and of course, trolling fame. Trung Nuyen, the CEO of Axi Infinity, Cynthia Lummis, a U.S. Senator from Wyoming. Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission,

Starting point is 00:02:08 Doe Kwan, the CEO of Terraform Labs, and Katie Juan, the general partner at Entreason Horowitz. So that's their top 10. Now, the Honorable 40 include All-Seeing Seneca, who's the creative lead at Board Ape Yacht Club, Naveen Jane from Yat Labs, the Polly Network hacker, they say for, quote, educating us on the difference between hack and exploit. Roaniel Rumburg, Audius's CEO, who's building one of the biggest web three applications, a competitor to Spotify. Michael Shalov, who's the CEO of Defy Infrastructure Firm Fireblocks.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, of course. Camila Rousseau, the founder of the Defiant. Tim Beko, the Ethereum developer, Mark Cuban, the investor and Web3 Bull. Willie Wu, one of Bitcoin Twitter's best-loved chartist. Isaiah Jackson, the author of Bitcoin and Black America. Stanley Kulachov from Ave. Ryan Selkis, the CEO of Masari, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, Andre Cronier, the creator of Yern, Gavin Wood, the creator of Pocodot, Ariana Simpson, the general partner at

Starting point is 00:03:08 Andresen Horowitz, Palo Arduino, the CMO of Tether, Vitalik, of course, the founder of Ethereum, Antonio Juliano, the creator of Decentralized Exchange, DYDX, Jeremy Aller, the CEO of Circle, Danny Ryan, programmer at the Ethereum Foundation, Michael Saylor, of course, Michael Saylor, the CEO of Micro Strategy, Elizabeth Warren, who's decided to go ham against crypto, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Barry Silbert, the founder of the Digital Currency Group, Seri Chea, who's helped bring Cambodia's Central Bank digital currency to the world, Ray Yousef, the founder of Peer-to-Pure Exchange, Paxville, President Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist Party. Bitfinext, one of the pseudonymous accounts that has long been against Tether,

Starting point is 00:03:50 CZ from finance, Robert Leshner, from compound, Devin Finser, the founder and CEO of OpenC. Matt Hall and John Watkinson, who are from Larva Labs, aka Cryptopunks, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter. Kristen Smith of the Blockchain Association, Mike Winkleman, aka Beeple, the biggest selling NFT artist of all time, Anatoly Yakovenko, one of the founders of Salana, and then they have a group of celebrities that discovered crypto this year as sort of a collection. Sorry for the long read of the folks on there, but I feel like it's an important thing for you guys to have context of that before we get into the list of folks that I would add.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Let's start with one that I have to imagine was one of the most contentious inside that newsroom, which was El Salvador's president, Naïbe Bucle. So what's undeniable is that one of the biggest stories in Bitcoin this year was the adoption of Bitcoin as a national currency by a sovereign state in the form of El Salvador. This is significant for a huge number of reasons. One, the potential precedent it sets. Two, from a technical perspective, the stress test that it creates on the Bitcoin network.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Three, from a developer incentive perspective. The additional reasons to go out and build on the Lightning Network, which powers so much new infrastructure. And so on, and so on, and so on. It's something that was pretty unimaginable even just a few short years ago. Now, I imagine that one of the reasons that Somat Coin Desk would have not wanted Buceli to be on that list, is the concerns that surround him having to do with the way he runs the country, whether he is slouching in some ways towards authoritarianism or dictatorship. This is not something that's swept under the rug. It's something that Bitcoins themselves

Starting point is 00:05:26 discuss pretty frequently. There's also the fact that Jack Mahler's from Strike serves as something of a stand-in for the El Salvador experiment. But still, I think if I'm making this list, I do end up putting Buceli on there. If you've listened to the show, it's not because I don't have these concerns around creeping authoritarianism. It's that most influential to me doesn't necessarily bring with it value judgments about the person who is influential. It's only how much their actions have mattered or shaped that year. And I think as much as Jack Maillers and the folks who were around Buckele influenced his decisions, ultimately, it was his drive as the head of his nation that brought Bitcoin to where it was in that country. I think the El Salvador experiment is one we should

Starting point is 00:06:07 continue to root for and watch closely. Nighting sponsors this podcast, and they are the go-to Bitcoin company for banks and credit unions as well as corporate treasuries, fintechs, and hedge funds. Learn more at nightig.com That's nydig.com slash nLW. Next, going back to sort of the beginning of the year and something that's just slightly orthogonal to crypto, my next edition is Keith Gill, aka deep-ficking value, aka Roaring Kitty. No single trader was more associated with the GameStop meme trade slash movement slash whatever the hell it was that ended up all the way in front of a congressional hearing.

Starting point is 00:06:56 Roaring Kitty is to me in many ways a stand-in for a new generation of traders that came up through the COVID lockdown era and found their way to these new types of products. Now, some of them have stayed just in meme trading. Many have found their way to crypto. And as easy as it is to be cynical about them or to accuse them, in fact, of cynicism. I think, as I've said on the show before, that there's something much more significant happening, that they are, in fact, a reaction to the world around them. And what's more, whether cynical or not, they're a part of the market landscape that must be contended with now. Also, the man sat in front of Congress and said, as for me, I like the stock.

Starting point is 00:07:32 What's not to love? Next up, a set of voices from the world of research and analysis. And honestly, these are pretty easy if you just go by who's most quoted on this show. So first, let's talk about Lynn Alden. Lynn was the breakout star of last year from both a macro and a Bitcoin perspective when it comes to research analysis and just incredibly cogent thinking about where markets hit larger structural and geostrategic patterns, but she really reinforced that this year. Lynn is the type of analysts who can never be overexposed because you always want to know what

Starting point is 00:08:04 they have to say about the next thing, even if you just heard them talk about the last thing. I also want to give a shout out to two that are more in the Bitcoin space and more fresh and new, however, and that's Will Clemente and Dylan Leclair. If you're listening to this show, I literally guarantee you that you are familiar with these guys, you follow them on Twitter, you read what they have to say about on-chain analysis, and you pay attention to when they're watching trends. These guys are both extremely young and still learning and honing their craft, which makes how influential they already are all the more impressive. Speaking of impressive voices, I want to talk about a couple folks in the NFT space. NFTs are fascinating

Starting point is 00:08:42 to me from the standpoint of where influence is happening. If you look around, there aren't really big NFT YouTube shows yet, nor are there big NFT podcasts, which is frankly kind of crazy. given how significant this industry or subsector or whatever you want to call it has become. Part of the reason for that is that those just aren't the mediums where the thought leaders of this space live. Instead, those folks live in Twitter spaces and in Twitter threads. Those of you who have been longtime followers of mine know that all of the stuff that I do in crypto, especially with public content, started with the original version of Longreed Sunday, which was a thread of Twitter threads. That began in 2018, right after Twitter had first

Starting point is 00:09:23 released its threading features, and I would go and curate the best threads that I saw people doing into one overarching narrative of the week. There was a long period, though, from between, call it, 2019, 2020 into this year, where threads just kind of weren't a thing anymore. They weren't being promoted by Twitter. They weren't something that people really liked. But then NFteens changed all that again, and you have had amazing content creators, amazing thinkers, use threads as their medium and shape the way that not just crypto Twitter, but crypto as a whole, sees NFTs and where they fit. I'm going to give the nod to two folks in that. The first is Punk 6529. 6529's threads have been some of the absolute most influential. I've seen numerous

Starting point is 00:10:04 people talk about how those threads contextualize NFTs for them, help them understand, and got them in the space. They also bridge from NFTs to other parts of the crypto industry and indeed even to culture at large. If you want a sentence for that, go back a couple weeks ago to listen to Long Read Sunday called America and the Metaverse. The other person I wanted to shout out, though, was Cosimo de Medici, who revealed themselves to be none other than Snoop Dog. The reason why I want to highlight Cosimo is that, one, Snoop or not, the threads that they've written are genuinely good, but second, it's the first time that we've seen a celebrity engage and build a following in this new space on the terms of the space entirely, rather than

Starting point is 00:10:43 leveraging their brand to get started. I think that that. that harkens to something that we're going to see more and more, and I think that we will look back at Snoop as the progenitor of that approach. Staying on NFTs for a minute, I think that we should shout out Sotheby's and Christie's, the world's most famous and storied auction houses. It strikes me that part of what has made NFTs such a fascinating phenomenon this year is how many different places they're showing up. The embrace by these traditional auction houses, has I guarantee it brought new types of attention to that space, has brought new legitimacy in terms of traditional art communities. And it may not be that NFTs quote-unquote need that, but that's not really

Starting point is 00:11:20 the point. The point isn't about a new phenomenon needing something. It's about whether it can be accessible and enjoyable for a wide array of people. When you have traditional institutions acting not as gatekeepers, but as doors into a new space, it's a pretty powerful thing. Speaking of institutions, I want to round out this list with two nods that include both the traditional institution and a very new type of institution. From the traditional perspective, I think I'm going to add Kai Sheffield, the head of crypto at Visa, to my list. There are a ton of institutions that have been working super hard to get spun up on crypto, spun up on blockchain, integrating with stable coins, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think Visa does stand out from the pack. First, they've been

Starting point is 00:12:01 on it longer. Second, they're doing more different types of things I just reported this week about a new advisory group. But third, they're also trying to engage not just in terms of how do we adapt our infrastructure to play a similar role in a new space, but how do we understand the space on its own terms? It might have been easy to read them buying a crypto punk as just some publicity stunt when they did it over the summer, but if you read the interview with Kai about why they did it and what it represents to them, it's very clear that that wasn't the case. I expect that we're going to see more of Visa all over this space in the years to come, and a lot of the groundwork will have been laid over the course of 2021. Last on this auxiliary most influential,

Starting point is 00:12:40 list, I'm going to chuck on Pleaser Dow. These are the folks, of course, behind the purchase of the Wu-Tang clans once upon a time in Shaolin. They were a group that helped just this week spin up the free Ross Dow, which raised over $12 million, to buy Ross Ulbrick, the founder of Silk Road's first NFT collection to help with his effort to get out of jail. And my strong suspicion is that Pleaser Dow is not only going to continue to find its way into interesting moments where culture intersects finance, but they're also going to serve as something of a template for other Dao's to come. The things that they learn now, both their successes and their failures, are likely to shape a new wave of people attempting to bring people together around shared interest and shared resources.

Starting point is 00:13:21 In some ways, this addition of the most influential list is almost taking a flyer on something that I'm seeing just on its way up right now. Anyways, guys, there are a million more people who are influential out there. I've obviously had so much fun following all the different dimensions of this crazy industry, this crazy space, this crazy cultural movement, whatever the hell it is. And I appreciate you guys all being along for the ride. Let me know who would be on your list of most influential and why join the breakers discord, hit me up on Twitter, and as always, I hope you're having a great weekend. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.

The Breakdown - The 10 (Other) Most Crypto Influential

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