The cryptocurrency industry is constantly growing and ever-changing, and it is difficult to sum up the zeitgeist of the year with just 50 names.
To conclude CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 series, we gave an honorable mention to a final list of nominees, recognizing stories that really took off in the final months of the year or were about to make the list. These names emerge from growing industry segments such as prediction markets, resurgent areas such as privacy, and well-established companies and personalities.
Privacy, including currencies like Zcash and networks like Canton
Privacy has long been a concern for the crypto industry, with coins, mixers, and other privacy tools aimed at helping participants transact without sharing all their private data. Industry participants and even federal regulators like US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins are discussing the importance of privacy in crypto transactions.
More recently, Zcash (ZCH) in particular has seen a resurgence, with the Zashi wallet making secured (i.e. private) transactions the default and larger investors pouring funds into the network’s tokens.
“The future of privacy is like the past… in the United States where I was born, and all over the world where everyone lived, you could have a conversation with someone. It’s just between you and them,” Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said in an interview with CoinDesk Podcasts. “You don’t have to worry if someone else is stalking you or spying on you. And the same thing with financial transactions, you go to the store and buy something and you pay them, and that’s just between you and them. There is no one else who has visibility or control over what you buy and when. Zcash implements that same mechanism using cryptography for the Internet, but in reality it is the same mechanism that humanity has always lived with until about 20 years ago, which is what you say and what you spend your money on is up to you, no depends on no one else.”
Canton Network, for its part, has just been chosen to act as a tokenization partner for securities industry heavyweight Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). While Digital Asset, the company behind Canton, and DTCC are currently only working on a minimally viable product, the plan is to allow a certain amount of US Treasury securities to be minted in Canton, with the underlying securities held in custody by the Depository Trust Company.
Canton is a privacy network, with a system design intended to allow participants to view only the purposes of transactions, but was also built specifically for institutions and regulated transactions.
Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara
Crypto-native prediction markets platform Polymarket formally re-entered the US this year, following a sharp rise in user numbers during the 2024 election. But it was actually Kalshi, another platform, that led the way through a pivotal court case against the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Winning that case last year allowed Kalshi to launch political prediction markets in the United States, opening the door to other platforms. It is now expanding into cryptocurrencies and boosting other platforms.
Kalshi, which just raised $1 billion earlier this month, continues to do so. The fundraising put founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara’s net worth at more than $1 billion.
Despite some setbacks, Kalshi’s signed a series of deals this year to also power the prediction markets of other platforms, including Coinbase and Phantom Wallet, and will be used by news giant CNN.
Binance Co-CEO Yi He
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, continues to grow. Yi He, one of its co-founders, largely stayed out of the spotlight despite launching the platform with Changpeng Zhao, with whom he also shares children, during the exchange’s early years of operations. Officially, she was Binance’s head of marketing, but she reportedly has immense influence behind the scenes, overseeing the Binance Labs venture capital fund, driving the growth of BNB Chain, and working on Binance acquisitions.
Earlier this month, Yi He was formally named co-CEO of the platform, alongside Zhao’s successor, Richard Teng.
“I really like knowing how to empower the organization, how to build a [growing] company,” she told CoinDesk Podcasts earlier this year. “That’s what I want to focus on in one part and in another part… I’m an OG, and I think this part [includes] change, will probably make the community feel very [more] Confidence and I will spend more time waiting for user feedback, improving our product and building a better platform.”
“I think Yi really underestimates her role, right? Anyone who knows the cryptocurrency industry and knows Binance knows that Yi has been involved from day one in terms of building this to where it is today,” Teng said in the same podcast. “She plays a very, very critical role in our development.”
Joe Lubin, President of SharpLink
ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin, no stranger to CoinDesk’s most influential list, took a new tack this year by taking a position on the board of SharpLink, which is now an Ethereum treasury firm holding nearly 900,000 ETH.
But while most digital asset treasury companies seem content to simply hodl, SharpLink said it plans to allocate its holdings, announcing that it would deploy $200 million in ether to Consensys’ layer 2 decentralized finance tool, Linea, in the coming years. The company intends to seek returns on its holdings, claiming that using its funds in this way would make the treasury “more productive.”
The company also continues to raise funds for its ETH purchases.
Bridge Founder Zach Abrams
The growth of stablecoins is one of the dominant narratives of 2025. Between legislation directing federal regulators to craft custom rules for stablecoin issuers and the tokens themselves, this segment of the broader crypto industry has never been more popular. But it’s not just about crypto-native companies; Companies like PayPal have been entering the sector.
Payments company Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge earlier this year, and the $1 billion deal closed in February, triggering a series of partnerships, license applications and new tools for other companies to issue their own stablecoins. Zach Abrams, founder of Bridge, said in a press release earlier this year that some of its tools (Open Issuance, for example) are designed to allow platforms to quickly build their own custom stablecoins.
