These former crypto builders have transitioned to the world's hottest AI projects.

Someone who reaches the top in a certain field is often not because they hit the right trend, but because they possess the ability to succeed.

These abilities are transferable. So we see an interesting phenomenon: over the past few years, the most intelligent, aggressive, and restless people in the crypto industry are now frequently appearing in the AI world.

Some are writing macro articles that influence Silicon Valley’s judgments; others are leading strategic decisions at top AI companies; some are building infrastructure that developers use every day.

Although many who have moved away no longer mention crypto, it’s undeniable that crypto has acted like a training camp, cultivating a group of people with sharp judgment, risk sensitivity, and an extraordinary awareness of “power structures,” who are now reshaping another industry.

Alex Atallah

If you’ve developed AI, you’ve probably used or heard of OpenRouter—a unified API connecting hundreds of large models, from GPT series to Claude, Llama, and various open-source models, allowing you to choose and tune as needed.

Its emergence solves a very practical problem: by 2026, model iterations are too rapid, interface standards vary across providers, and just managing “which model to connect” can be overwhelming for developers.

The founder of OpenRouter is Alex Atallah. Before AI, he was already well-known as OpenSea’s co-founder and CTO.

Before dominating the AI infrastructure track, Alex had already achieved success in tech. As one of the few crossover products in crypto, OpenSea transformed the NFT market from a fringe activity into a multi-billion-dollar valuation platform.

From OpenSea to OpenRouter, he shifted his integration mindset from crypto to AI. He realized that models in the AI era are like tokens or protocols in Web3, inevitably going from chaos to aggregation. Currently, he’s leveraging his experience with high concurrency processing and deep understanding of decentralized distribution from the crypto world to build OpenRouter into the underlying “app store” for AI.

Kris Marszalek

In 2025, someone paid $70 million to buy the domain AI.com.

That person is Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com.

In crypto circles, Kris is best known for renaming the Los Angeles Staples Center to Crypto.com Arena and for the Super Bowl ad that made “Crypto.com” a household name.

After acquiring AI.com, he plans to turn this domain into an AI agent platform. No longer just a chatbot, but a “digital employee” capable of booking tickets, managing finances, and even handling complex workflows for users.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

If you’ve been involved in AI for a while, you’ve probably heard of this name: a guy who graduated from Columbia at just 19, was later expelled from OpenAI, and then managed a multi-billion-dollar fund.

As one of the most controversial and talented young figures in AI today, Leopold Aschenbrenner has become a top macro strategist and investment tycoon in Silicon Valley. He currently runs a multi-billion-dollar investment fund, Situational Awareness LP, focused on foundational infrastructure supporting AGI: power grids, 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 was a core member of OpenAI’s former “Superalignment” team and is now a key advocate pushing the U.S. to elevate AI R&D to a “Manhattan Project” level. He’s recognized as one of the few forecasters capable of understanding the black box evolution of large models.

Interestingly, Leopold’s origins are not in AI but in crypto.

Around 2022, at just 19, he graduated from Columbia and joined the FTX Future Fund, established with funding from Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), founder of the crypto exchange FTX. In this fund, with a strong “effective altruism” (EA) ethos, Leopold was not focused on crypto market speculation but on assessing how crypto wealth could help mitigate existential risks to humanity.

This experience working in the crypto top think tank exposed him to in-depth research on AI risks and taught him how to think about the ultimate direction of technology amid large capital flows.

Avital Balwit

Besides Leopold Aschenbrenner, former senior assistant at the FTX Future Fund, Avital Balwit, has also entered the AI industry, becoming a key decision-maker at the globally prominent AI startup Anthropic.

Avital Balwit is currently Chief of Staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. She participates in high-level strategic decisions and coordinates resources in the AI model race between Anthropic and OpenAI. After all, Anthropic’s star product Claude is steadily catching up with ChatGPT.

She is best known in AI circles not just for her position but for her writings. She has thoughtfully discussed “the meaning of human existence in the post-work era,” profoundly shaping Silicon Valley’s views on societal changes after AGI’s widespread adoption, making her one of the most influential cultural critics of the AI age.

Previously, in the lab funded by crypto giant SBF, she was responsible for screening and evaluating projects that could resist AI-related existential risks, biosecurity, and long-term governance. Anthropic was one of their investments, with SBF investing $580 million in 2023.

Recently, she has expressed unique views on “Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the AI era,” largely influenced by her early research on decentralization in Web3.

Emad Mostaque

Many people first heard of Emad through Stable Diffusion.

But in fact, Emad’s career started in finance. At 23, he began managing his own hedge fund, later serving as co-CIO of Capricorn Long/Short EM, focusing on emerging markets strategies. In 2017, his fund 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 macro trends” like economic cycles, policy shifts, and technological disruptions affecting asset prices long-term.

In 2013, he started exploring Bitcoin and Ethereum as an investor and angel investor in early crypto projects.

In 2019, Emad launched Symmitree, aiming to reduce barriers for impoverished populations to access digital technology via blockchain. The project stalled after about a year because he faced a major obstacle: centralized institutions—hospitals, governments, tech companies—were unwilling to share their data and models, even amid a global health crisis.

He later said this experience confirmed that centralization isn’t just an efficiency issue but a structural one. No one voluntarily relinquishes control over data and computing power unless mechanisms force cooperation. So in 2020, Emad founded Stability AI. He believed AI shouldn’t be confined to a few labs; models should be open source, training transparent, and anyone should be able to build on them.

In 2022, Stable Diffusion was released, marking the first time open-source image generation models truly challenged the commercial closed-source models’ dominance. During that period, Stability AI’s valuation soared to over a billion dollars, and Emad became a prominent figure in the open-source AI movement.

However, internal issues also accumulated—controversies over his management style, concerns about burn rate versus revenue, and the departure of key researchers. In early 2024, amid controversy, he left Stability AI.