co-founder

The co-founder of the dark web market Empire Market, Raheim Hamilton, was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison and fined $5 million on October 5 in Chicago. His plea agreement covers approximately 1,230 bitcoins, 24.4 ethers, and three properties in Virginia.Empire Market operated from 2018 to 2020, facilitating over 4 million transactions between buyers and sellers, with a transaction volume exceeding $430 million. Investigators seized digital assets, cash, and precious metals worth $75 million in the case. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that the platform required buyers and sellers to conduct transactions exclusively in cryptocurrency and encouraged the use of mixing services and encrypted communication. Buyers could also rate the effectiveness of sellers in hiding drug packages, with drug sales involved amounting to nearly $375 million.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, stated in a live interview at the Digital Asset Summit 2026 held in Singapore that as near.com continues to expand its on-chain services, users no longer need centralized exchanges for "a large amount" of crypto activities. He mentioned that near.com is "almost ready" and has a "large roadmap for continuously adding features," including bank withdrawals, transaction records for tax purposes, and selective disclosure for confidential transactions. He also shared his experience using centralized exchanges, stating that despite knowing the company's CEO, one of his accounts was still deleted.near.com integrates cross-chain spot trading, tokenized stocks, wealth management products, and perpetual contracts into a single interface. Polosukhin indicated that most of the infrastructure for NEAR Intents has been migrated to confidential sharding, keeping transaction activities private, and users can disclose individual transactions when needed. He mentioned that near.com has a lot of fiat-related features coming soon and referenced the collaboration between NEAR and Monerium, allowing users to convert euros in their bank accounts to EURe via IBAN. The ultimate goal of NEAR Intents is to handle "any asset to any asset," such as USD to EUR, SGD to HKD.Regarding tokenized stocks, near.com completed integration with Ondo Finance in September, allowing users to convert euros into tokenized NVIDIA stocks, with NEAR planning to add more stocks from global markets.

Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm posted on X platform stating that the U.S. Department of the Treasury recently acknowledged in a document that there were issues with the previous rules regarding mixers, and mentioned that this policy could have a "chilling effect" on legitimate activities.Storm stated that although the relevant department of the U.S. Department of the Treasury now believes there are issues with the policy, the U.S. Department of Justice still insists in its case that even legitimate transactions conducted through Tornado Cash constitute illegal activities due to the potential for being used for money laundering, evading sanctions, and other criminal purposes.Storm claimed that the non-criminal department of the U.S. government believes the policy is inappropriate, while the criminal justice department considers all related transactions to be criminal; he has been detained and prosecuted for over 1,139 days and stated that his case stems from developing open-source code.Storm also mentioned that a new document was submitted today to the Southern District of New York (SDNY) federal court, and the U.S. Department of Justice is still pushing for his conviction.

The co-founder of the real-world asset perpetual contract protocol Ostium, Kaledora, published a statement explaining the financial and revenue model of the protocol. She stated that approximately $44.7 million in total revenue over two years on Dune comes from four on-chain fees: $20.39 million in opening fees, $16.5 million in spreads, $4.75 million in rollover fees, and $3.35 million in liquidation fees.Of the aforementioned revenue, $22.14 million (49.6%) flows to the OLP treasury, $19.55 million (43.8%) is for liquidity costs, including $16.05 million for hedging and $3.49 million in hedging interest, leaving a gross profit of $2.96 million (6.6%). She noted that the total on-chain revenue does not include off-chain hedging costs, and prior to the liquidity upgrade in April, the protocol did not have the capability to monetize traffic; a security incident occurred just months after the system was upgraded.In terms of financing, Ostium raised $300,000 in 2022, $3.6 million in 2023, $4.1 million in 2024, and $19.4 million in 2025. The team is expected to expand from about 12 people in 2025 to 35 people by the second quarter of 2026, investing in costs related to data authorization, marketing, cloud infrastructure, auditing, and AI. She mentioned that the company has not reserved a balance sheet sufficient to cope with such incidents and that the silence has been too long. The next step will allow the remaining 345 OLP holders to share in business growth, with plans to announce the second phase recovery plan in the coming week.

Muneeb Ali posted on the X platform that he will serve as the new CEO of Stacks Labs. Last year, Stacks underwent an ecosystem restructuring, with Stacks Labs becoming the protocol's operational center; over the past year, Alex Miller served as the interim CEO of Stacks Labs.Muneeb Ali stated that his optimism for STX is higher than ever; with the successful launch of Bitcoin staking, there will be increased investment in the development of the Bitcoin capital market. As a result of this news, STX rose 10.9% in the past 24 hours.

The Block cited Lookonchain data stating that a wallet associated with Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin transferred a total of 133,298 ETH a few hours ago.Based on the price reported, the scale of the transfer is approximately 356.4 million dollars. Consensys declined to comment on this ETH transfer.

According to The Block, Jeff Yan, co-founder of the decentralized perpetual contract trading platform Hyperliquid, stated during a fireside chat at the Korea Blockchain Week 2026 that around-the-clock trading is not the essential difference between on-chain trading venues and traditional exchanges. He pointed out that cryptocurrencies do not need to adhere to traditional market opening hours because these assets inherently possess international attributes, and some traditional exchanges have already begun to actively extend their trading hours.Yan emphasized that the more enduring value of on-chain finance comes from allowing users to retain control and custody of their funds, which helps to avoid a common single point of failure risk. In his view, once a counterparty, intermediary, or even custodian encounters issues, the ability to self-custody becomes particularly crucial.In addition, transparency constitutes another distinct feature of on-chain trading. Although it does not have a strong appeal in serving ordinary consumers, it is essential for building trust in the entire system. In a system controlled solely by a private organization, users cannot obtain the same level of trust and neutrality guarantees.He also mentioned that for assets lacking publicly available prices during the closing hours of traditional exchanges, continuous trading remains necessary. He cited commodities, stocks, and Pre-IPO targets that had already traded on Hyperliquid before the reference market opened as examples to illustrate that the demand is indeed real.

Cindy Leow, co-founder of the Solana perpetual contract exchange Drift (now Velocity), stated thatVelocity has completed audits with OtterSec and Asymmetric Research this week and is fully open-sourced, with the exchange restarting today.At the same time, as the exchange restarts and enters the next phase, she will step down. Previously, ChainCatcher reported on April 1 that Velocity was hacked by North Korean hackers due to a security vulnerability, resulting in a theft of $295 million.

Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) disclosed in an 8-K filing submitted on September 25 that co-founder P. Sean Neville has resigned from the board for personal reasons, effective immediately, reducing the board size from 8 to 7 members.On the same day, Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Fox-Geen notified the company of his intention to resign, but will remain until the end of 2026 to assist with the transition. Circle has engaged an executive search firm to find successors. The company stated that the departures of both individuals were not due to disagreements regarding the company's operations, policies, or practices.

The co-founder of the on-chain perpetual contract platform Hyperliquid, Jeff, stated that after the next network upgrade, HIP-4 will increase the deployment limits. The maximum number of active HIP-4 results that a single deployer can run simultaneously will increase from 100 to 200, and the maximum number of results that a single deployer can deploy daily will also increase from 500 to 1000.Jeff added that this adjustment was made based on feedback from the community Builders. In addition, the funding rate cap will also be adjusted from 4% per hour to 0.5% per hour in the next upgrade.

Polygon co-founder Sandeep posted on the X platform stating that the POL community has recently accumulated and permanently destroyed 100 million POL through on-chain revenue, accounting for about 1% of the total supply, and will additionally destroy approximately 25 million POL.Sandeep also mentioned that POL (formerly MATIC) is still "the most undervalued and overlooked project." According to him, Polymarket has launched perpetual contracts on Polygon, and with the recent upgrade, Polygon PoS is gradually evolving towards a more advanced blockchain, expecting to achieve a 1 millisecond confirmation time through block flow in the future. Additionally, OMS is about to enable Polygon to handle approximately 1 million new transactions daily.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko stated that the industry is "not ready" for the next major upgrade of the chain, Alpenglow.Previously, Anza engineers had migrated the Solana developer network to the Alpenglow consensus protocol, which will change the way blocks are processed, aiming to reduce the transaction finality time from about 12.8 seconds to 100 to 150 milliseconds.

DoubleZero co-founder Austin Federa posted on the X platform, stating that he recently saw some "boring FUD" from "big names" in private chats, and clarified that DoubleZero firmly supports Solana.Currently, DoubleZero has provided free high-speed connections for over 60% of Solana staking, with about 75% of validators using DoubleZero.

Palantir (PLTR.N) co-founder calls the artificial intelligence policies promoted by OpenAI and Anthropic "extremely dangerous."

KelpDAO stated on platform X that it has filed a lawsuit against LayerZero and its co-founder Bryan Pellegrino, seeking accountability for the rsETH cross-chain bridge attack incident that occurred earlier this year. The lawsuit claims that LayerZero failed to adequately disclose its inherent technical weaknesses and risks; failed to prevent its security infrastructure from being compromised; and that LayerZero had previously reviewed and approved Kelp's deployment and configuration in writing.Officials stated that LayerZero has publicly attributed responsibility to itself in recent months. Since the occurrence of the attack, the team has taken action to ensure the safety of user assets, including migrating the rsETH cross-chain bridge to a more secure cross-chain standard.LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino tweeted that KelpDAO's related claims lack basis and that he will respond and defend in Vancouver.Previously, LayerZero released an incident report indicating that on April 18, 2026, the KelpDAO rsETH cross-chain bridge built on LayerZero was attacked, resulting in a loss of approximately 116,500 rsETH, valued at around $292 million.

Hack VC co-founder Alexander Pack expressed shock and sorrow over Hsin-Ju's passing, calling it an "unimaginable tragedy."Pack stated that he had not been in direct contact with Hsin-Ju for over 10 months and is currently unaware of the specific circumstances surrounding her death, urging all parties to respect the family and friends who are mourning.

According to a report by Reuters, Gao Yang, co-founder and chief scientist of the Chinese humanoid robot startup Spirit AI, stated that humanoid robots could complete most general tasks based on verbal instructions as early as next year, but it will take at least 8 more years to enter households. He mentioned that the brain is the weakest link in the entire robotics technology stack, and it is expected to reach a milestone similar to GPT-3.0 by mid-2027, allowing users to speak to robots in natural language and have them perform a series of reasonable physical actions to attempt to complete tasks.Spirit AI was founded in 2024, has about 300 employees, and raised $670 million in funding within two years, with a valuation of $2.9 billion. The company employs about 1,000 contractors who wear data collection devices at home or in factories, primarily relying on real-world data for training. The success rate for simple tasks in a structured living room environment is 90%. Currently, dozens of Moz1 wheeled humanoid robots are deployed on production lines at CATL and JD.com.Gao Yang stated that the next 1-2 years represent the initial window for industrial applications, and after two years, they can enter commercial service scenarios to perform simple tasks, but entering households will be more challenging. In terms of safety, full-body force control is implemented, and the robots will automatically engage emergency braking when encountering significant interaction forces. High-quality data is the main bottleneck for training the robot's brain.

According to CoinDesk, Hut 8 co-founder Marc van der Chijs warned in an interview with CoinDesk that the fierce competition between enterprises and nations is accelerating the development of artificial intelligence, with its speed exceeding human control, potentially posing systemic risks to the financial system and critical infrastructure. He stated, "We have already lost control," and expressed concern that systemic disruption or catastrophic failure is almost inevitable before real international safeguards are established.Van der Chijs predicts that AI and robotics could ultimately replace 90% to 95% of existing jobs and significantly lower the costs of goods and services. At that point, governments will need to find new sources of revenue, such as taxing the use of robots or AI. He also believes that AI could expose vulnerabilities in traditional banking software, threatening the confidence of institutions that rely on interconnected systems; in the crypto space, businesses built around Bitcoin, such as exchanges, are more susceptible to impact than the underlying network itself.Van der Chijs previously sold a large amount of Bitcoin to shift towards AI investments and believes that the capital shift by investors towards AI has prevented Bitcoin from reaching the previously expected levels of $200,000 to $250,000. He is now reinvesting some of the AI profits back into crypto assets through exchange-traded funds. He still views Bitcoin as the only asset worth holding in his lifetime and claims that Hut 8's shift to AI data centers is "the best decision ever."

Bankless co-founder David Hoffman posted on the X platform, stating, "We have now entered the altcoin season, and the real market moment has arrived earlier than expected." David Hoffman announced on May 21 that he had liquidated his ETH holdings and subsequently bought VVV, NEAR, ZEC, HYPE, and LIT, all of which have significantly outperformed ETH.