A person can reach the top in a certain field, often not because they hit the trend, but because they possess the ability to get things done.

These abilities are transferable. So, we can observe an interesting phenomenon: over the past few years, the smartest, most radical, and most restless individuals in the crypto industry are now frequently appearing in the AI world.

Some are writing macro essays that influence Silicon Valley's judgments, some are leading strategic decisions in top AI companies, and some are building infrastructure that developers use every day.

Although many who have left do not wish to mention crypto anymore, it is undeniable that crypto acted as a training camp, nurturing a group of individuals with judgment, risk sensitivity, and an acute awareness of "power structures," who are now reshaping another industry.

Alex Atallah

If you have done AI development, you likely have used or heard of OpenRouter, a unified API that connects hundreds of large models, from the GPT series to Claude to Llama and various open-source models, letting you pick and choose whichever you want to use.

Its emergence addressed a very real problem: by 2026, the iteration of models was happening too quickly, and each company's interface standards varied, making it mentally exhausting for developers just to manage "which model to connect."

And the founder of OpenRouter is Alex Atallah.

Before AI, he was more famously known as the co-founder and CTO of OpenSea.

Before dominating the AI infrastructure track, Alex had already achieved fame in the tech circle. As one of the few breakout products from the crypto industry, OpenSea transformed the NFT market from a fringe concept into a company valued at tens of billions of dollars.

From OpenSea to OpenRouter, he translated his integrative thinking from the crypto industry into AI. He realized that models in the AI era are like tokens or protocols in the Web3 era, inevitably going through a process of chaos to aggregation. Currently, he is leveraging his experiences in high-concurrency processing and a deep understanding of decentralized distribution gained in the crypto world to build OpenRouter into the underlying "app store" for the AI era.

Kris Marszalek

In 2025, someone spent $70 million to purchase the domain AI.com.

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

In the crypto circle, Kris is most known for renaming the Staples Center in Los Angeles to Crypto.com Arena and for the Super Bowl ad that made countless people remember the name "Crypto.com."

After acquiring AI.com, he intends to turn this domain into an AI Agent integration platform. No longer allowing AI to stay within the "chat box," but enabling it to become a "digital employee" capable of booking tickets, managing finances, and even handling complex workflows for users.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

If you've spent some time in the AI circle, you've probably heard of this name, a guy who graduated from Columbia University at just 19, was later fired from OpenAI, and then turned around to manage a billion-dollar fund.

As one of the most controversial and talented young talents in contemporary AI, Leopold Aschenbrenner has now become a top macro strategist and investment tycoon in Silicon Valley. He currently manages the Situational Awareness LP fund, which focuses on betting on the core foundations supporting the AGI process: power infrastructure, cutting-edge semiconductors, and massive computing centers.

Many people recognized him from his famous 165-page essay "Situational Awareness," predicting the arrival of AGI around 2027. He was not only a core member of OpenAI's former "super-alignment" team but is also a key advocate currently pushing for AI R&D in the U.S. to reach "Manhattan Project" levels, recognized as one of the few prophets capable of revealing the black box of large model evolution.

Interestingly, Leopold’s starting point was not in AI but in crypto.

Around 2022, at just 19 years old after graduating from Columbia University, he joined the FTX Future Fund, founded by FTX cryptocurrency exchange's creator Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). In this fund, which carried a strong element of "effective altruism" (EA), Leopold was not involved in studying secondary market speculation in the crypto space, but rather assessing how to use crypto wealth to mitigate existential risks to humanity.

It was this experience working in the upper echelons of the crypto think tank that allowed him early access to in-depth research on AI risk, teaching him how to think about the ultimate direction of technology against the backdrop of large-scale capital flows.

Avital Balwit

In addition to Leopold Aschenbrenner, former senior assistant at the FTX Future Fund, Avital Balwit, has also entered the AI industry and has become a core decision-maker at the globally renowned AI startup Anthropic.

Avital Balwit's current position is Chief of Staff for Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, and she is required to participate in the highest-level strategic decisions of the company while coordinating resources in the model race between Anthropic and OpenAI. After all, Anthropic's star product, Claude, is steadily chasing after ChatGPT.

The most notable thing about Avital Balwit in the AI circle is not just this position, but the articles she has written. She has discussed in depth "where the sense of meaning for humans in a post-work era comes from," profoundly shaping Silicon Valley's reflections on the societal forms following the popularization of AGI, thus becoming one of the most influential cultural critics of the AI era.

Previously, in that laboratory funded by crypto giant SBF, she was responsible for screening and evaluating projects capable of resisting the existential risks brought by AI, biosecurity, and long-term governance. Anthropic was one of the projects they invested in at the FTX Future Fund, with SBF investing $580 million into this AI project in 2023.

Additionally, Avital has recently shared unique views on "UBI (Universal Basic Income) in the AI era," which has largely benefited from her early research on decentralized distribution in the Web3 field.

Emad Mostaque

Many people know Emad from Stable Diffusion.

But in fact, Emad's professional starting point was finance. At the age of 23, he began managing his own hedge fund and later served as co-CIO at Capricorn Long/Short EM, focusing on emerging market strategies. In 2017, his fund won the annual emerging market risk-adjusted hedge fund award. From 2005 to 2020, he spent a full fifteen years in the global macro hedge fund space, studying "systematic major trends," such as economic cycles, policy changes, and the long-term impact of technological disruption on asset prices.

In 2013, he started engaging with Bitcoin and Ethereum as an investor and also participated as an angel investor in several early crypto projects.

In 2019, Emad worked on a project called Symmitree, aimed at lowering the barriers to accessing digital technology for impoverished populations through blockchain technology. The project basically ceased after running for about a year because he encountered a major problem; various centralized entities—hospitals, governments, tech companies—were unwilling to open up their data and models, even in the face of a global public health crisis.

Emad later stated that it was this experience that confirmed for him: centralization is not an efficiency issue, but a structural issue. No one would voluntarily give up control over data and computing power unless the mechanism design forced them to cooperate. Thus, in 2020, Emad founded Stability AI. He believes AI should not be a toy exclusive to a few labs; models should be open-source, the training process should be transparent, and anyone should be able to build on it.

In 2022, Stable Diffusion was released, and the open-source image generation model truly "broke through" the moat of commercial closed-source models for the first time. During that time, Stability AI's valuation soared to the billion-dollar level, with Emad himself becoming a symbolic figure of the open-source AI movement.

However, internal company issues were also accumulating simultaneously. Controversies surrounding his management style, questions about the pace of spending matching revenue, multiple core research staff leaving ... At the beginning of 2024, he left Stability AI amidst the controversies.

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