Creator of Avalanche, a competitor to Ethereum, the most popular decentralized blockchain platform that applications can run on top of. Over the past year, more than 500 decentralized finance apps have been built on Avalanche, which can process 4,500 transactions per second, compared to just 14 per second for Ethereum.<p>Funding: $6 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Initialized Capital and others. </p><p>Bona fides: Over 2.4 million users; Avalanche’s token AVAX has an $8.5 billion market capitalization.</p><p>Cofounders: CEO Emin Gün Sirer, 50, former Cornell University computer science professor known for his research on distributed systems; COO Kevin Sekniqi, 28; chief protocol architect Ted Yin, 27.</p>
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