founders

According to The Information, Anthropic is seeking shareholder approval for a special equity structure that would grant a total of 50.1% voting rights to CEO Dario Amodei and six other co-founders, ensuring that the founding team retains control after the company goes public. This arrangement requires at least three founders to continue holding a minimum percentage of the company's shares.It is reported that the seven founders of Anthropic currently each hold about 2% of the shares, and the new equity will not provide additional economic benefits, only increasing voting rights. Meanwhile, Anthropic's long-term benefit trust fund will still be responsible for electing most board members, with the number of founder board seats increasing from 2 to 3, and employees will also receive shares that can break ties on certain matters.Anthropic was valued at $96.5 billion in May this year, and its recent secondary market valuation has risen to about $1.5 trillion, with its proposed IPO expected to reference this latest valuation.

KelpDAO stated on platform X that it has filed a lawsuit against LayerZero and its co-founder Bryan Pellegrino, seeking accountability for the rsETH cross-chain bridge attack incident that occurred earlier this year. The lawsuit claims that LayerZero failed to adequately disclose its inherent technical weaknesses and risks; failed to prevent its security infrastructure from being compromised; and that LayerZero had previously reviewed and approved Kelp's deployment and configuration in writing.Officials stated that LayerZero has publicly attributed responsibility to itself in recent months. Since the occurrence of the attack, the team has taken action to ensure the safety of user assets, including migrating the rsETH cross-chain bridge to a more secure cross-chain standard.LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino tweeted that KelpDAO's related claims lack basis and that he will respond and defend in Vancouver.Previously, LayerZero released an incident report indicating that on April 18, 2026, the KelpDAO rsETH cross-chain bridge built on LayerZero was attacked, resulting in a loss of approximately 116,500 rsETH, valued at around $292 million.

According to The Information, although American venture capital investment in Chinese startups has significantly decreased in recent years, some American VCs are still continuing to travel to China to meet with technology founders.Last month, three partners from Founders Fund, which is led by Peter Thiel, visited technology companies in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen: Sean Liu, John Luttig, and Joey Krug.

Bankless co-founder David Hoffman announced on May 21 that he had liquidated his ETH holdings and subsequently bought VVV, NEAR, ZEC, HYPE, and LIT, disclosing some entry prices: "NEAR at approximately $1.40, HYPE at approximately $45, ZEC at approximately $560, LIT at approximately $1.35."According to Gate market data, LIT is currently priced at $5.02, an increase of about 272% from the entry price; ZEC is currently priced at $1512.42, an increase of about 170%; NEAR is currently priced at $3.49, an increase of about 149%; HYPE is currently priced at $86.51, an increase of about 92%. Hoffman did not disclose the specific entry price for VVV, but if estimated at the May 21 price of $15.99, it is currently priced at $25.27, an increase of about 58%; during the same period, ETH rose from approximately $2127.47 to $2473.23, an increase of about 16%. The five altcoins he allocated significantly outperformed ETH during the same period.

According to @wallstengine citing Forbes data, six employees who left OpenAI to found Anthropic in 2021 recently made it onto the Forbes 400 billionaires list, each with an estimated net worth of about 15.5 billion dollars.These six individuals are Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, and Sam McCandlish, with a total net worth of about 93 billion dollars. Forbes estimates that each holds approximately 1.6% of Anthropic, which was valued at 96.5 billion dollars this May.

Co-founder of Arbitrum Steven Goldfeder and co-founder of Solana Toly engaged in a debate over on-chain transaction fees, MEV protection, and the single sequencer model.Steven stated that one cannot simply compare surface-level fees. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains that claim lower fees have higher MEV costs, including front-running against retail investors. He expressed a preference for paying clear fees upfront rather than incurring hidden losses from front-running, sandwich attacks, and other issues for the sake of lower fees.Toly countered that Arbitrum currently has a less favorable bid-ask spread and higher fees. The 10% cut taken from transaction fees alone translates to a cost in basis points that exceeds the loss rate from sandwich attacks, which he estimates to be about 10 times that of the latter, not accounting for the impact of the spread. He emphasized, "A single sequencer that pursues shareholder value maximization can never outperform permissionless competition."

The founder of Arbitrum, Steven Goldfeder, and Solana co-founder, Toly, engaged in a debate over the fee model of Robinhood Chain. Toly claimed that the 10% revenue share paid to Arbitrum by Robinhood Chain is sufficient to cover four times the transaction fees on the Solana chain, suggesting that if deployed on Solana, user gas fees could significantly decrease. In response, Goldfeder stated that Robinhood could retain about 90% of gas revenue under the Arbitrum architecture, thus choosing Arbitrum to "be the landlord, not the tenant."Toly countered that Robinhood could charge fees at the application front end while utilizing a lower-cost underlying network; Goldfeder, however, indicated that a large amount of on-chain activity does not go through the Robinhood front end, and if it were merely a "tenant" of the underlying network, Robinhood would not be able to capture the revenue generated from these peripheral activities.According to market news, Robinhood evaluated both Solana and Arbitrum during the product initiation phase and ultimately chose Arbitrum, which allows for independent chain deployment.

According to Bloomberg, after NVIDIA acquired the AI platform Hugging Face for about $13 billion, the three French co-founders—38-year-old Clément Delangue, 42-year-old Julien Chaumond, and 41-year-old Thomas Wolf—each saw their net worth rise to about $1.8 billion, marking their debut on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, and the three co-founders will continue to serve under a six-year retention agreement. NVIDIA has committed that Hugging Face will remain an open platform, allowing users to freely upload and download AI models and datasets. Hugging Face was founded in 2016, initially starting in Paris and now headquartered in Brooklyn.

Towns co-founders Ben and Pat announced that after five years of collaboration with Brian, they have completed the transfer of protocol operations to the Towns Foundation located in Switzerland. The new experienced leadership team will continue to manage the protocol, drive the next phase of growth, and will gradually appear through official channels. The protocol will continue to operate as a decentralized communication protocol, supporting on-chain community ownership, end-to-end encrypted messaging, programmable identities, and native value transfer.According to reports, Towns has accumulated over 1.6 million users and over 400,000 communities, with users expected to earn over $40 million through the protocol by 2025, and has completed listings on multiple mainstream exchanges. The protocol also supports real-time messaging, payments, governance, and $TOWNS network incentives. The team pointed out that building a sustainable company and building a protocol are different challenges, and in response to changes in the market environment, they chose to hand over the protocol to the appropriate team for continuation rather than shutting it down.Both parties expressed their anticipation for the foundation to promote the development of Towns in the intersection of decentralized communication and AI. Pat and Ben will engage in new ventures while continuing to support the transition part-time, thanking the team, investors, node operators, exchange partners, developers, $TOWNS holders, and community members.

Tom Lee, Chairman of Bitmine, stated in an interview that in the era of artificial intelligence, the vision and judgment of company founders are more important than ever. What truly drives company development is not asking questions to AI, but the ability to create a future direction.The existence of OpenAI is inseparable from Sam Altman's vision; the development of Anthropic and AI-related companies under Elon Musk is similarly dependent on this. The core value of these founders lies in proposing long-term strategies and directions, rather than simply asking their AI models what to do next.Tom Lee also categorizes Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev in the same group, believing that he is leading a company in a rapidly growing market, a market that is growing even faster than the overall economy. Vlad Tenev is also one of the important reasons he is optimistic about Robinhood stock.Tom Lee believes that in the AI era, while technology itself may gradually become widespread, the ability of founders to define market direction and drive organizational execution will still become a long-term competitive advantage for companies.

According to The New York Times, OpenAI founders and employees collectively hold 48.93% of the company's shares, which is currently valued at $852 billion.

According to official news, the institutional-level Ethereum ecosystem service organization Ethereum Institutional announced the completion of its initial ecosystem funding round and the formation of a supporter alliance, receiving support from over 100 ecosystem participants, led by BitMine, SharpLink, and Ethereum co-founders Joseph Lubin and Mihai Alisie, with the amount undisclosed. The organization stated that this funding will be used to support its accelerated efforts in tokenization, stablecoins, and on-chain market infrastructure.Ethereum Institutional indicated that in the coming months, it will strengthen direct engagement with banks, asset management institutions, custodians, market infrastructure, fintech companies, and sovereign institutions to advance specific work related to tokenization, stablecoins, market infrastructure, and on-chain settlement, while expanding its core business areas such as institutional education, market intelligence, and ecosystem marketing; at the same time, it will continue to collaborate with a broader Ethereum ecosystem community, including L2, application teams, infrastructure, and custodial service providers.

Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss posted on the X platform last night that AI trading has ended, and a large amount of capital is seeking a safe haven. It is time to rotate back to "the hardest currencies in the universe"------Bitcoin and Zcash.On Tuesday, the South Korean KOSPI index plummeted by 10.84%, Samsung Electronics fell by 13.4%, SK Hynix dropped by 14.7%, and Japan's Nikkei 225 fell by about 4%.

According to CoinDesk, Runestone co-founder Leonidas announced that it is launching an open-source Bitcoin client called DOG Mode, aimed at bypassing BIP 110's restrictions on non-financial data. DOG Mode will increase the maximum weight unit for standard transactions from 400,000 to 3,900,000, close to the entire block capacity, and will reduce the dust limit from 294 to 546 satoshis down to 1 satoshi. Leonidas stated that removing the dust limit will free up approximately $25 million in idle funds.The BIP 110 proposal restricts arbitrary data through user-activated soft forks, requiring 55% miner support, which is currently close to zero. DOG Mode does not require any consensus or voting; it only needs to change the forwarding rules of a single node. If enough nodes run and miners accept, transactions can be confirmed. Leonidas mentioned that DOG Mode deviates from Core to a much lesser extent than Knots, and there is currently no code repository or version. He calls on developers to contribute code and miners to add support. The price of DOG tokens has dropped 1.2% in the last 24 hours.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng's net worth has risen to approximately $36 billion, more than doubling from about $16.7 billion previously, surpassing Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman.Previously, DeepSeek completed a $7.4 billion financing round in June 2026, with the company's valuation reaching $50 billion. Bloomberg estimates that Liang Wenfeng holds about 78% of DeepSeek's shares, and his wealth increase mainly comes from the rise in the company's valuation.

Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, stated on social media that it would be a wonderful thing if the world could have a truly trustworthy and neutral global coordination and digital asset settlement platform. It is the large-scale and rigorous decentralization achieved by the Ethereum platform that makes this vision possible. Soon, and in the near future, more organizations with trustworthy neutrality and ample funding will join in to promote this mission alongside the Ethereum Foundation.These organizations will focus on facilitating the development of the entire Ethereum ecosystem and advancing the areas of interest for many financial institutions adopting Ethereum technology, including: Ethereum Mainnet, Layer 2 networks (L2), and private Ethereum networks. In the future, these three major systems will be able to achieve near real-time interoperability and composability, while ETH will flow freely within this expanded Ethereum ecosystem landscape.

Bittensor co-founder const posted on the X platform, detailing the current state of decentralization of the project, future roadmap, and goals. Bittensor has not yet achieved decentralization at the economic incentive layer, which is still led by the core team, including const himself, two engineers, and a core group of contributors. The project has been live for over 5 years, with no pre-mining, and has 128 subnet teams and over 20 core validator teams, achieving decentralization at the ownership distribution level. The team chose to rapidly iterate at the cost of "maintaining centralization" rather than slowly advancing "democratic" decision-making.Regarding future update plans, Bittensor will promote validators to re-enter the competitive mechanism while opening liquidity pools for two-way investment to symmetrize the market and prevent on-chain signals from being manipulated. Additionally, a belief mechanism will be introduced to grant voting rights to Alpha token holders. In the coming weeks, updates will also be made to TaoFlow and its derivatives, further fine-tuning the issuance distribution algorithm to optimize the distribution method of inflation. Const expects to complete the construction of core mechanisms within the next year and a half, at which point the three pillars of incentive alignment, value optimization, and true ownership will operate in synergy, ultimately achieving complete decentralization by abandoning centralized control.

Longevity technology startup NewLimit, co-founded by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, announced the completion of a $435 million Series C funding round, with a valuation of $3.1 billion. This round was led by Founders Fund, a fund under Peter Thiel, with continued participation from Abstract Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, NFDG, Eli Lilly Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and new investors including Thrive Capital, Greenoaks, and Quiet Capital.In 2021, Brian Armstrong, along with former GV partner and bioengineer Blake Byers and stem cell biologist Jacob Kimmel, jointly invested $110 million to establish NewLimit in South San Francisco.

Gnosis DAO is conducting a Snapshot vote proposing to allow GNO holders to proportionally acquire shares of the DAO treasury through a voluntary redemption mechanism. According to analyst Ignas, the treasury holds approximately $223 million in assets (including ETH, stablecoins, and ecosystem tokens), with about 1.3 million GNO eligible for redemption, each corresponding to about $170 in treasury value, while the current trading price of GNO is around $132, representing a discount of about 27%.The vote reversed twice within 24 hours: after Gnosis co-founder Stefan George cast a dissenting vote, the situation briefly turned, but then a whale wallet holding 67,000 GNO cast a supporting vote, putting the supporters back in the lead. Currently, about 116,000 GNO are in favor (about 65%), 59,600 against, and 1,600 abstentions, surpassing the quorum threshold of 75,000 votes, with voting continuing until May 12.Supporters believe that Gnosis Ltd. has become a funding black hole structurally misaligned with the interests of holders, while opponents warn that redemption will weaken projects with actual users such as Gnosis Pay, Circles, and Gnosis Chain, and may trigger a chain reaction for other DAOs trading below net asset value.

According to market news, Silicon Valley's top investor Peter Thiel's venture capital fund Founders Fund has raised $6 billion to invest in late-stage companies, marking the largest fundraising in the institution's history.Most of the funds—$4.5 billion—come from limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds. A source familiar with the matter stated that the remaining $1.5 billion comes from senior management and employees of Founders Fund, including Peter Thiel himself. The fund's fourth growth-stage investment fund was quickly established less than a year after the launch of the previous fund, making it the fastest transition to a new fund in Founders Fund's twenty-year history.The rapid launch of a larger fund reflects the rising demand for substantial financing from mature-stage startups, which are increasingly inclined to raise funds from private investors rather than the public market. Other venture capital firms are also raising billions of dollars for late-stage investments, partly because tech companies need more capital to afford expensive computing resources. For example, Sequoia Capital recently raised about $7 billion for a new fund to increase investments in large companies; Thrive Capital has also raised a fund of $10 billion, marking its largest scale in history.