The cryptocurrency industry is constantly growing and constantly changing, and it’s hard to sum up 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 list of nominees, recognizing stories that really took off in the final months of the year, or were on the verge of making the list. These names come from growing segments of the industry like prediction markets, resurgent areas like privacy and the well-established companies and personalities.
Privacy, including coins like Zcash and networks like Canton
Privacy has long been a concern of the crypto industry, with privacy coins, mixers and other tools meant to help participants transact without sharing all their private details. Industry participants and even federal regulators such as US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins are debating the importance of privacy in crypto transactions.
Recently, Zcash (ZCH) in particular has experienced a resurgence, with the Zashi wallet making foreclosed – ie. private – transactions for standard transactions and major investors pouring money into the network’s tokens.
“The future of privacy is like the past … in the United States, which 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,” Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said in an interview with CoinDesk Podcasts. “You don’t have to worry about someone else snooping or eavesdropping on you. And the same with financial transactions, you go to the store and you buy something and you pay them and it’s just between you and them. There is no one else who has any visibility or control over what you buy and when. Zcash implements the same mechanism using the same mechanism using the same IT mechanism for the Internet, but always only has about the human mechanism. 20 years ago, which is that it is up to you, what you say and what you spend your money on.”
Canton Network, for its part, was just tapped 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 have a certain amount of US Treasuries minted on Canton, with the underlying securities held by the Depository Trust Company.
Canton is a privacy network with a system design intended to allow participants to see only their ends of transactions, but it was also built specifically for institutions and regulated transactions.
Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara
Crypto native prediction market platform Polymarket formally stepped back from the US this year after a surge in users during the 2024 election. But it was actually Kalshi, another platform, that spearheaded a landmark lawsuit against the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. By winning that case last year, Kalshi launched political prediction markets in the US, opening the door for other platforms. It is now expanding into crypto and operating a number of other platforms.
Kalshi, which just raised $1 billion earlier this month, continues to . The fundraising put founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara’s net worth over $1 billion.
Despite some hiccups, Kalshi’s signed a number of deals this year to also power other platforms’ prediction markets, 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 – during the first several years of the exchange’s operation. Officially, she was the head of marketing at Binance, but she reportedly has a huge influence behind the scenes, overseeing 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 really have a lot of fun with how to strengthen the organization, how to build one [growing] business,” 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 this part [includes] change, will probably make the community feel a lot [more] trust 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, don’t you? “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 roof this year by taking on a board role at SharpLink, which is now an Ethereum tax company with nearly 900,000 ETH.
But where most digital asset treasury companies seem content to just hoard, 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 dividends on its holdings and claims 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
Stablecoin growth is one of the dominant narratives in 2025. Between legislation directing federal regulators to draft tailored 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 companies; companies such as PayPal have been foraying into the sector.
Payments firm Stripe bought stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge earlier this year, with the billion-dollar deal closing in February, sparking a series of partnerships, license applications and new tools for other companies to issue their own stablecoins. Zach Abrams, Bridge’s founder, said some of its tools — Open Issuance, for example — are designed to let platforms quickly build their own custom stablecoins in a press release earlier this year.
