Someone who reaches the top in a particular field does so not because they caught the right trend, but because they inherently possess the ability to get things done.
These skills are transferable. That’s why we’re seeing an interesting phenomenon: over the past few years, the smartest, most aggressive, and most restless individuals in the crypto industry are now frequently appearing in the AI world.
Some people are writing macro-level analyses that influence Silicon Valley’s thinking, some are leading strategic decisions at top AI companies, and some are building the infrastructure that developers use every day.
Although many who have left are unwilling to mention crypto anymore, it is undeniable that crypto has served as a boot camp, cultivating successive generations of individuals with sharp judgment, a keen sense of risk, and an acute sensitivity to "power structures"—who are now reshaping another industry.
Alex Atallah
If you've done AI development, you've likely used or heard of OpenRouter, a unified API that connects to hundreds of large models—from the GPT series to Claude to Llama and various open-source models—allowing you to call whichever one you need.
Its emergence solves a very real problem: by 2026, model layers are evolving too rapidly, with each provider using different interface standards—developers could easily lose their minds just trying to manage which models to integrate.
The founder of OpenRouter is Alex Atallah.
Before AI, he was better known as the co-founder and CTO of OpenSea.
Before dominating the AI infrastructure space, Alex was already a celebrated figure in the tech industry. As one of the few breakout products in the crypto sector, OpenSea transformed the NFT market from a niche novelty into a billion-dollar platform.
From OpenSea to OpenRouter, he has transferred his integrative thinking from the crypto industry to AI. He recognized that models in the AI era are like tokens or protocols in the Web3 era—inevitably destined to evolve from chaos to consolidation. Currently, he is leveraging his experience in high-concurrency processing gained in the crypto space and his deep understanding of decentralized distribution to build OpenRouter into the foundational “app store” of the AI era.
Kris Marszalek
In 2025, someone spent $70 million to purchase the domain AI.com.
This is Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com.
In the crypto world, Kris is best known for naming Los Angeles’s Staples Center as Crypto.com Arena and for the Super Bowl ad that made countless people remember the name “Crypto.com”.
After acquiring AI.com, he plans to transform the domain into an AI Agent integration platform—moving AI beyond the "chatbox" to become digital employees capable of booking tickets, managing finances, and handling complex workflows for users.
Leopold Aschenbrenner
If you've been around the AI scene for a while, you've probably heard this name already—the guy who graduated from Columbia at age 19, got fired by OpenAI, and then went on to manage a fund worth billions of dollars.
One of the most controversial and talented young figures in today’s AI landscape, Leopold Aschenbrenner has become a leading AI macro strategist and investment magnate in Silicon Valley. He currently manages Situational Awareness LP, a multi-billion-dollar fund focused exclusively on betting on the foundational pillars of AGI progress: power infrastructure, cutting-edge semiconductors, and massive compute centers.
Many first learned of him through his famous 165-page paper, "Situational Awareness," which predicted the arrival of AGI around 2027. He is not only a core member of OpenAI’s former Superalignment team but also a leading advocate currently pushing for the U.S. to elevate AI development to the level of the Manhattan Project, widely regarded as one of the few visionaries capable of seeing into the black box of large model evolution.
Interestingly, Leopold’s journey began not in AI, but in crypto.
Around 2022, shortly after graduating from Columbia University at the age of 19, he joined the FTX Future Fund, which was funded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Within this fund, strongly influenced by "effective altruism" (EA), Leopold was not focused on speculative trading in crypto markets, but rather on evaluating how crypto wealth could be used to mitigate existential risks to humanity.
It was precisely this experience working at the top-tier think tank in the crypto space that exposed him to in-depth research on AI risk and taught him how to think about the ultimate trajectory of technology within the context of large-scale capital flows.
Avital Balwit
In addition to Leopold Aschenbrenner, Avital Balwit, former senior assistant at the FTX Future Fund, has also entered the AI industry and is now a core decision-maker at Anthropic, one of the most closely watched AI startups globally.
Avital Balwit currently serves as Chief of Staff to Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, requiring her to participate in the company’s highest-level strategic decisions and coordinate resources amid the model competition between Anthropic and OpenAI. After all, Anthropic’s flagship product, Claude, is steadily closing the gap with ChatGPT.
Avital Balwit is most famous in the AI community not entirely for this position, but for the articles she has written. She has seriously explored where human meaning comes from in a post-work era, profoundly shaping Silicon Valley’s thinking about societal structures after the widespread adoption of AGI, making her one of the most influential cultural commentators of the AI era.
Previously, at the laboratory funded by crypto giant SBF, she was responsible for screening and evaluating projects capable of mitigating existential risks posed by AI, biosecurity, and long-term governance. Anthropic was one of the investments made by the FTX Future Fund at the time, with SBF investing $580 million in this AI project in 2023.
In addition, Avital’s recent views on UBI (Universal Basic Income) in the age of AI are highly distinctive, largely informed by her early research into decentralized distribution in the Web3 space.
Emad Mostaque
Many people first knew Emad through Stable Diffusion.
In fact, Emad’s career began in finance. At age 23, he started managing his own hedge fund, later becoming Co-Chief Investment Officer at Capricorn Long/Short EM, focusing on emerging markets strategies. In 2017, the fund he led won the Annual Emerging Markets Risk-Adjusted Hedge Fund Award. From 2005 to 2020, he spent fifteen years in global macro hedge funds, studying “systemic mega-trends” such as economic cycles, policy shifts, and technological disruptions and their long-term impacts on asset prices.
In 2013, he began engaging with Bitcoin and Ethereum as an investor and participated in numerous early crypto projects as an angel investor.
In 2019, Emad worked on a project called Symmitree, which aimed to use blockchain technology to lower the barrier for low-income populations to access digital technologies. The project was largely discontinued after about a year because he encountered a major challenge: centralized institutions—hospitals, governments, and tech companies—were unwilling to open their data and models, even in the face of a global public health crisis.
Emad later said that this experience convinced him entirely: centralization is not an efficiency issue, it’s a structural one. No one will voluntarily give up control over data and computing power unless the system design compels them to cooperate. In 2020, Emad founded Stability AI. He believed AI should not be the exclusive toy of a few labs—models should be open source, training processes should be transparent, and anyone should be able to build on top of them.
In 2022, Stable Diffusion was released, and for the first time, an open-source image generation model truly broke through the moat of commercial proprietary models. During that period, Stability AI’s valuation soared to the billion-dollar level, and Emad himself became a symbolic figure in the open-source AI movement.
However, internal company issues were also accumulating simultaneously: controversies over his management style, questions about the mismatch between his spending rate and revenue, and the departure of several key researchers... In early 2024, he left Stability AI amid controversy.
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