Although the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to wreak havoc on the global economy, 2021 is nevertheless shaping up to be an important year for the world of fintech.
Here are three entrepreneurs to keep an eye on this year, as they continue to make waves and pioneer change in this field...
Nick Spanos
Nick Spanos is one of the most well-known investors and innovators in the blockchain and crypto sphere. In 2013, he made headlines when he founded the Bitcoin Center NYC - the first-ever cryptocurrency trading floor - right across the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the financial district of Lower Manhattan.
He also serves as the CEO of Blockchain Technologies Corp., which holds multiple blockchain patents for blockchain voting and VoteWatcher, the world's first-ever blockchain-based voting platform, and is working on numerous other projects which enhance blockchain's real-life applications.
Another one of Spanos' exciting and potentially disruptive projects is ZAP, which he co-founded in 2017. ZAP is essentially a marketplace and toolkit which enables developers to build and launch decentralized apps (Dapps) and smart contracts which utilize real-world data and events to trigger the aforementioned contracts.
He was also featured in the Netflix documentary Banking on Bitcoin, and he has spoken at dozens of different blockchain events in the US and far beyond.
Barak Ben-Ezer
Next up, we have Barak Ben-Ezer, CEO of digital banking app Neema. He is also the man behind SOV, a blockchain-based currency which, as per a bill passed in February 2018, is the new legal tender of the Marshall Islands. This makes SOV unique and fundamentally different to the likes of Bitcoin and other stablecoins and altcoins.
The key difference between SOV and traditional fiat currency is the fact that the former's supply growth rate is algorithmically fixed at four percent per year, where for fiat, governments or the central bank can increase the supply of money by as much as they desire, potentially leading to high levels of inflation.
Additionally, Ben-Ezer won the Geektime Award in 2014 and he previously served as the co-founder and co-CEO of Libra Trade - a popular FOREX and options trading platform.
Soravis Srinawakoon
Last but not least, we have Band Protocol CEO & co-founder Soravis Srinawakoon.
The permissionless blockchain protocol, which is backed by the likes of Sequoia Capital and Binance Labs, works in a similar way to Spanos' ZAP platform, as it connects blockchain applications with real-world data and transactions.
Prior to launching Band Protocol, Srinawakoon worked as a software engineer at Ericcson before becoming a teaching assistant at Stanford University, which he had graduated from in 2013.
Srinawakoon, a Forbes Asia 30 Under 30, also founded Better Off, a charity which builds libraries for children to use across rural Thailand.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com
