The Bay Area crypto scene has always been a strange mix: idealists building peer-to-peer money on one side, venture-backed infrastructure companies raising nine-figure rounds on the other. In 2026, those worlds are converging faster than ever. Regulatory clarity from the GENIUS Act, institutional money flooding into on-chain assets, and a maturing L1/L2 landscape have given the region’s builders the tailwinds they’ve waited years for. From exchange CEOs to protocol architects to dev infrastructure founders, these are the ten Bay Area crypto figures worth watching this year.
Brian Armstrong
Co-Founder & CEO, Coinbase | San Francisco
Brian Armstrong co-founded Coinbase in 2012 while writing code on weekends as an Airbnb engineer, and the company he built is now swinging for a very different kind of goal. For 2026, Armstrong has declared Coinbase’s ambition to become the world’s number-one financial app, an “everything exchange” spanning crypto, equities, commodities, and prediction markets on a single platform. The company launched zero-commission stock trading in December 2025, expanded its Base App to 140 countries the same month, and is betting that tokenized equities settled on-chain 24/7 will be the next major unlock for retail investors globally. Coinbase’s Base L2 network has climbed to $15 billion in total value locked, and Armstrong is quietly pushing for a native Base token. With the GENIUS Act establishing a federal stablecoin framework, Coinbase’s USDC partnership with Circle is also scaling into the bank channel faster than at any point since launch.
Jayendra Jog
Co-Founder, Sei Labs | San Francisco
Jayendra Jog grew up in the Bay Area surrounded by tech, started learning to code in high school, and cut his teeth as a software engineer at Robinhood, arriving just in time to watch the GameStop saga expose, in real time, exactly what was wrong with centralized financial infrastructure: T+2 settlement, single points of failure, and a kill switch in the hands of the platform. That experience became the origin story for Sei. Co-founded in 2021 with Jeff Feng, Sei Labs built a Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up for high-performance trading, parallelized execution, sub-second finality, and EVM compatibility without the throughput compromises. Sei launched mainnet in 2023, was listed on Robinhood in October 2025, and has a spot ETF filing pending with the SEC. The defining bet for 2026 is Sei Giga: a wholesale architectural overhaul that deprecates the network’s Cosmos roots entirely in favor of a leaner EVM-only chain, targeting 200,000 transactions per second and 400ms finality through a new multi-proposer consensus protocol called Autobahn, a 50x throughput improvement over current EVM networks. In January 2026, Sei passed the first governance upgrade on the Giga roadmap, with Coinbase and Kraken both integrating native Sei EVM support in the weeks that followed. Jog’s thesis hasn’t changed since Robinhood: the underlying rails of finance are broken, and the fix isn’t a better app on top of them.
Nathan McCauley
Co-Founder & CEO, Anchorage Digital | San Francisco
Nathan McCauley runs the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States. Getting there took years of regulatory groundwork and, in February 2025, a Senate Banking Committee testimony where McCauley made the case directly to Congress that crypto-native banks deserved fair access to financial infrastructure. That year also saw Anchorage acquire Mountain Protocol to build stablecoin issuance from scratch, and become the first OCC-supervised stablecoin issuer under the GENIUS Act framework. In February 2026, the company closed a $100 million Series E, bringing total funding to nearly $600 million. McCauley, who previously led security engineering at Square and Docker, has built Anchorage into the institutional custody and compliance layer that regulated banks actually trust.
Hunter Horsley
Co-Founder & CEO, Bitwise Asset Management | San Francisco
Hunter Horsley co-founded Bitwise in San Francisco in 2017, coming out of product roles at Facebook and Instagram with a thesis that institutional investors needed a purpose-built crypto asset manager, not a retrofit of existing TradFi infrastructure. Eight years later, Bitwise manages over $15 billion in client assets across more than 40 investment products spanning ETFs, separately managed accounts, private funds, and staking solutions. The firm serves over 5,000 wealth management teams, RIAs, family offices, and institutional investors, as well as 21 banks and broker-dealers. In 2025, over 550 new wealth management teams added a Bitwise product, a direct consequence of post-ETF regulatory clarity finally unlocking advisor adoption at scale. Horsley, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and CoinDesk Most Influential alum, has become one of the clearest communicators in the industry on what institutional crypto adoption actually looks like in practice, not in theory.
Avery Ching
Co-Founder & CEO, Aptos Labs | Palo Alto
Avery Ching spent over a decade building distributed systems at Meta, most recently as the technical lead for the Diem blockchain project. When Meta shuttered Diem in early 2022, Ching and co-founder Mo Shaikh took the underlying technology and built Aptos Labs from the ground up, raising $400 million in combined seed and Series A funding from a16z, Coinbase Ventures, and others. Aptos holds the top four records for daily blockchain transactions, has partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Mastercard, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton, and in late 2025 began pulling in stablecoin inflows that briefly outpaced Ethereum. Ching took over as sole CEO in December 2024 when Mo Shaikh stepped down, and is now steering the company toward two focused bets for 2026: a global on-chain trading engine and a decentralized cloud computing protocol.
Evan Cheng
Co-Founder & CEO, Mysten Labs | Palo Alto
Evan Cheng spent more than a decade leading engineering at Apple, where he was the LLVM compiler lead, before moving to Meta’s Novi Research division. In September 2021, he co-founded Mysten Labs alongside four other former Meta/Novi executives to build a blockchain from scratch, with no compromises on throughput or latency. The result is Sui, a Layer 1 that uses an object-centric data model and parallel execution to achieve sub-second transaction finality. Mysten raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation in 2022 from a16z, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, and Coinbase Ventures. Sui has since crossed $1 billion in total value locked, attracted Grayscale Trust product coverage in 2025, and has positioned itself as a serious alternative to Ethereum for DeFi, gaming, and on-chain finance.
Nikil Viswanathan
Co-Founder & CEO, Alchemy
Nikil Viswanathan co-founded Alchemy in 2017 with Joe Lau after product roles at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, and after the two of them built Down To Lunch, the number-one social app in the App Store in 2016. Alchemy became the de facto developer infrastructure platform for Web3, often described as the AWS of blockchain development: it powers the APIs, node infrastructure, and developer tooling that the majority of serious Web3 apps run on. The platform has over four million weekly users across 200 countries, has powered more than $100 billion in on-chain transaction volume, and is valued at over $10 billion. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Google’s former Chairman, Coinbase, and Stanford University.
Juan Benet
Founder & CEO, Protocol Labs | Palo Alto
Juan Benet founded Protocol Labs out of Y Combinator’s S14 batch while at Stanford, and has spent the decade since building the decentralized storage and networking protocols he believes the next version of the internet requires. His two flagship projects are IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer content addressing protocol now used across the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond, and Filecoin, the decentralized storage network built on top of it. Filecoin’s 2017 ICO raised $257 million, one of the largest in the industry’s history. Protocol Labs has since evolved into an innovation network connecting over 600 startups, funds, accelerators, and open-source projects. As AI storage demands grow and data sovereignty becomes a mainstream concern, the case for the infrastructure Benet has been building for a decade keeps getting harder to dismiss.
Sergey Nazarov
Co-Founder & CEO, Chainlink Labs | San Francisco
Sergey Nazarov co-founded Chainlink in 2017 to solve what he saw as the core unsolved problem in blockchain: how do you get a smart contract to reliably access real-world data without reintroducing the trusted intermediaries you just spent all that engineering effort removing? The oracle network he and Steve Ellis built has become the de facto data layer for DeFi, securing over $27 trillion in on-chain transaction value and powering more than 70% of all DeFi activity. In 2025, a year CoinDesk named Nazarov one of crypto’s most influential figures, Chainlink expanded its institutional footprint dramatically, partnering with Swift, DTCC, UBS, and the U.S. government to move macroeconomic data and tokenized assets onto blockchains. Nazarov frames 2026 as the year that institutional adoption of on-chain finance shifts from pilot to production.
Katie Haun
Founder & CEO, Haun Ventures | San Francisco
Katie Haun came to crypto the hard way: she was assigned to investigate Bitcoin as a federal prosecutor at the DOJ in 2012, created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force, and left convinced the technology was more important than its critics claimed. She joined Coinbase’s board as its first independent director in 2017, became Andreessen Horowitz’s first female general partner in 2018, and in March 2022 launched Haun Ventures with a $1.5 billion debut fund, the largest ever raised by a solo venture partner at the time. In early 2025 she raised an additional $1 billion across two new funds. Her portfolio spans early-stage Web3 infrastructure and growth-stage protocols, with notable bets including Bridge and Zora. In a sector full of founders raising from people who don’t understand what they’re building, Haun brings something rare: a prosecutorial understanding of why the technology matters, combined with a decade of experience picking the companies that make it last.
Decade-Long Bets in a Short-Cycle Industry
The Bay Area still runs the broadest spectrum of crypto seriousness anywhere in the world. What the ten founders on this list share isn’t a sector or a product category. It’s a longer time horizon than the market tends to reward. Armstrong, Nazarov, and Benet have all been building for over a decade. Cheng, Ching, McCauley, and Viswanathan came up through the institutional tech world before the current cycle made crypto respectable. Horsley built the asset management infrastructure that institutional crypto adoption actually required and has watched that thesis finally get vindicated. Jog watched the rails of traditional finance fail in real time at Robinhood and went to rebuild them from scratch. Haun walked away from a government career because she thought the technology was too important to ignore from the outside. None of them are new to this. That’s the point.
Crypto isn’t the only space where Bay Area founders are rewriting the rules of finance. Explore the 10 SF Bay Area Fintech Founders to Watch in 2026 to see who’s building the next generation of banking, payments, and compliance infrastructure.
