Another year, another CryptoDaily™ Awards list, and, once again, Web3 gave us no shortage of names to choose from.

2026 had a bit of everything: new companies finding their place in the market, familiar projects changing direction, products getting better, crypto markets moving through their usual ups and downs, and plenty of people quietly doing good work somewhere in the middle of all that.

We recently highlighted the companies that stood out to us in 2026, but behind most of those stories, and countless others, are individuals whose decisions, ideas, and contributions helped drive the year forward. 

That’s where this list comes in.

How the 2026 Honorees Were Picked

Putting the list together meant looking at very different kinds of work across Web3, so there was never going to be one single formula for every pick.

What stayed consistent was the focus on recent efforts, wider track record, and whether there was a clear case for that person to be there in the first place.

For some, that came down to what they built. For others, it was growth, technical development, public presence, market analysis, or the role they played in moving a particular conversation forward.

This year’s awards are split across the following categories:

• Entrepreneurship

• Engineering & Development

• Product & Design

• Marketing & Growth

• Education & Public Speaking

• Thought Leadership

• Trading & Market Intelligence

Each category includes three honorees: 

• CryptoDaily’s Choice, 

• Runner-up Pick, 

• and Honorable Mention.

CryptoDaily’s Choice goes to the person who, from our editorial team’s perspective, stood out most strongly in that category this year. Runner-up Pick recognizes another name with a particularly strong case, while Honorable Mention gives the third spot to someone whose work also deserved attention.

That gives us 21 honorees in total across seven parts of Web3.

Winners

Entrepreneurship 

Crypto Daily’s Choice – Michael Jerlis

Michael Jerlis is the founder & CEO of EMCD, a crypto mining and fintech platform he built from zero reputation over nine years into two global award-winning businesses. EMCD Mining Pool commands more than 2% of global Bitcoin hashrate, serves customers across 120 countries, and has mined 30,000+ BTC to date. Coinhold Wallet has $70M+ in assets under management, with 500,000+ wallets created to date. Jerlis solves every business problem the same way –  systematically, not reactively. That approach is why EMCD has outlasted every halving and every crypto winter since 2017.

Runner-up Pick – Sam Green

Sam Green is the founder and CEO of Cambrian, a financial intelligence platform built around blockchain data, AI, and institutional use cases. Before Cambrian, he co-founded Semiotic Labs, worked on The Graph ecosystem, and helped develop the DEX aggregator Odos. In 2026, Cambrian raised a $6 million seed round co-led by Polychain and Franklin Templeton, bringing total funding to $11.9 million.The company is now building data infrastructure aimed at institutions and AI agents operating onchain, giving Green a particularly timely entrepreneurship story with a business built around where onchain data is actually being used next.

Honorable Mention – Varun Choudhary

Varun Choudhary is the founder of ORO, an AI-based interface designed to make onchain finance easier to use through natural-language commands. Instead of moving manually between DeFi protocols, users can ask ORO to trade, lend, borrow, or deposit while keeping control of their assets. In 2026, ORO raised another $3 million, taking total funding to $4 million, while reporting around 400,000 users across more than 80 languages. The platform now works across Ethereum, Solana, and ZIGChain, making Choudhary an interesting newer founder to watch as AI becomes more closely tied to DeFi products.

Engineering & Development 

CryptoDaily’s Choice – Zac Williamson

Privacy has been one of Ethereum’s harder technical problems for years, and Zac Williamson has spent much of his career working on exactly that. A former particle physicist and co-inventor of PLONK, he went on to co-found Aztec, the privacy-focused Ethereum L2. In 2026, Aztec rolled out its Alpha V5 upgrade, cutting private proving times by more than half, bringing block times down to six seconds, and making fully private transfers possible for under $0.05. Williamson has also remained a visible voice around zero-knowledge proofs, private execution, and how privacy can actually work at Ethereum scale.

Runner-up Pick – Jure Granić-Skender

Jure Granić-Skender is a founding engineer at MetaDAO, where he works on protocol development and market-based governance on Solana. His background spans SaaS, Web3 tooling, wallet infrastructure, and AMM design, but his 2026 work is what makes him especially relevant here. At Solana Summit Serbia, he spoke about using AI agents to help build secure smart contracts handling millions in TVL, while his earlier projects include the Sign In With Solana Rust library. He is still a relatively low-profile name globally, but technically, there is a clear body of work behind the inclusion.

Honorable Mention – Anam Ansari

Prediction markets have given Anam Ansari plenty to work on in 2026. As Blockchain Engineering Lead at Trepa, she has been building the Solana smart contracts behind the platform, with a particular focus on fixed-point math, testing, and making sure payouts behave properly in production. She also broke down Trepa’s architecture for developers at a Superteam Malaysia session this April and appeared on the Ship Safely podcast earlier in the year to discuss the engineering behind prediction markets. Before Trepa, her work already stretched across Solana infrastructure, mobile integrations, SDKs, and developer tooling.

Product & Design 

CryptoDaily’s Choice – Maria Carola 

Maria Carola has spent close to a decade in crypto, first on the marketing side and later running StealthEX. What makes her fit this category is how closely her role has stayed tied to the product itself: keeping instant swaps simple, expanding the asset list, adding fiat access, integrations, and user-facing tools without turning the platform into something overly complicated. StealthEX has continued to push that straightforward, non-custodial model in 2026, and Carola’s work sits right in the middle of that balance between product growth and keeping the experience easy to use. 

Runner-up Pick — Simon Rico

A lot of Simon Rico’s work has been about making DeFi trading feel less like a technical exercise. Until June 2026, he was Principal Designer at 0x, leading design work around Matcha and helping shape the way traders move through swaps, token discovery, and more advanced trading flows. His design changes have previously translated into measurable improvements in mobile conversion, and in 2026 he wrapped up more than three years at Matcha before moving on to build his own design product, Logram. That mix of hands-on Web3 product work and a very clear design point of view makes him a strong runner-up here.

Honorable Mention — Mike McCabe

Privacy products are notoriously difficult to make usable, and that is exactly the problem Mike McCabe has been working on at 0xbow. As Product Lead for Privacy Pools, his role sits between technical privacy infrastructure and the question of how people actually use it onchain. He has been unusually visible in 2026, appearing at EthCC, ETHPrague, ETHis, and ETHSofia to talk about privacy, compliance, and product adoption. That repeated presence matters here: McCabe is not just attached to a product title, he has been part of the wider 2026 conversation around how privacy tools move from protocol ideas into something users can realistically interact with.

Marketing & Growth 

CryptoDaily’s Choice – Mike Ermolaev

Mike Ermolaev spent 2026 pushing Outset PR beyond the usual agency model. The soft launch of Outset Media Index was a major step, bringing traffic, engagement, SEO, collaboration data, and other signals into the way crypto media is evaluated. But the bigger story is how consistently he has built around that same instinct: question the standard approach, test what actually works, and turn those insights into something practical. Under his leadership, Outset PR has grown into a more data-led, strategic partner for crypto brands, while Mike himself has remained a strong voice on market events, media performance, and AI-driven discovery.

Runner-up Pick – Silvia Mogas

Silvia Mogas has been difficult to miss on the Web3 marketing circuit in 2026. Her year has included appearances at ETH Bucharest, Crypto Expo Europe, ETHGlobal NYC, AIM Congress and other industry events, usually around go-to-market strategy, adoption, positioning, and bringing Web3 products to wider audiences. Outside the conference circuit, she works with digital asset companies as a fractional CMO and strategist, covering everything from exchanges and tokenized assets to institutional products. It is that mix of hands-on marketing work and repeated public presence that makes her a natural fit here.

Honorable Mention – Jack Haldorsson

For Jack Haldorsson, 2026 has largely been about the less glamorous side of Web3 growth: what happens after the launch hype fades. Through Lunar Strategy, he has been writing and speaking repeatedly about go-to-market planning, creator campaigns, founder-led marketing, community building, and keeping growth going between major announcements. The agency says it worked with more than 110 clients in 2025, while Haldorsson has continued running webinars, publishing practical growth guides, and appearing on marketing podcasts this year. His profile is still relatively compact, but the body of 2026 work is easy to trace.

Education & Public Speaking 

CryptoDaily’s Choice – Rick Baker

Education has been the core of Rick Baker’s work for years, and 2026 gave him several reasons to stay visible. He spoke at Web3 Expo Dubai on accessible Web3 learning and how institutions can prepare for wider adoption, while continuing to build Learn Crypto Global and the Tokenised Asset Academy around blockchain, DeFi, and tokenisation education. In September, he also co-hosted a live DeFi masterclass aimed at making the subject easier to understand for people outside the usual crypto crowd. His work this year has stayed firmly focused on turning technical topics into something people can actually follow.

Runner-up Pick – Diana Rodriguez

Diana Rodriguez has spent much of 2026 doing the practical side of crypto education: workshops, beginner sessions, and live speaking rather than simply posting explainers online. She ran a crypto-for-beginners workshop with Gemini in January, hosted and spoke at a sold-out International Women’s Day event in Sydney in March, and joined a panel at New Zealand CryptoCon in June. Her focus is deliberately beginner-friendly, covering wallet setup, self-custody, scams, and the basics people usually have to figure out the hard way. That steady run of public education work makes her a strong fit here. 

Honorable Mention – Ashley Wright

Ashley Wright has spent much of 2026 doing what she does best: making crypto easier to understand for people who are not already deep in the industry. She taught practical digital-asset classes early in the year, spoke at Cayman Crypto Week, and later joined Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto, where she also led a workshop around crypto, AI, and the future of money. Through The Wright Success and Crypto Strategy Academy, she has taught hundreds of students and built a broader profile around digital-asset education, financial literacy, and bringing more people into Web3 without drowning them in jargon.

Thought Leadership 

CryptoDaily’s Choice – Lisa Loud

Lisa Loud has had a fairly visible 2026 across both Web3 and fintech conversations. At Consensus Hong Kong, she moderated a session on open source, decentralization, and edge AI, and later appeared in interviews around tokenized assets, financial inclusion, and leadership in emerging tech. She has also continued publishing her own takes on trust, careers, and leadership in Web3 through Forbes. Her background includes roles at Apple, PayPal, ShapeShift, and Secret Network, which gives her a wider frame than someone speaking from just one corner of crypto.

Runner-up Pick – Yuanjie Zhang

A lot of Yuanjie Zhang’s public work this year has centered on where blockchain actually fits into the next phase of finance. In 2026, he spoke repeatedly about RWAs, stablecoins, institutional adoption, cross-border payments, and the role blockchain could play in AI-driven economies. He appeared at Conflux’s Digital Finance & Ecosystem Conference in Hong Kong, joined institutional-focused events with HashKey, and gave several interviews on Asia’s role in bringing real-world assets onchain. That steady run of public commentary makes him a strong thought-leadership pick rather than just another protocol executive.

Honorable Mention – Alex Tapscott

Alex Tapscott has spent years writing and speaking about where blockchain fits into the wider economy, and he stayed active in that role through 2026. He appeared at Web3 Toronto alongside founders, policy people, and institutional finance leaders, while continuing to speak about tokenization, digital assets, and the shift from blockchain as “infrastructure” to something that can open up new markets and financial products. His background as an author and longtime commentator gives him a different angle from the other two picks: less company-led, more focused on explaining where the industry may be heading and why.

Trading & Market Intelligence 

CryptoDaily’s Choice – Markus Thielen

Markus Thielen has been one of the more consistently visible crypto market researchers in 2026. Through 10x Research, he has spent the year tracking Bitcoin through onchain data, ETF flows, options positioning, liquidity, and broader macro signals rather than leaning on price charts alone. His market calls have been picked up repeatedly by CoinDesk, Benzinga, and other outlets, and CryptoQuant currently ranks his Bitcoin calls among the stronger analyst records it tracks. That steady mix of research, media appearances, and actual market positioning makes him a natural first pick here.

Runner-up Pick – Vetle Lunde

Few people spend quite as much time digging through the less glamorous parts of the Bitcoin market as Vetle Lunde. At K33 Research, his work in 2026 has covered everything from low trading activity and leverage to institutional flows, market bottoms, and the way Bitcoin has behaved against other risk assets. He has appeared in interviews and podcasts throughout the year while K33 continued publishing its regular market reports and 2026 research. Lunde’s strength is less about headline-grabbing predictions and more about reading market structure closely enough to explain what is actually changing underneath the price.

Honorable Mention – James Check

James Check has kept up a very steady stream of Bitcoin market work through 2026. His Checkonchain reports have followed capitulation, ETF flows, holder behavior, realized price, market-cycle shifts, and the return of spot demand, while his analysis has also appeared in podcasts, live sessions, and market coverage outside his own platform. In September, Cointelegraph picked up his argument that Bitcoin may already have established its cycle bottom near $58,000. What keeps his work interesting is the way he uses onchain behavior to explain why the market is moving, not just where the price might go next.

One Last Word on the 2026 CryptoDaily™ Individual Awards

The best part of an annual awards list usually comes later.

Not on the day it is published, but months down the line, when you look back and see which names kept going, which took a completely different turn, and which suddenly made a lot more sense than they did at the time.

So consider this one bookmarked.

2026 is not finished writing its story just yet, and neither are the people on this list. We’ll see what the next twelve months do with both.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Source: Crypto Daily