Brian Armstrong

In 2010, Armstrong was an early believer and follower of Bitcoin after reading the original whitepaper. During his travels to Brazil and South America, he saw plentiful opportunities to create better ways to facilitate cross-border payments. He began work coding a platform where people could store and send cryptocurrency to solve this problem. He founded Coinbase soon after in 2012 after securing $150,000 of investment capital.

Coinbase has since gone on to become one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, with 56 million registered users. According to his website, Brian is “passionate about accelerating the pace of innovation in the world, building technology products, and increasing the amount of economic freedom in the world.”