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Meet the 17 investors and entrepreneurs who made ten-digit fortunes on the blockchain
April 03, 2024
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The crypto winter is over. Bitcoin has more than doubled over the past 12 months, hitting an all-time high of $73,000 in March after the U.S. legalized bitcoin-pegged exchange-traded funds. The total value of all outstanding cryptocurrencies increased by 170%, adding some $1.6 trillion in market value over the past 12 months, according to CoinGecko.

That’s helped make at least 17 people crypto billionaires, according to Forbes’ 2024 World’s Billionaires list, up from nine crypto billionaires last year. These 17 investors and entrepreneurs are worth a collective $93 billion, between their estimated crypto asset holdings, publicly disclosed stock holdings and private assets. That’s more than double the $37 billion in collective crypto billionaire wealth last year.

For the third year running, Changpeng Zhao, founder and former CEO of crypto exchange Binance, is crypto’s wealthiest person. Despite pleading guilty to U.S. money laundering charges in November, CZ, as he’s known, is now worth an estimated $33 billion, up from $10.5 billion last year. That makes him the biggest crypto gainer in dollar terms since last year and the 50th-wealthiest person in the world. The bulk of his fortune comes from his majority stake in Binance, which remains the industry’s largest global trading venue by volume.

Two of this year’s biggest gainers can thank investors in their publicly traded companies. Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, a software firm that has made heavy investments in bitcoin, is now worth an estimated $4.4 billion, compared to $760 million last year. Brian Armstrong, CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, is worth an estimated $11.2 billion, up from just $2.2 billion last year. Shares of Coinbase and MicroStrategy are each up more than fourfold over the past 12 months.

Making their debut on Forbes’ annual billionaires ranking are Giancarlo Devasini, Paolo Ardoino, Jean-Louis van der Velde and Stuart Hoegner, four large shareholders of Tether, a controversial but wildly profitable stablecoin issuer. Crypto’s three-comma club also includes familiar faces like the Winklevoss twins (of Facebook fame), venture capitalist and Nikki Haley booster Tim Draper, and Ripple cofounder and budding space entrepreneur Jed McCaleb.

Here are the richest people in crypto in 2024:

NET WORTHS ARE AS OF MARCH 8, 2024; COMPARISONS ARE BETWEEN MARCH 8, 2024 AND MARCH 10, 2023.

16. Joe Lau

Net worth: $1.5 billion (vs. $1.8 billion) | Source of wealth: Alchemy

16. Nikil Viswanathan

Net worth: $1.5 billion (vs. $1.8 billion) | Source of wealth: Alchemy

The two Stanford alumni cofounded Alchemy, a Web3 infrastructure provider whose developer suite powers crypto and blockchain projects, in 2020. Investors valued Alchemy at more than $10 billion in early 2022. Today the company is worth about $5.6 billion, based on secondary sales of private shares tracked by data provider Notice.co.


15. Tim Draper

Net worth: $2 billion (vs. $650 million) | Source of wealth: Bitcoin

Draper is a venture capitalist and early Bitcoin investor. In 2014, he bought 29,656 bitcoins confiscated by U.S. Marshals from the shuttered Silk Road black market for $18.7 million, or $632 per coin. They are now worth $2 billion. He has also made dozens of VC investments in companies ranging from Tesla to Theranos.


14. Stuart Hoegner

Net worth: $2.5 billion (vs. $1.2 billion in July) | Source of wealth: Tether

Stuart Hoegner has served as general counsel for Tether and its sister company Bitfinex since 2014, and he holds an estimated 13% stake. A Canadian certified accountant, Hoegner began his career at Ernst & Young before starting Gaming Counsel Professional Corporation, a boutique law practice that catered to online gambling and cryptocurrency clients. He was also previously a director of compliance and deputy general counsel at Excapsa Software, an online poker company that became embroiled in a software-facilitated cheating scandal.

Tether has been accused of facilitating money laundering for terrorist groups and criminal organizations, including human trafficking rings that run “Pig Butchering” crypto scams. (Tether says it follows “stringent Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering protocols” and “remains committed to expeditiously working with law enforcement” to identify criminal activity.) In 2021, Tether and its sister company Bitfinex paid $18.5 million to settle fraud charges with the New York Attorney General’s office, which alleged Tether had overstated its cash reserves.


13. Mike Novogratz

Net worth: $2.5 billion (returnee) | Source of wealth: Galaxy Digital Holdings, Bitcoin

An early bitcoin investor, Novogratz heads crypto investment firm and merchant bank Galaxy Digital Holdings, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and has about $6 billion in assets under management. His stake in the company is worth about $2 billion. Prior to his career in crypto, Novogratz worked on Wall Street. He spent a decade at Goldman Sachs and then led a macro-focused fund for private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, later becoming the firm’s president.


11. Tyler Winklevoss

Net worth: $2.7 billion (vs. $1.2 billion) | Source of wealth: Bitcoin, Gemini

11. Cameron Winklevoss

Net worth: $2.7 billion (vs. $1.2 billion) | Source of wealth: Bitcoin, Gemini

The Winklevoss twins, notorious for their dispute with Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s founding (as depicted in the 2010 movie The Social Network), have most of their wealth tied up in bitcoin, which they first bought in 2013, and are believed to have large stashes of ethereum and Filecoin as well. The Winklevii also control 75% of Gemini, the crypto exchange they founded together, which aims to compete with the likes of Coinbase and Binance. Outside investors last valued Gemini at over $7 billion in 2021, but Forbes now estimates that Gemini is worth less than $1 billion because its trading volumes have plummeted amid investor and government lawsuits stemming from the 2022 collapse of its interest-bearing program, Gemini Earn.


10. Jed McCaleb

Net worth: $2.9 billion (vs. $2.4 billion) | Source of wealth: XRP sales

Another early crypto pioneer, McCaleb created Mt. Gox, the first major bitcoin exchange, in 2010. He sold it a year later, before it was infamously hacked. Next, McCaleb cofounded Ripple in 2012, but soon left over disagreements with fellow founders. Most of his wealth comes from selling much of the original 9 billion XRP he pocketed as a Ripple cofounder. He sold the last of his coins in 2022. (McCaleb also founded Stellar, a Ripple competitor, in 2014.) These days, he spends his time and financial resources on Vast, a space exploration company that he’s backing.


9. Matthew Roszak

Net worth: $3.1 billion (vs. $1.1 billion) | Source of wealth: Bitcoin, Ethereum

An early investor in bitcoin, Roszak made his first purchases in 2010. Most of his wealth comes from early bets on cryptocurrencies, including ethereum and BNB, Binance’s native token. Roszak also runs Bloq, a blockchain startup that invests in other crypto ventures and consults on projects.


8. Fred Ehrsam

Net worth: $3.2 billion (vs. $930 million) | Source of wealth: Coinbase, Paradigm

Ehrsam founded cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in 2012 with Brian Armstrong. He left the company in 2017 but remains on the board and still owns about 5% of its stock. In 2018, he cofounded Paradigm, a cryptocurrency investment firm, which now has more than $8 billion in assets under management.

Coinbase generated $2.9 billion of revenue last year, down from $3.1 billion in 2022 and $7.8 billion in 2021, the last time crypto prices spiked. But the company has returned to profitability, generating net income of $100 million, compared to a $2.6 billion net loss in 2022.


7. Chris Larsen

Net worth: $3.2 billion (vs. $2.2 billion) | Source of wealth: Ripple, XRP

Larsen cofounded Ripple in 2012 to facilitate international payments using the XRP cryptocurrency. He stepped down as Ripple CEO in late 2016 but remains executive chairman. He holds an 18% stake in Ripple, which investors value at $3.8 billion, according to recent secondary market data shared with Forbes. He also has a sizable stash of XRP—over 2.8 billion tokens—and nearly $1 billion of cash and investments, per Forbes’ estimates, largely from prior XRP sales.


6. Jean-Louis van der Velde

Net worth: $3.9 billion (vs. $1.8 billion in July) | Source of wealth: Tether

As Tether’s former CEO, van der Velde operates as a figurehead responsible for maintaining Tether’s high-level strategic relationships with banks and regulators, and owns an estimated 20% of the company. He left the Netherlands in 1985 to attend university in Taiwan, and subsequently cofounded several IT and tech startups in Asia before joining Tether. He lives in Hong Kong.


5. Paolo Ardoino

Net worth: $3.9 billion (vs. $1.8 billion in July) | Source of wealth: Tether

Ardoino serves as Tether’s CEO, its public face and owns an estimated 20% of the company. He joined Tether’s sister company, Bitfinex, as a senior software developer in 2014. Ardoino previously worked in startups as a computer programmer.


4. Michael Saylor

Net worth: $4.4 billion (vs. $760 million) | Source of wealth: MicroStrategy, Bitcoin

Saylor is the biggest crypto billionaire gainer, in percentage terms, on this year’s list. Shares of MicroStrategy, the software firm Saylor started in the 1990s and refashioned into a bitcoin investment vehicle in recent years, are up nearly 500% from last year. The company now owns about 193,000 bitcoins, making it the largest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world, according to its CFO.

Then there’s Saylor’s personal bitcoin stash—Saylor said in 2021 he holds 17,732 bitcoins that he bought at an average price of $9,882 per coin—and he is in the process of cashing out about $200 million of MicroStrategy stock, which he announced at the beginning of the year.


3. Giancarlo Devasini

Net worth: $9.2 billion (vs. $4 billion in July) | Source of wealth: Tether

Devasini is the CFO and likely the largest individual shareholder of Tether, crypto’s largest issuer of stablecoins—a form of cryptocurrency that is pegged to the U.S. dollar or other hard currency and used as a medium of exchange. Over 100 billion Tether tokens have been minted. Buoyed by higher interest rates, Tether generated $6.2 billion in profit last year from the interest it generates on customers’ collateral. Devasini owns an estimated 47% stake in Tether, which Forbes values by applying the average price-to-earnings multiples of a group of publicly traded mid-tier banks and asset managers.


2. Brian Armstrong

Net worth: $11.2 billion (vs. $2.2 billion) | Source of wealth: Coinbase

Armstrong, who cofounded Coinbase in 2013 with Fred Ehrsam, is the company’s largest individual shareholder, with an 18% stake. The crypto exchange’s stock is up 50% year-to-date, and over three-fold since last year, giving it a market capitalization of nearly $60 billion. Since November, Armstrong has sold more than $170 million worth of Coinbase stock through an automated 10b5-1 trading plan.


1. Changpeng Zhao

Net worth: $33 billion (vs. $10.5 billion) | Source of wealth: Binance

Zhao, who goes by CZ, agreed to personally pay $200 million in fines last year to settle federal money laundering charges brought by the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (Binance agreed to pay an additional $4.5 billion.) He also agreed to step down as CEO of crypto exchange Binance and is barred from involvement with Binance for three years as part of his guilty plea. (Zhao’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 30). Yet it hardly left a dent in his fortune. His stake in Binance—estimated to be 90%, based on corporate documents and conversations with former employees—is worth some $32.5 billion.

Binance remains the largest crypto exchange in the world by trading volume, generating an estimated $9 billion of revenue last year, according to Forbes’ analysis. To estimate Binance’s market value, Forbes applied the price-to-sales multiple of Coinbase, a publicly traded peer, then applied further discounts to account for Binance’s concentrated ownership, the possibility of further regulatory enforcement and key-man risks following CZ’s departure.

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Custom AI assistants that print money in your sleep? 🔜

The future of Crypto x AI is about to go crazy.

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~36b left in escrow..

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The @WhiteHouse cited Pyth in its latest report on digital financial technology, linking to the network’s research on building perpetual futures.

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As discussions around modernization and regulation continue, one thing is clear: transparent, real-time market data is no longer just a back-office detail. It’s foundational to the next chapter of global finance.

The price of everything, everywhere 🇺🇸

https://whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Digital-Assets-Report-EO14178.pdf

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PYTH: We'll Always Have Coldplay

Welcome back to The Epicenter, where crypto chaos meets corporate cringe.

But surprisingly, crypto has not been the most chaotic corner of the internet as of late.

That honor goes to the startup Astronomer, whose CEO’s cheating scandal broke the web in a glorious meme-fueled media frenzy. The company’s damage control? Hiring Gwyneth Paltrow as a “temporary spokesperson.” Do we think they’re grasping at straws or setting a new standard for PR?

Meanwhile, the markets didn’t blink. BTC is still flexing near its all-time highs. Michael Saylor’s bringing a bitcoin-adjacent money-market product to Wall Street. A pharma company just earmarked $700M to stack BNB, and analysts are calling time of death on the four-year crypto cycle. It’s a steady boom now, kittens.

A few things that are also worth noting: Winklevoss vs. JPMorgan, Visa’s take on stablecoins, and Robinhood’s Euro drama that defies the chillness of eurosummer.

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From meme-fueled PR stunts to Bitcoin-backed money-market funds, this week reminded us that markets move fast—and headlines move faster. With Wall Street automating itself, fintechs beefing with banks, and even your smartphone becoming a miner, anything is possible. Stay curious, stay cynical, and as always—stay sharp and stay liquid. We’ll see you back here in two weeks.

— The Epicenter, powered by Pyth Network

 

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4 Fintech Companies 💸& Things To Know About 🤔

The fintech revolution is reshaping the way we manage, invest, and move money, breaking down traditional barriers and empowering individuals worldwide. As financial technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, a select group of innovative companies are leading the charge by offering groundbreaking solutions that redefine banking, payments, and digital assets. Whether you’re a savvy investor, an industry professional, or simply curious about the future of finance, discovering these trailblazing fintech companies is essential to understanding today’s dynamic financial landscape.

 

  1.  Alina Invest - The AI Wealth Manager for GenZ Women

Alina is aimed at women under 25 who identify as beginner investors. They're an SEC-registered investment advisor that charges $120/year for membership. The service "buys and sells for you" and gives up notification updates of recent transactions like a wealth manager would.

👉 Getting people to invest early is crucial to building long-term wealth. One thing that holds them back is a lack of confidence and experience. Being targetted "for beginners" and people who live on TikTok should appeal. I love the sense of "we're buying and selling for you." Funds always do that, but making it an engagement mechanic is very smart. The risk here is that building a wealth business will take decades for the AUM to compound. But the next generations, Wealthfront or Betterment, will look something like Alina.

2. Blue layer - The Carbon project funding platform

Bluelayer allows Carbon project developers to take from feasibility studies to issuing credits, tracking inventory, and managing orders. Developers of reforestation, conservation, direct air capture, and other projects can also directly report to industry registries. 

👉 Carbon investing and tax credits are heavily incentivized but need transparent data. By focusing on the developers, Bluelayer can ensure the data, reporting, and credits lifecycle is all managed at the source. This is smart.

3. Akirolabs - Modern Procurement for enterprise

Akiro is a "strategic" procurement platform aiming to help enterprise customers identify risks, value drivers, and strategic levers before issuing an RFP. It aims to bring in multiple stakeholders for complex purchasing decisions at multinationals. 

👉 Procurement is a great wedge for multinational corporate transformation. Buying anything in an enterprise that uses large-scale ERPs is a nightmare of committees and spreadsheets. Turning an oil tanker-sized organization around is difficult, but the right suppliers can have a meaningful impact in the short term. That only works if you can buy from them. Getting people on the same page with a single platform is a great start.

4. NeoTax - Automated Tax R&D Credits

NeoTax allows companies to connect their engineering tools to calculate available tax advantages automatically. Once calculated, the tax fillings are clearly labeled with supporting evidence for the IRS.

👉 AWS and GCP log files and data are a goldmine. Last week, I covered Bilanc, which uses log files to figure out per-account unit economics. Now, we calculate R&D tax credits. The unlock here is LLM's ability to understand unstructured data. The hard part is understanding the moat, but time will tell.

In an era where technology and finance are increasingly intertwined, these four fintech companies stand out as catalysts for positive change. By driving progress in digital payments, asset management, lending, and decentralized finance, they are not only making financial services more accessible and efficient—they are also paving the way for a more inclusive and empowered global economy. Staying informed about their innovations can help you seize new opportunities and take part in the future of finance.

 

👀Things to know 👀

 

PayPal issued low guidance and warned of a “transition year.” The stock is down 8% in extended trading despite PayPal reporting a 9% growth in revenue and 23% EBITDA. Gross profit is down 4% YoY. PayPal's total revenues were $29Bn for the year

Adyen reported 22% revenue growth and an EBITDA margin of 46% for the full year. Adyen's total revenues were $1.75bn for the full year. The margin was down from 55% the previous year, impacted by hiring ahead of growth.

🤔 PayPal’s Braintree (unbranded) is losing market share in the US, while Adyen is winning it. eCommerce is growing ~9 to 10% YoY, and PayPal’s transaction revenue grew by 6.7%. The higher interest rate environment meant interest on balances dragged up the total revenue figure. Their core business is losing market share. Adyen is outgrowing the market by ~12%.

🤔 The PayPal button (branded) is losing to SHOP Pay and Apple Pay. The branded experience from Apple and Shopify is delightful for users; it’s fast and helps with small details like delivery tracking. That experience translates to higher conversion (and more revenue) for merchants.

🤔 The lack of a single global platform hurts PayPal, but it helps Adyen. In the earnings call, the new CEO admitted their mix of platforms like Venmo, PayPal, and Braintree are holding them back. They aim to combine and simplify, but that’s easier said than done.

🤔 Making a single platform from PayPal, Venmo, and Braintree won’t be easy. There’s a graveyard of payment company CEOs who tried to make “one platform” from things they acquired years ago. It’s crucial if they’re going to grow that they get their innovation edge back. Adyen has one platform in every market.

🤔 PayPal’s UK and European acquiring business is a bright spot. The UK and EU delivered 20% of overall revenue, growing 11% YoY. Square and Toast don’t have market share here, while iZettle, which PayPal acquired in 2018, is a strong market player. Overall though, it’s yet another tech stack and business that’s not part of a single global platform.

The two banks provided accounts to UK front companies secretly owned by an Iranian petrochemicals company. PCC has used these entities to receive funds from Iranian entities in China, concealed with trustee agreements and nominee directors. 

🤔 This is the headline every bank CEO fears. Oof. Shares of both banks have been down since the news broke, but this will no doubt involve crisis calls, committees, appearing in front of the regulator, and, finally, some sort of fine.

🤔 The "risk-based approach" has been arbitraged. A UK company with relatively low annual revenue would look "low risk" at onboarding. One business the FT covered looked like a small company at a residential address to compliance staff. They'd likely apply branch-level controls instead of the enterprise-grade controls you'd see for a large corporation. 

🤔 Hiring more staff won't fix this problem; it's a mindset and technology challenge. In theory, all of the skill and technology that exists to manage risks with large corporate customers (in the transaction banking divisions) are available to the other parts of a bank. In practice, they're not. Most banks lack a single data set and the ability for compliance officers in one team to see data from another part of the org. Getting the basics right with data and tooling is incredibly hard and will involve a multi-year effort. 

🤔 These things are rarely the failure of an individual or department; the issue is systemic. While two banks are named in this headline, the issue is everywhere. Banks need more data and better data to train better AI and machine learning. That all needs to happen in real-time as a compliment to the human staff. Throwing bodies at this won't solve the visibility issue teams have.

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What is XAH and Xahau?

If you're new to XRP, you may have noticed some of us discussing another network named 'Xahau'.

It's Like XRP ... But Different

The Xahau network was created in 2023, and its starting point was the open-source code for the XRP Ledger. A small team of researchers and entrepreneurs decided to add smart contracts to the network code.


The XRP Ledger has no smart contract capabilities, by default.

To integrate smart contracts, the team decided to use an architecture that includes 'WASM' or 'web assembly' code. Each account can have up to 10 'hooks' installed that are triggered for transactions that match specific criteria. They can run before or after a transaction is processed. This enables a variety of use cases that do not involve the need to change the network's core code.

Hooks

A 'hook' is what is known as a smart contract that can be triggered in relation to a specific account and its transactions.

The term arises from the programming world, where it generally means "code that runs based on triggering conditions." In Xahau's case, it indicates code that is run before, or after, a transaction is processed.
 
Each hook must be installed on a specific account by the party that controls the account - i.e., the secret key holder.
 
What Can XAH Do That XRP Cannot?
 
The primary benefit from the use of hooks, is that the core network code does not need to be changed every time a new use case is identified. This means that additional use cases can be addressed immediately, with no requirement for intervening steps, such as:
  • Community review
  • Community approval
  • Amendment voting
All of those steps are eliminated with the use of hooks; new use cases can be addressed as fast as the code can be developed.
 
To read more about how hooks enables Xahau to handle more use cases than even the XRPL, you can read this article:
 
Key Differences From XRP
 
Other unique differences from the XRP Ledger include:
  • Much smaller supply ~612 million coins vs. 100 billion coins
  • XAH hodlers are rewarded at 4% of their account balance. There are no rewards for XRP.
  • Governance participants are incentivized
  • Payment channels available for user-created tokens (IOUs)
  • URI tokens instead of NFT tokens
Who's Who of Xahau?
 
The list of those that are either founders, or closely associated with the founding organizations, is extensive. Here are the names of three organizations mentioned in the whitepaper, or their current moniker:
  • Xaman (a.k.a. XRPL Labs)
  • Gatehub
  • InFTF (Inclusive Financial Technology Foundation)
There exists a long list of impressive developers, architects, and technologists among the Xahau inner circle. But the three names that people associate most prominently with the leadership of the Xahau network are Wietse Wind, Richard Holland, and Denis Angell. The links to their 'X' accounts are:
 
Friend Or Foe?
 
This topic is one of the most contentious.
 
While Ripple, the company with the largest stake of XRP, showed interest in hooks early on, they ultimately decided to advocate for a different approach; the use of an EVM-based solution (Ethereum Virtual Machine) to handle smart contracts on the XRP Ledger. This decision was met with consternation by the Xaman team that had worked with them for several years to advocate for the use of hooks.
 
You can read more about the 'business politics' part of this topic here:
 
So how do Xahau fans view the relationship between XRP and XAH?
 
The Xahau team - and many of its community members - advocate for the use of a 'dual-chain' solution to implement smart contracts. This can be accomplished by the use of 'listener' software, along with native Xahau hooks.
 
A proof of concept, developed by Denis Angell, has demonstrated that bi-lateral communication can work with a simple approach.
 
From an economic standpoint, every chain that has its own digital asset is a competitor; but the simple way to think about Xahau, is that a 'bunch of XRP geeks' decided to implement smart contracts on their own version of the XRP Ledger.
 
The team emphasized transparency along the way, and initially received support from the primary XRP stakeholder, Ripple. They published Xahau as open-source code that could, in theory, be back-engineered and integrated with the XRP Ledger. You can clearly observe the team's idealistic mindset in early marketing mistakes, where they named their digital asset 'XRP Plus' in an effort to emphasize the way that they viewed their creation. While this resulted in confusion - and even suspicion - in its early days, the team quickly pivoted, and named their digital asset 'XAH', which became its ticker symbol.
 
Synergy effects between the two camps speak to a genuine camaraderie, with many Xahau developers being open and willing to help with changes to the core XRP Ledger protocol. You can find many examples of this open dialogue on the 'X' platform.
 
How To Purchase XAH
 
If you wish to speculate by buying XAH directly, it is available in a variety of convenient locations, depending on where you are located. If you're in a country that is supported by Bitrue, you can directly purchase or trade XAH by using that exchange.
 
On January 20th, 2025, Bitmart announced that it supports trading of XAH for customers in their list of supported countries; And in late March, another major exchange announced that they would be supporting XAH trading pairs: Coinex.
 
If you're located in the United States, you can purchase XAH directly from a vendor known as 'C14'. The xApp for C14 is located in the Xaman wallet.
 
XRP Ledger geeks can also purchase XAH IOUs on the XRPL Dex and then convert them to 'real' XAH using a Gatehub bridge. This is available in countries that Gatehub supports.
 
Which XAH Accounts Should I Follow?
 
On the 'X' platform, there exists two major community groups for XAH fans:
In addition to the Xahau notables I've already mentioned in this article, my advice is to take a look at who is posting in the above two communities. There are many impressive leaders and entrepreneurs included. You should be able to find multiple 'X' accounts that reflect your interests.
 
Xahau Development Roadmap
 
Xahau leaders have published a roadmap for 2025 that lists their various goals for the ecosystem:
 
To read a detailed explanation for each item, refer to this: Xahau Roadmap Super Thread
 
One of the most incredible waypoints listed is 'JavaScript Hooks Implementation.' 🤯
JavaScript!
 
With the 'JavaScript Hooks Implementation', Xahau is making history; it will enable anybody that knows JavaScript to easily create and install a smart contract. While networks like Ethereum are impressive early movers, they require developers to learn a new language and syntax.
 
Xahau will soon open 'crypto smart contracts' to a group of developers that number in the tens of millions.
 
Project L-10K
 
Project L-10K is one of the most important items in the pipeline. L-10K refers to the effort to boost the throughput of Xahau consensus to over 10,000 transactions per ledger! This will benefit hosted projects such as Evernode, and future issued assets. Heading up the effort is Richard Holland, who provided a progress update to the community in late May of 2025:
 
To learn more about this ambitious effort, you can watch his full presentation here:
The Future Of Defi And Payments
 
Once you've seen the extensive list of use cases that XAH easily handles, it's truly inspiring. Xahau is everything that you love about XRP, plus a long list of more things to love. ❤️
 
Be an early adopter of XAH and the Xahau network! Join the community groups listed and follow the accounts that seem to reflect your own interest - speculator, developer, or crypto fan. You have a place in our community, no matter what your background or interests are. Welcome to the future of crypto Defi and Payments
 
Sources:
 
 
NOTE: Payment channels for IOUs is currently in amendment status for the XRP Ledger, authored by Denis Angel here:
 
 

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