A person can reach the top in a certain field not just because they ride the wave, but because they possess the capability to succeed in the first place.

These capabilities can be transferred. Therefore, we can observe an interesting phenomenon: over the past few years, the smartest, most aggressive, and restless individuals in the crypto 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 unwilling to mention crypto again, it is undeniable that the crypto space acted like a training camp, cultivating a group of individuals with judgment, risk sensitivity, and unusual sensitivity to "power structures," who are now reshaping another industry.

Alex Atallah

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

Its emergence addresses a very practical issue: with model iterations accelerating too rapidly by 2026 and each company having different API standards, developers can easily become overwhelmed just figuring out which model to connect.

The founder of OpenRouter is Alex Atallah. Before focusing on AI, he was also famously known as the co-founder and CTO of OpenSea.

Before dominating the AI infrastructure space, 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 marginal novelty into a company valued at tens of billions.

From OpenSea to OpenRouter, he has transferred his integrative mindset from the crypto sector into AI. He realizes that models in the AI era are akin to tokens or protocols in the Web3 era, inevitably undergoing a process from chaos to aggregation. Currently, he is leveraging his experience in high-concurrency processing and profound understanding of decentralized distribution gained in the crypto sphere to develop OpenRouter into the "app store" foundation of the AI era.

Kris Marszalek

In 2025, someone spent 70 million dollars to buy the domain AI.com.

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

In the crypto space, Kris’s most notable financial move was renaming the Staples Center in Los Angeles to Crypto.com Arena, along with a Super Bowl ad that made "Crypto.com" a name recognized by countless people.

After acquiring AI.com, he plans to turn this domain into an AI Agent integration platform, not letting AI stay within "chat boxes," but allowing it to become a "digital employee" capable of booking tickets, managing finances, and even handling complex workflows for users.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

If you've been around the AI scene for a while, you've probably heard this name, a guy who graduated from Columbia University at just 19, was later dismissed 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 leading macro strategist and investment tycoon in Silicon Valley's AI sector. He currently manages a multi-billion dollar investment fund, Situational Awareness LP, which specifically bets on the core infrastructure supporting the AGI process: power infrastructure, cutting-edge semiconductors, and massive computing centers.

Many first learned about him from his famous 165-page paper "Situational Awareness," which predicted the advent of AGI around 2027. He was not only a core member of OpenAI's former "Super Alignment" team but is also currently a key advocate pushing for the elevation of AI research and development in the U.S. to "Manhattan Project" levels, being recognized as one of the few prophets capable of discerning the evolution of large models.

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, funded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In this fund, which had a strong "effective altruism" (EA) orientation, Leopold was not speculating on the secondary market of the crypto sphere, but was responsible for assessing how to use crypto wealth to mitigate existential risks to humanity.

This experience working in the upper echelons of the crypto think tank allowed him early access to in-depth research on artificial intelligence risks (AI Risk) and taught him how to think about the ultimate direction of technology amid large-scale capital flows.

Avital Balwit

In addition to Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former senior assistant at FTX Future Fund, Avital Balwit has also entered the AI industry, becoming a core decision-making member of the currently most watched AI startup Anthropic.

Avital Balwit's current position is Chief of Staff to Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, where she participates in the highest-level strategic decision-making for 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.

Avital Balwit is not only known in the AI circle for this position, but also for the articles she has written. She has thoughtfully discussed "the source of meaning for humans in the post-work era," profoundly shaping Silicon Valley's thinking about the social forms following the widespread adoption 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 counter AI-induced existential risks, biosecurity, and long-term governance. Anthropic was indeed one of the investment projects they had in the FTX Future Fund, with SBF investing 580 million dollars into this AI project in 2023.

Additionally, Avital has recently offered very unique views on "UBI (Universal Basic Income) in the AI era," greatly benefiting from her earlier research on decentralized distribution in the Web3 space.

Emad Mostaque

Many people recognize Emad from Stable Diffusion.

But in fact, Emad started in finance. At 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 received 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 big trends," such as economic cycles, policy changes, and technological disruptions on the long-term impact of asset prices.

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

In 2019, Emad worked on a project called Symmitree, which aimed to use blockchain technology to lower the barriers for impoverished populations to access digital technology. The project lasted about a year before essentially stopping, as he encountered a major issue where centralized entities such as 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 remarked that this experience confirmed to him that centralization is not an efficiency issue, but a structural issue. No one will willingly relinquish control over data and computing power unless the mechanism design compels them to cooperate. Thus, in 2020, Emad founded Stability AI. He believes AI should not be the exclusive toy of a few labs; models should be open-source, training processes should be transparent, and anyone should be able to build whatever they want 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, the valuation of Stability AI soared to the billion-dollar level, and Emad himself became a symbolic figure of the open-source AI movement.

However, internal issues within the company were also accumulating. Controversies regarding his management style, skepticism about the speed of spending relative to revenue, and the departure of several core researchers... In early 2024, he left Stability AI amidst controversy.