These former crypto builders have joined the world's hottest AI project

By: blockbeats|2026/03/05 23:00:04
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Someone who can be at the top of a certain field is often not because they caught the wave but because they have the ability to make things happen.

These abilities are transferable. So we can see an interesting phenomenon: in the past few years, the smartest, most aggressive, and most restless group of people in the cryptocurrency industry are now frequently appearing in the AI world.

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

Although many who have moved away are reluctant to mention cryptocurrency again, it is undeniable that cryptocurrency, like a training camp, has cultivated batch after batch of people with judgment, risk awareness, and an exceptional sensitivity to the "power structure," reshaping another industry.

Alex Atallah

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

Its emergence solved a very practical problem: by 2026, model layer iterations were too fast, each company had different interface standards, and developers could easily get overwhelmed just by managing "which model to use."

And the founder of OpenRouter is Alex Atallah.

Before AI, he had an even more famous identity, the co-founder and CTO of OpenSea.

These former crypto builders have joined the world's hottest AI project

Prior to dominating the AI infrastructure race, Alex had already established himself in the tech world. As one of the rare breakout products in the cryptocurrency industry, OpenSea propelled the NFT market from a niche gadget to a multi-billion-dollar valuation platform.

From OpenSea to OpenRouter, he transferred his integration thinking from the cryptocurrency industry to AI. He realized that the models of the AI era are like the tokens or protocols of the Web3 era, inevitably undergoing a process from chaos to aggregation. Currently, he is leveraging his experience in high-concurrency processing accumulated in the crypto world and a profound understanding of decentralized distribution to build OpenRouter as the underlying "app store" of the AI era.

Kris Marszalek

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

This person was Kris Marszalek, Co-Founder and CEO of Crypto.com.

In the crypto community, Kris is most famous for renaming the Staples Center in Los Angeles to Crypto.com Arena, as well as the Super Bowl ad that ingrained the name "Crypto.com" in countless people's minds.

After acquiring AI.com, he plans to turn this domain into an AI Agent integration platform. No longer keeping AI confined to a "chat box," but transforming it into a "digital employee" capable of booking tickets for users, managing finances, and even handling complex workflows.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

If you've been around the AI scene for a while, you've probably heard this name before, a Columbia University graduate who was just 19 years old, later expelled from OpenAI, and then turned to managing a multi-billion dollar fund.

As one of the most controversial and talented young talents in the modern AI field, Leopold Aschenbrenner has become a top AI macro strategist and investment tycoon in Silicon Valley. He currently heads the multi-billion dollar investment fund Situational Awareness LP, specializing in betting on the underlying core supporting the AGI process: power infrastructure, cutting-edge semiconductors, and massive computing centers.

Many people came to know him through his famous 165-page essay "Situational Awareness," predicting the arrival of AGI around 2027. He is not only a core member of the former "super-alignment" team at OpenAI but also a key advocate driving the United States to elevate AI development to the level of a "Manhattan Project," recognized as one of the few prophets able to foresee the evolution of large models' black boxes.

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

Around 2022, at the age of just 19, after graduating from Columbia University, he joined the FTX Future Fund, funded by the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). In this fund with a strong Effective Altruism (EA) color, Leopold was not delving into the secondary market speculation of the crypto world but was responsible for evaluating how to use crypto wealth to mitigate existential risks to humanity.

It was this experience working at the top-tier think tank in the crypto space that allowed him to get an early look into in-depth research on AI Risk and taught him how to think about the ultimate trajectory of technology in the context 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 Anthropic, the currently most-watched AI startup globally.

Avital Balwit currently serves as Chief of Staff to Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, where she is involved in top-level strategic decisions for the company and coordinates resources in this model competition between Anthropic and OpenAI. After all, Anthropic's star product, Claude, is gradually catching up with ChatGPT.

Avital Balwit is most famous in the AI circle not solely for this role, but for the articles she has written. She has earnestly discussed "Where Does Humanity's Sense of Meaning Come From in a Post-Work Era," profoundly shaping Silicon Valley's contemplation on social forms post-AGI proliferation, thus becoming one of the most influential cultural commentators in the AI era.

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

Furthermore, Avital's recent perspectives on "UBI in the AI Era" are very unique, largely benefiting from her early research on decentralized distribution in the Web3 space.

Emad Mostaque

Many know Emad from Stable Diffusion.

But in fact, Emad's career started in finance. He began managing his own hedge fund at the age of 23 and later served as co-CIO at Capricorn Long/Short EM, focusing on emerging market strategies. In 2017, the fund he led received the Annual Emerging Markets Risk-Adjusted Hedge Fund Award. From 2005 to 2020, he spent a full fifteen years in the global macro hedge fund space, researching "systemic trends" such as economic cycles, policy changes, and the long-term impact of technological disruptions on asset prices.

In 2013, he started to get involved with btc-42">Bitcoin and Ethereum, initially as an investor and later as an angel investor in several early-stage crypto projects.

In 2019, Emad worked on a project called Symmitree, aiming to leverage blockchain technology to reduce the barriers for underprivileged populations to access digital technologies. The project ran for about a year but eventually stalled as it faced a major challenge – various centralized institutions, including hospitals, governments, and tech companies, were unwilling to open up their data and models, even in the face of a global public health crisis.

Emad later mentioned that this experience was pivotal in making him realize that centralization is not just an efficiency issue but a systemic one. No one would voluntarily relinquish control over their data and computing power unless the design incentivizes cooperation. Thus, in 2020, Emad founded Stability AI. He believed that AI should not be confined to a few exclusive labs; models should be open-source, training processes should be transparent, and anyone should be able to build on top of them.

In 2022, Stable Diffusion was released, marking the first significant breach of the fortress of commercial proprietary models by an open-source image generation model. During that period, Stability AI's valuation skyrocketed to the billion-dollar range, and Emad himself became a prominent figure in the open-source AI movement.

However, internal issues within the company were also accumulating. Controversies regarding his management style, questions about the mismatch between the burn rate and revenue, the departure of several key researchers... In early 2024, amidst growing controversy, he departed from Stability AI.

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