Web3 Company Founders From MIT

After one of Blur’s founders doxxed himself, publicly revealing himself as a 24-year-old MIT dropout, one couldn’t help but notice how the entrepreneurial landscape is packed with MIT talents, especially in the blockchain market. Why is it so and what is it that makes the MIT crowd so special?

Founder of Blur: Pacman

From 2016 to 2018, Pacman studied Mathematics and Computer Science at MIT.

In 2022, Pacman anonymously founded the NFT trading platform, Blur. In March 2022, Blur completed an $11 million seed funding round with Paradigm as the lead investor.

Before Blur, Opensea had absolute dominance in the NFT trading market. Although x2y2 and LooksRare attempted to launch a "vampire attack" on Opensea through token issuance, they both failed.

On October 20, 2022, Blur officially launched. According to Dune Analytics, as of October 31, Blur's weekly trading volume had surpassed that of Opensea. Prior to this, no other trading platform had reached half of Opensea's weekly trading volume. On February 22, Blur's daily trading volume was $115 million, while Opensea's was less than $15 million.

Pacman's execution ability is amazing, and he turned himself and Blur from nothing to well-known heroes in just three months.

Founder of Optimism: Jinglan Wang

Jinglan Wang is the only female founder behind a billion-dollar Web3 project.

The MIT Bitcoin Club was Jinglan Wang's starting point in her cryptocurrency career. Jinglan Wang was previously the president of the Wellesley Bitcoin Club and the director of the MIT Bitcoin Expo.

Jinglan Wang's obsession with cryptocurrency is extraordinary, and she even changed her major to computer science in college to better understand cryptocurrency.

From March 2017 to August 2018, Jinglan Wang served as the executive director of the Blockchain Education Network (BEN), a non-profit organization focused on blockchain education founded in 2014 by cryptocurrency billionaire Jeremy Gardner and bitcoin clubs from universities across the United States.

Jinglan Wang has been researching Ethereum's scalability since 2015.

In 2019, Jinglan Wang co-founded the non-profit research organization Plasma Group with Benjamin Jones, Karl Floersch, and Kevin Ho. Plasma is a second-layer scaling technology for Ethereum proposed by Vitalik and Joseph Poon in 2017.

In January 2020, Plasma Group announced its transformation from a research collective into a for-profit startup named Optimism and received $3.5 million in support from Paradigm and IDEO CoLab Ventures.

This transformation was initially questioned by external parties, such as Dragonfly Capital partner Ashwin Ramachandran describing it as the "death of Plasma."

In March 2022, Optimism completed a $150 million financing round, valuing the company at $1.65 billion. In just two years, it became a crypto unicorn. On June 1, 2022, Optimism officially launched its governance token, OP, and initiated an airdrop, causing a frenzy in the entire crypto market.

A few days before February ended, Coinbase's new L2 blockchain Base, built on the OP Stack, caused the value of Optimism's OP token to soar against the trend, with a total circulating market capitalization of over $10 billion.

Paradigm founder: Matt Huang

Matt Huang studied mathematics at MIT from 2006 to 2010. 

Huang is best known for investing in ByteDance (now known as TikTok) when he was 24 years old. According to analysis, Huang made an estimated 2000X return on his investment, with ByteDance valued at around $75 billion at the time. 

In June 2018, after leaving Sequoia Capital, Huang co-founded the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. 

Since its inception, Paradigm has invested in leading projects in almost all sub-sectors of the Web3 field, including the largest NFT trading platform, Blur, the largest DEX, Uniswap, and the highest market capitalization Layer 2 network, Optimism. Of course, there have been mistakes, such as investing in FTX. 

Compared to successful investment cases, Paradigm's ability to quickly apply research and lead industry trends is most impressive. For example, the Art Gobblers NFT art piece that became popular in November last year was researched and created by Paradigm researchers using the Goo token distribution mechanism proposed by Paradigm in September 2022. 

In May 2021, Paradigm proposed the concept of "perpetual options," which was later followed by the research team at Opyn, who launched a perpetual collaboration option product.

Lightspark founder: Christian Catalini

From 2014 to 2021, Christian Catalini served as an assistant professor and associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. 

From 2018 to 2022, Christian Catalini served as a co-founder of Diem/Libra and chief economist of Meta FinTech. 

During this period, there was a small incident where an MIT researcher accused Facebook of plagiarizing its research paper results published in July 2018 on the design of Libra. 

In February 2022, Diem was sold for about $200 million, and Meta's cryptocurrency dreams were shattered. 

In May 2022, Catalini became the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Lightspark. 

Currently, he serves as an economic advisor for Algorand, a technical advisor for Chainlink Labs, and a member of the Coinbase Research Institute Advisory Committee.

Messari founder: Ryan Selkis

Ryan Selkis earned his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2013-2014. 

In January 2018, he founded Messari to build research tools for crypto companies and professionals. 

In September 2022, Messari raised $35 million and was valued at $300 million.

MicroStrategy founder: Michael Saylor

Michael Saylor studied Aerospace Engineering at MIT from 1983-1987, and after graduating, he founded the business intelligence company MicroStrategy. In 1998, MicroStrategy went public on the NASDAQ.

In July 2020, MicroStrategy made its first purchase of bitcoin. According to coinglass data, MicroStrategy currently holds 129,600 BTC, making it the publicly traded company with the largest holdings of BTC. 

Following closely behind is Tesla, which also has some connection to Michael Saylor. In December 2020, Elon Musk asked on Twitter about the feasibility of large bitcoin purchases. Michael Saylor suggested that Tesla convert its balance sheet from dollars to BTC. In February 2021, Tesla announced in an SEC filing that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin.

StarkWare co-founder and CEO: Uri Kolodny

From 1998-2000, Uri Kolodny earned his MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Since November 2017, Uri Kolodny has served as co-founder and CEO of StarkWare.

In May 2022, StarkWare announced a $100 million funding round at an $8 billion valuation. Investors included Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Pantera Capital, and Vitalik.

Celo founder: Rene Reinsberg

Rene Reinsberg earned his MBA from MIT from 2009-2011 and was the co-founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center.

Since 2020, Rene Reinsberg has served as the Chairman of the Celo Foundation.