The cryptocurrency industry is constantly evolving and changing at a rapid pace, and it’s difficult to sum up the year’s zeitgeist in just 50 names.
To wrap up CoinDesk’s Most Impactful 2025 series, we’re giving honorable mentions to our final list of nominees, recognizing stories that have truly succeeded or are on the verge of making the final cut in the final months of the year. The names stem from growing areas of the industry, such as prediction markets, resurgent areas like privacy, and established companies and figures.
Privacy, including coins like Zcash and networks like Canton
Privacy has long been a concern in the crypto industry, with privacy coins, mixers, and other tools designed to help participants conduct transactions without sharing all of their private details. Industry players and even federal regulators like SEC Chairman Paul Atkins are discussing the importance of privacy in cryptocurrency trading.
Zcash (ZCH) in particular has seen a resurgence recently, with Zashi wallets making shielded transactions (i.e. private transactions) the default and larger investors pouring funds into the network’s token.
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said in an interview with CoinDesk Podcasts: “The future of privacy is like the past… In the United States where I was born, and the whole world where everyone lives, you can have a conversation with someone. It’s just between you and them.” “You don’t have to worry if someone else is lurking or eavesdropping on you. As with financial transactions, you go to a store, buy something and pay for it, and it’s just between you and them. No one else can see or control what you buy and when. Zcash implements the same mechanism using internet encryption, but it’s really the same mechanism that humans have been living with for about 20 years ago, which is that you have the final say and what you spend your money on is your business and no one else’s.”
Canton Network has just been named a tokenization partner for securities industry heavyweight The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). While Digital Asset and DTCC, the companies behind Canton, are currently only working on developing a minimum viable product, the plan is for a certain number of U.S. Treasury bonds to be minted on Canton, with the underlying securities being held in custody by the Depository Trust Company.
Canton is a privacy network with a system designed so that participants can only see the end of their own transactions, but it is also purpose-built for institutional and regulated trading.
Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara
Crypto-native prediction market platform Polymarket officially re-entered the United States this year following a significant increase in users during the 2024 election. But it was actually another platform, Kalshi, that took the lead in completing a key court case against the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. After winning the case last year, Kalshi launched a political prediction market in the United States, opening the door for other platforms. It is now expanding into cryptocurrencies and providing support for many other platforms.
Kalshi just raised $1 billion earlier this month and is still going strong. The financing brings founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara’s net worth to more than $1 billion.
Despite some issues, Kalshi has also signed multiple agreements this year to power prediction markets on other platforms, including with Coinbase and Phantom Wallet, and will be used by traditional news giant CNN.
Binance Co-CEO He Yi
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, continues to grow. One of its co-founders, He Yi, has largely stayed out of the spotlight, despite launching the platform with Changpeng Zhao (who also has children) during the first few years of the exchange’s operation. Officially, she is Binance’s head of marketing, but she reportedly wields considerable influence behind the scenes, overseeing the Binance Labs venture capital fund, promoting the growth of BNB Chain and participating in Binance’s acquisitions.
Earlier this month, He Yi was officially named co-CEO of the platform, alongside Zhao’s successor Richard Teng.
“I’m really interested in how to empower an organization, how to build a [growing] company,” she told the CoinDesk Podcast earlier this year. “That’s one part and the other part that I want to focus on… I’m an OG and I think that part [includes] Changes that may make the community feel a lot [more] With full confidence, I will spend more time waiting for user feedback, improve our products, and build a better platform. “
“I think Yi really underestimated her role, right? … Anyone who knows the crypto industry and knows Binance knows that Yi has been involved in building the industry from day one and continues to this day,” Teng said in the same podcast. “She plays a very, very critical role in our development.”
SharpLink Chairman Joe Lubin
ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin is no stranger to CoinDesk’s most influential lists, taking a new tack this year by taking a board role at SharpLink, an ethereum finance company that now holds nearly 900,000 ETH.
But while most digital asset finance companies seem content with just holding, SharpLink said it plans to actually distribute its holdings, announcing that it will deploy $200 million worth of Ethereum into Linea, Consensys’ second-layer decentralized financial tool, over the next few years. The company intends to seek returns on its stake, claiming that using its funds in this way will make the Treasury “more productive”.
The company also continues to raise funds for its ETH purchases.
Bridge founder Zach Abrams
The growth of stablecoins is one of the dominant narratives of 2025. Between legislation directing federal regulators to create customized rules for stablecoin issuers and the tokens themselves, this area of the broader crypto industry has never been more popular. But it’s not just crypto-native companies; companies like PayPal are already making inroads into the space.
Payments company Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge earlier this year, a $1 billion deal that closed in February and triggered a flurry of partnerships, license applications and new tools for other companies to issue their own stablecoins. Bridge founder Zach Abrams said in a press statement earlier this year that some of its tools, such as open distribution, are designed to allow platforms to quickly build their own custom stablecoins.
