Most Influential 2025's Honorable Mentions

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Most Influential 2025's Honorable Mentions

The crypto industry is ever-growing and ever-changing. It would be difficult to summarize it in 50 names. Here are a few final individuals and entities we wanted to make note of this year.

By Nikhilesh De|Edited by Cheyenne Ligon

Dec 19, 2025, 3:11 p.m.

The cryptocurrency industry is ever-growing and ever-changing, and it's difficult to summarize the year's zeitgeist with 50 names alone.

To wrap up CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 series, we're giving an honorable mention to a final slate of nominees, recognizing stories that really took off in the closing months of the year or who were on the cusp of making the list. These names spring from growing segments of the industry like prediction markets, resurging areas like privacy and the well-established companies and personalities.

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Privacy, including coins like Zcash and networks like Canton

Privacy has long been a concern for the crypto industry, with privacy coins, mixers and other tools intended to help participants transact without sharing all of their private details. Industry participants and even the likes of federal regulators like U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair 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 shielded — 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 that I was born into, and the whole world where everyone lived, you could have a conversation with someone. It's just between you and them," said Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox in an interview with CoinDesk Podcasts. "You don't have to worry about if someone else is lurking or eavesdropping on you. And the same with financial transactions, you go to the store and you buy something and you pay them, and that's just between you and them. There's no one else who has any visibility or control over what you buy and when. Zcash implements that same mechanism using cryptography for the internet, but it's really just the same mechanism that humanity has always lived with until about 20 years ago, which is that what you say and what you spend your money on is up to you. It's not up to anyone else."

Canton Network, for its part, was just tapped to act as the tokenization partner for securities industry heavyweight Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). While Digital Asset, the company behind Canton, and DTCC are presently only working on a minimally viable product, the plan is to let some amount of U.S. Treasury securities to be minted on Canton, with the underlying securities custodied by the Depository Trust Company.

Canton is a privacy network, with a system design intended to allow participants to only see their ends of transactions, but it was also built specifically for institutions and regulated transactions.

Kalshi cofounders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara

Crypto native prediction markets platform Polymarket formally reentered the U.S. this year, following a sharp uptick in users during the 2024 election. But it was actually Kalshi, another platform, which spearheaded the way through a pivotal court case against the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Winning that case last year let Kalshi launch political prediction markets in the U.S., opening the door for other platforms. It's now expanding to crypto and powering a number of other platforms.

Kalshi, which just raised $1 billion earlier this month, is continuing to . The fundraise put founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara's net worths at over $1 billion.

Despite some hiccups, Kalshi's signed a number of deals this year to power other platforms' prediction markets as well, including with Coinbase and Phantom Wallet, and will be used by legacy 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 limelight despite launching the platform with Changpeng Zhao — with whom she also shares children — over the first several years of the exchange's operations. Officially, she was the head of marketing at Binance but she reportedly holds immense influence behind the scenes, overseeing the Binance Labs venture capital fund, boosting BNB Chain's growth and working on Binance's acquisitions.

Earlier this month Yi He was formally named co-CEO of the platform, alongside Zhao's successor Richard Teng.

"I'm really very funny about 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 part and another part … I'm an OG, and I think that this part [includes] change, will probably make the community feel much [more] confidence and I will spend more time waiting for user feedback, improving our product and building a better platform."

"I think Yi really understates her role, right? … Anybody that knows the crypto industry and knows Binance knows Yi has been involved from day one in terms of building this to where it is today," Teng said on the same podcast. "She plays a very, very critical role in our development."

SharpLink chairman Joe Lubin

ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin — no stranger to CoinDesk's Most Influential list — took a new tack this year by taking on a board role at SharpLink, which is now an Ethereum treasury firm holding nearly 900,000 ETH.

But where most digital asset treasury companies seem content to just hodl, SharpLink said it plans to actually allocate its holdings, announcing it would deploy $200 million worth of ether to Consensys' layer-2 decentralized finance tool Linea in the coming years. The company intends to seek yield on its holdings, claiming that using its funds in this manner would make the treasury "more productive."

The company also continues to raise funds for its ETH buys.

Bridge founder Zach Abrams

Stablecoin growth is one of the dominant narratives of 2025. Between legislation directing federal regulators to craft bespoke 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 the crypto-native firms; companies like PayPal have been foraying into the sector.

Payment firm Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge earlier this year, with the billion-dollar deal closing in February, setting off a string of partnerships, license applications and new tooling for other companies to issue their own stablecoins. Zach Abrams, Bridge's founder, said some of its tooling — Open Issuance, for example — is designed to let platforms quickly build their own bespoke stablecoins in a press statement earlier this year.

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