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A VC told me recently that it’s hard for them focus on anything else except for blockchain and crypto companies. Given the excitement around blockchain, digital currencies, bitcoin, and ICOs, I thought it would be interesting to recognize the Asian Americans that are the most influential to the future of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
This is a pretty wild list, including individuals launching their own tokens, to a journalist, to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, all the way to investors that are making a mark in the space. Read on to learn about innovative and revolutionary token projects as well as how each person is playing an important part in the development of the blockchain and cryptocurrency field. Ben Yu
Ben is the co-founder and CEO of Stream , which is building the economic infrastructure to enable a new generation of decentralized streaming applications for content creators. Stream seeks to compete directly with the centralized payment model of YouTube and Twitch by paying creators in cryptocurrency.
Previously, Ben was the co-founder of Sprayable, which develops products that you spray on your skin to get a daily dose of energy or to help you get a more refreshing night’s sleep.
Ben is a Harvard dropout who participated in the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows. Bill Shihara
Bill is the co-founder and CEO of Bittrex , one of the world’s largest crypto trading platforms and exchanges. Bittrex prides itself in being market neutral, having listed and supported hundreds of different cryptocurrencies on its platform.
As Bittrex was developed by security professionals, it uses an elastic multi-stage wallet strategy that keeps 80% to 90% of all funds offline. Trading fees are 0.25% and withdrawals are completely free and subject only to the transaction fee specified in the blockchain of the particular cryptocurrency.
Before he co-founded Bittrex, Bill’s first crypto-based business was GiftcardBTC. The site had a simple premise – sell giftcards/phone cards for BTC and take a percentage off the top.
When they decided to allow Litecoin on their platform that’s when they realized that there was no programmable way to go from LTC to BTC – that was how Bittrex was born. Before all of that, he was a security engineering manager at Amazon and manager of security threat analysis and security engineering at BlackBerry. He drove the anti-malware and security automation strategy for the BlackBerry ecosystem to protect customers from threats before they happened. Prior to working at BlackBerry, Bill spent 11 years at Microsoft working on the Windows Operating System and the Trustworthy Security team. He is currently an advisor to General Crypto, a cryptocurrency hedge fund, as well as StormX.
Bill graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Southern California.
Bobby Cho
Bobby is the head cryptocurrency trader at Cumberland Mining , which is one of the largest Bitcoin and Ethereum institutional liquidity providers and market makers. Investors contact them to buy or sell $1 Million+ blocks of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Previously, Bobby was a director at itBit, a Bitcoin exchange.
Before that he was a Vice President of SecondMarket, a marketplace for illiquid assets or securities.
So, in some ways, Bobby has always gravitated towards illiquid/difficult-to-trade products. He is currently a mentor at Plug and Play accelerator. Bobby graduated with a degree in business administration from Villanova University.
Catheryne Nicholson
Catheryne is the co-founder and CEO of BlockCypher , which developed a cloud-optimized blockchain technology layer, enabling developers and large enterprises to build, monitor and secure blockchain applications. Instead of spending three to six months building out infrastructure before developers can do basic things, if you use an API like BlockCypher, you can get out the gate in just a couple of hours. In the same manner that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a wide array of services for developers, BlockCypher has an array of web services, APIs, web hooks, web sockets, which a developer can use. Deloitte is one of BlockCypher’s key partners as they pursue their enterprise ambitions.
Catheryne says she would like to see more women involved in Bitcoin and blockchain technology as enablers for change.
Catheryne is an engineer, entrepreneur, mother and former U.S.
Naval Officer who has designed and built large scale software platforms in education, CRM, energy and emissions management, as well as tactical air mission planning for organizations like C3, Siebel Systems, and Northrop-Grumman. Before BlockCypher, Catheryne was the co-founder and CEO of MommaZoo, which enabled parents and teachers to build school-parent communities to increase parent engagement in classes. Catheryne graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, an MBA from City University, and a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Stanford University.
Charlie Lee
Charlie is the creator of Litecoin , which is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. It was among the earliest forks of the Bitcoin Core client when it launched in October 2011 and is considered the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.
Litecoin was the first to alter Bitcoin and the most significant difference is that it takes 2.5 minutes for Litecoin to generate a block, or transaction, in comparison to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. Due to its ease and speed of transacting, Litecoin is currently among the most accepted and valuable cryptocurrencies around the world.
Previously, he was the director of engineering at Coinbase. Before that he was a engineer at Google working on YouTube Mobile, Chrome OS, and Google Play Games. He graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Eric Tang
Eric is the co-founder and CTO of Livepeer , which aims to deliver a protocol and platform for decentralized live video broadcasting over the internet.
Livepeer provides an open platform that gives broadcasters, developers, and users the easy ability to get their content and message out to the world.
Previously , Eric was the co-founder and CTO at Wildcard, a native publishing platform and browser for the mobile web. Before that he was the lead developer for Hyperpublic, an open database and API of people, places, and things tied to a specific location. Eric graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Jen-Hsun Huang
Jen-Hsun is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia , a Fortune 500 company that designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming, cryptocurrency, and professional markets.
Cryptocurrency miners were born alongside bitcoin in 2009 and soon figured out that the type of math required to mine the digital coins was made faster by introducing graphics cards initially used to improve video game graphics.
Therefore, users of digital currencies have been buying up thousands of graphics cards from Nvidia to use in computers that process transactions and create more cryptocurrencies.
Predicting the market for graphics cards in cryptocurrency would grow “quite large,” Huang said the sales were “not likely to go away anytime soon. There will be more currencies to come–they will come from different nations. We have the ability to rock and roll with this market as it .
