5 Dope CEOs Who ICO-ed

The crypto industry is a vast and massive field that unites professionals from IT, tech, and true specialists in blockchain and crypto field. The role of crypto experts across the ICO and blockchain industry is enormous, and we won’t deny it. These experts are becoming advisors for diverse ICOs, thereby assisting them in raising large amounts of money. They also speak at crypto conferences all over the world, telling newbies about their experiences and sharing their vision of the new technologies.

Crypto experts also work at crypto media, amassing great content for anyone who’s willing to learn more about the world of blockchain.

Without such experts, blockchain wouldn’t exist. That’s why we’re pleased to share a bit about the most successful CEOs of recent ICOs.

Ted Livingston

CEO KIK

Ted Livingston is the founder and CEO of Kik, a chat network with more than 240 million registered users. Founded in 2009, Kik has raised $120.5 million from investors. Livingston also maintains an active interest in the University of Waterloo’s Velocity Fund.

Kik Messenger is a mobile messaging app from the Canadian company Kik Interactive and is available free of charge on iOS and Android operating systems. Kik is known for its user’s anonymity features, such as allowing users to register without providing a telephone number. As of May 2016, Kik Messenger had approximately 300 million registered users.

Kik’s ICO sale took place over a span of two weeks, from Sept 12th to Sept 26th, 2017. It was one of the most popular ICOs of 2017, raising approximately $50M USD from 10,026 individuals in 117 countries. An additional $50M was raised from institutional investors in a pre-sale.

At the True North tech conference, Livingston expressed his surprising opinion about blockchain: “Almost nobody should be looking at it.” Then he explained:

“What does blockchain do at the end of the day? It allows you to have a database that’s trustless. That can be applied in a bunch of ways, but most of those ways, you still need trust.”

Surprisingly, in spite of his statement, Livingston and his ICO raised millions in USD with the help of blockchain.

Kai C. Chng

Co-Founder / Ceo at Digixglobal

For four years, Kai C. Chng worked on Wall Street as an EMFX trader in a global investment bank. He was an International Program student at UPenn Wharton and graduated with honors from NYU Stern.

The Digix stack is currently being built by DigixGlobal. Digix was the company’s initial concept, and they’re dedicated to building out the initial Digix technology, developing business partnerships, and ultimately creating governance tools for the DAO.

Once DigixDAO governance has finished DGD Token, holders of DGD will be able to vote on proposals that anyone can present, not just DigixGlobal.

On 30th March 2016,DigixGlobal conducted the first ever ICO on the Ethereum network, raising $5,500,000.

Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian writer and programmer. He’s been involved in the Bitcoin community since 2011, co-founding and writing articles for Bitcoin Magazine. Buterin is known, first of all, as the founder of the Ethereum Project, coming in second as the world’s most valued and recognized cryptocurrency platform after Bitcoin. His visionary project boasts an enormous market cap of over $65 billion dollars, and it just keeps growing.

Meanwhile, Vitalik — only 24 years old — has far-reaching plans for the near future.

Ether is a cryptocurrency whose blockchain is generated by the Ethereum platform. Ether can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant mining nodes for computations performed.

Yonatan Ben Shimon

CEO Matchpool

Yonatan Ben Shimon has six years’ experience in the Blockchain space. He’s passionate about the value of his crypto-productsand created the Matchpool platform.

Matchpool raised over $5.7 million in just 48 hours, and the community has high expectations for its decentralized matchmaking protocol.

Similar to most Blockchain projects, Matchpool engaged in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

Da Hongfei

CEO at NEO

Da Hongfei is the founder of NEO, a blockchain platform for distributed apps. He’s also founder and CEO of Onchain, an enterprise and institution blockchain development company. Both projects are based in China and were the first blockchain development projects in the country.

Hongfei earned his status as a blockchain and cryptocurrency professional in Asia and is now one of the most respected experts in crypto, particularly in the areas of Chinese user adoption, enterprise applications, and government regulation.

Da Hongfei’s cryptocurrency story began in 2014 with the founding of AntShares — now known as NEO — and Onchain.

NEO’s technology allows for smart contracts such as Ethereum. However, NEO runs a virtual machine that enables developers to code these contracts in C#, Java, Python, and other popular coding languages. The resultis that users no longer need to learn a new language to code smart contracts.

The above information was taken from https://forico.io

5 Dope CEOs Who ICO-ed was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.