Bankless: 12 Crypto Builders to Watch in 2024
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Bankless: 12 Crypto Builders to Watch in 2024
This article compiles 12 outstanding talents in the crypto field who will lead the direction of the crypto industry's development in 2024.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: David Hoffman, Co-Founder of Bankless
Translation: xiaozou, Jinse Finance
1. Sreeram Kannan, Founder of EigenLayer
Founder of EigenLayer, the father of modern restaking, a beloved philosopher of mass coordination.
Sreeram Kannan lives in the future—specifically, a future I’d also like to live in. His vision for how EigenLayer enables flexible, large-scale human coordination is a breath of fresh air in an industry that often seems lost.
His clarity of thought, linking technical details with abstract principles of trust and coordination expansion, has earned him and EigenLayer massive attention as the next focal point of Ethereum scalability—something we didn’t even realize existed until EigenLayer introduced the concept of restaking!
As the most critical part of Ethereum’s roadmap draws closer, restaking has become central to Ethereum’s narrative in 2024.
With EigenLayer’s mainnet launch approaching, new AVS architectures going live, and the restaking market developing, you’ll hear rising waves of excitement from both the Ethereum community and the broader crypto space. But one big question remains: Can “trust-as-a-service” penetrate non-crypto use cases beyond cryptocurrency companies?
2. Nick White, Founder of Celestia
Founder of Celestia, data provider, modular maximalist, monolithic minimalist.
Nick White is pushing forward the modular frontier in crypto. How far can modularity go in this space? The core of modularity resonates deeply with crypto values: antifragility, redundancy, replicability, expressiveness. The Celestia project has become the Schelling point for investing in the modular thesis.
Modularity advocates see Celestia as unleashing an explosion of innovation within modular ecosystems. Is low-cost DA (data availability) really what was missing from modular theory? What kind of asset is TIA? Celestia’s DA enables more rollups on Ethereum, which are vital for Ethereum’s long-term growth—but could this be a Trojan horse mechanism bootstrapping Celestia’s own rollup-based ecosystem? Is TIA money?
3. Neel Somani, Founder of Eclipse
Founder of Eclipse, maker of the Platypus project, active participant across ecosystems, a walker among flyers.
Neel Somani is advancing development in new domains he discovered through first-principles thinking. After building a Rollup-as-a-Service provider and transitioning into Eclipse, his articulation of how Eclipse will ultimately evolve offers rich insights.
Extremes are rarely ideal places to stand, but Neel has found a middle ground in 2024—between leading projects such as Ethereum, L2s, Solana, and Celestia.
As the SVM ecosystem grows, Eclipse’s success becomes easier to imagine. Can the idea of SVM on Ethereum hold up? As maximalists of Solana and modularism drift further apart, can Eclipse become an oasis between them?
With Eclipse preparing for mainnet launch, we’ll see what value a highly secure monolithic L2 on Ethereum can offer the world.
Whatever happens, Neel will teach us a lot along the way.
4. Keone Hon, Founder of Monad
Founder of Monad, father of Molandack, EVM parallelist, database parallelist, I/O parallelist.
Keone has emerged as the prominent face of Monad, a project dedicated to bringing parallelism to the EVM ecosystem. The narrative is forming: “Solana’s speed and low cost, combined with Ethereum’s network effects.”
Some experts argue that merely parallelizing a virtual machine isn’t groundbreaking—what truly matters is parallelizing database access. It turns out Keone and the Monad team have done exactly that, which is why MonadDB is a key innovation at the heart of Monad.
Monad’s 2024 launch is highly anticipated—just look at the intense activity from Nads (Monad supporters) in the #TheRoom channel on Monad’s Discord. People are already watching closely, trying to uncover treasure between the worlds of Ethereum and Solana.
5. Andrew Huang, Founder of Conduit
Founder of Conduit, chain gardener, volume cultivator, cost reducer, framework copier-paster, someone rooted at the bottom of the basin.
Andrew Huang is leading the charge to reduce the cost of deploying new rollup chains—every single cost. Thanks to Andrew and Conduit, resource overhead, technical complexity, and most other barriers have been eliminated. If you believe rollups on Ethereum will become as numerous as blogs on the internet, then you’re rooting for Andrew.
Conduit is a Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) provider—think Cloud for Rollups. The economies of scale with RaaS are enormous. Lowering rollup resource costs means more applications can evolve into app-specific chains, and all Conduit-compatible chains automatically inherit top-tier rollup security. As Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap matures, Andrew, Conduit, and other RaaS projects will lead the way into the fertile garden enabled by this vision.
Finally, I hope Andrew pushes past the imagined boundaries of rollups. Right now, we generally think of rollups as faster, cheaper blockchains. I believe this is an oversimplified and unimaginative view of their future. Reducing rollup costs won’t just make them faster and cheaper—it will open up an entirely new design space for rollups.
I’ll be watching as Andrew transforms the two-dimensional world of rollups into a three-dimensional one.
6. Jill Gunter, Strategy Officer at Espresso
Strategy Officer at Espresso, L2 transaction pioneer, composability carrier, chain abstractor, master of historical anecdotes.
In my mind, Jill Gunter has always been a quiet force in crypto. She joined Espresso Systems in 2021 as CSO.
Espresso sits at the highly permeable boundary between Ethereum and modular chain theory. As a sequencing module for L2 chains, Espresso acts as a shared sequencer across multiple integrated chains. The era of L2 recomposability is approaching, and Jill’s position at Espresso, combined with her ability to explain complex topics, may bring her into the spotlight multiple times in 2024.
The day Jill’s podcast *Grind My Gears* with Meltem Demirors aired its final episode was a sad one. It was arguably the best podcast in crypto at the time and served as a model for Bankless’s own evolution.
As the number, structure, and complexity of rollups explode, Espresso and shared sequencers will act as the glue holding Ethereum’s upper layers together.
I expect Espresso to grow increasingly important in 2024—whether through Jill stepping into her podcasting era again, or through CEO Ben Fisch, who is equally worth watching.
7. Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins
Fixer of Pudgys, the adult in NFT PFPs, king of distribution, executor of industry promises.
In 2021, the NFT industry collectively made many promises about the future potential of NFTs: real-world presence, gaming metaverses, and limitless brand value. And as predictably as clockwork, when prices fell, those bull-market dreams collapsed, and founders abandoned their projects.
Luca Netz acquired the Pudgy Penguins project in 2022 and turned it around, setting course directly for Valhalla. Pudgy plush toys now appear in Walmart stores, and the Pudgy World metaverse is launching this year.
The question is, Pudgy Penguins seem only to be getting started—their current achievements are just the first phase of a grander plan. While other NFT projects haven’t even found the starting line, Pudgy Penguins have already begun their race.
What does this space have in store for us? How large can the real-world footprint of digital assets become? How real can the Pudgy metaverse get?
You’ll need to follow Luca to find out.
8. ETF Experts Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart
Unlikely protagonists, voices of traditional finance, aligners of worlds.
After years of waiting, spot Bitcoin ETFs have finally launched, shattering all previous volume records for ETF debuts. Spot ETH ETFs could be approved as early as May.
Even if spot ETH ETFs are rejected (unlikely), Eric and James will remain in the spotlight, as applications for spot ETH ETFs will simply be resubmitted again and again until approval comes through.
As the crypto market cap surpasses $2 trillion and is expected to reach around $10 trillion in the next cycle, more and more assets will become compelling targets for TradFi ETF filings. What comes after ETH? I don’t know, but one thing is certain: Eric and James will always have something worth listening to.
It doesn’t matter if no additional ETFs emerge in this market cycle. They will eventually come. Cryptocurrency represents the birth of an entirely new asset class, and currently only one asset within it has an ETF.
If you follow Eric and James on Twitter, it’s clear they’ve been influenced by crypto culture. This is a one-way street. They are now one of us.
9. Li Jin, Co-Founder of Variant
Co-Founder of Variant Fund, passionate pioneer, reinventor of labor, contemplative communicator, one who injects warmth into cold code.
Unless cryptocurrency makes a tangible impact on global culture, it has failed. Crypto culture is distinctly different from other internet cultures. Gradually, everything crypto touches begins to reflect the crypto culture we’ve created—whether good or bad.
Li Jin represents the “better” side of that. As crypto matures in its products and influence, it will begin to exert deeper psychological and cultural impacts on those living within its orbit. “If you adopt crypto protocols, you adopt crypto values.”
Mainstream crypto products will be cultural products—we saw this with friend.tech! Low-cost data availability, modular blockchains, and parallelized VMs are great, but these investment themes serve isolated communities. We need to discover new cultural elements to bring crypto products to the other 5 billion internet users.
Li Jin focuses on consumer crypto products—which is why I’m paying close attention to what Li Jin pays attention to.
10. Mike Ippolito, Founder of Blockworks
Founder of Blockworks, author of many podcasts, swimmer beneath the waves, down-to-earth tinkerer of ideas.
Every conversation with Mike teaches me something new—unlocking a new angle or stirring half-formed thoughts. Thankfully, he hosts his own podcast. His writing is deeply technical and research-heavy, advanced and well worth your time. Mike possesses a kind of tribal immunity gene that grants him a chain-agnostic perspective.
His company, Blockworks, has become my go-to source for crypto news. Crypto journalism is hard, and Blockworks strikes the perfect balance between journalistic integrity and crypto alignment.
11. Anthony Sassano, Founder of The Daily Gwei
Founder of The Daily Gwei, creator of infinite possibilities, professional amateur node operator, humble ETH bull.
Anthony doesn’t belong in the same category as the others above. When I say “people to watch in 2024,” I mean more people like Anthony Sassano and The Daily Gwei. The Daily Gwei was my first stop on the Ethereum journey. If you listen to The Daily Gwei every day, you’ve already graduated from crypto university.
Anthony’s carefully curated Daily Gwei Discord is a fortress of informed, technically skilled Ethereum investors and enthusiasts.
12. Deana Burke and Natasha Hoskins, Co-Founders of The Too Online Podcast
Co-Founders of Boys Club podcast, dynamic duo, world-builders, sharers and expressers of resonance, dreamers forever grounded.
One of my favorite new podcasts lately is *Too Online*, hosted by Natasha Hoskins and Deana Burke, co-founders of *Boys Club*.
Natasha and Deana are crypto natives creating internet-themed content for people. On *Too Online*, each shares a story from the internet that happened last week. The stories aren’t usually about crypto, but they’re always things crypto natives can appreciate—because we’re all online too.
After spending hours each week listening to dense crypto podcasts, their light-hearted 30-minute internet gossip feels like a breath of fresh air—and reminds me that roughly 99% of society doesn’t care about native crypto topics.
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