These former crypto builders have moved on to the hottest AI projects globally

A person can become a top player in a certain field not necessarily because they hit the right trend, but because they possess the ability to get things done.

These abilities are transferable. Therefore, we can observe an interesting phenomenon: in recent years, the smartest, most aggressive, and most restless individuals from the cryptocurrency industry are now frequently appearing in the AI world.

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

Although many who have moved on are reluctant to mention cryptocurrency, it is undeniable that the crypto space acted like a training camp, cultivating a group of individuals with judgment, risk intuition, and an acute sensitivity to "power structures," who are now reshaping another industry.

Alex Atallah

If you have done AI development, you have likely 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, allowing you to choose which one to use.

Its emergence solves a very practical problem: by 2026, the iteration of models is too rapid, and each company's interface standards are inconsistent, causing developers to struggle just with the question of "which model to connect."

The founder of OpenRouter is Alex Atallah. Before AI, he had a more famous identity 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 in the crypto industry, OpenSea transformed the NFT market from a fringe novelty into a company valued at tens of billions of dollars.

From OpenSea to OpenRouter, he has transferred his integrative thinking from the crypto industry to AI. He realized that models in the AI era are akin to tokens or protocols in the Web3 era, inevitably going through a process from chaos to aggregation. Currently, he is leveraging his experience in high-concurrency processing and deep understanding of decentralized distribution, aiming to build OpenRouter into the "app store" foundation of the AI era.

Kris Marszalek

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

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

In the crypto world, Kris is most famous for his deal to rename Los Angeles's Staples Center to Crypto.com Arena and for the Super Bowl ad that made countless people remember the name "Crypto.com."

After acquiring AI.com, he plans to turn this domain into an AI Agent integration platform, moving AI beyond just a "chat box" to become a "digital employee" capable of booking tickets, managing finances, and even handling complex workflows for users.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

If you've been in the AI circle for a while, 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 multi-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 a multi-billion dollar investment fund, Situational Awareness LP, which specializes in betting on the core foundations supporting the AGI process: power infrastructure, cutting-edge semiconductors, and massive computing centers.

Many people first learned about him through his famous 165-page article "Situational Awareness," which predicted 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 the elevation of AI R&D in the U.S. to the level of the "Manhattan Project," recognized as one of the few prophets capable of insight into 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, he graduated from Columbia University and joined the FTX Future Fund, established by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In this fund, which had a strong "effective altruism" (EA) focus, Leopold was not involved in speculative trading in the secondary market but was responsible for assessing how to use crypto wealth to mitigate existential risks to humanity.

This experience working in the top think tank of the crypto space allowed him to engage early with in-depth research on AI risks and taught 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 FTX Future Fund, Avital Balwit has also entered the AI industry, becoming a core decision-maker at the currently most watched AI startup, Anthropic.

Avital Balwit currently serves as the Chief of Staff to Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, where she is involved in the highest-level strategic decisions of the company while coordinating resources in the model competition between Anthropic and OpenAI. After all, Anthropic's star product, Claude, is steadily chasing after ChatGPT.

Avital Balwit is most well-known in the AI circle not just for her position but for the articles she has written. She has seriously discussed "where the sense of meaning for humanity comes from in a post-work era," profoundly shaping Silicon Valley's thinking about the societal forms after the popularization of AGI, thus becoming one of the most influential cultural critics of the AI era.

Previously, in that lab funded by cryptocurrency giant SBF, she was responsible for screening and evaluating projects that could withstand existential risks from AI, biosecurity, and long-term governance. Anthropic was one of their investment projects at the FTX Future Fund, where SBF invested $580 million in this AI project in 2023.

Additionally, Avital has recently expressed 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 space.

Emad Mostaque

Many people know Emad from Stable Diffusion.

However, Emad's career started in finance. He began managing his own hedge fund at 23 and later served as co-CIO at Capricorn Long/Short EM, focusing on emerging market strategies. In 2017, the fund he led 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 "systemic megatrends," such as economic cycles, policy changes, and the long-term impact of technological disruption on asset prices.

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

In 2019, Emad worked on a project called Symmitree, which aimed to lower the barriers for impoverished populations to access digital technology using blockchain technology. The project ran for about a year before it essentially stopped because he encountered a major problem: various centralized institutions, including hospitals, governments, and tech companies, were unwilling to open their data and models, even in the face of a global public health crisis.

Emad later stated that this experience confirmed for him that 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 that AI should not be the exclusive toy of a few laboratories; models should be open-source, the training process should be transparent, and anyone should be able to build their own things on top of 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, and Emad himself became a symbolic figure in the open-source AI movement.

However, internal issues within the company were also accumulating. Controversies over his management style, doubts about the speed of cash burn versus revenue, and the departure of several core researchers… In early 2024, he left Stability AI amid the controversies.