The gift of ru-community to the global blockchain market

5 min readSep 8, 2021

Back in 2017, in the stormy ICO era, a study by global consultant Ernst & Young showed the projects founded by immigrants from Russia and the CIS countries occupy one of the leading places in terms of fees during the initial coin offering (ICO) process.

Speaking of Russians in Silicon Valley, the media often mention Google, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who came to the United States with his parents in 1978 at the age of 6, one of Paypal’s co-founders is Max Levchin, who’s living in the United States since he was 16, and the Ethereum blockchain developer Vitalik Buterin’s living in Canada since he was 6.

We will illustrate the prospects and excess of the IT potential of the post-Soviet countries by the example of developers and fintech entrepreneurs who studied and did their first business in their native countries but could bring their companies to the global level.

Trust Wallet

The idea of a startup that will soon turn into a Trust Wallet company came to Viktor Radchenko, a native of Dnepropetrovsk when a friend showed him a way to buy banned substances using cryptocurrency.

At that time, the developer and security specialist had been living in the United States for several years and had experience in founding successful commercial products. Trucker Path and Truckloads, the services he created for truckers, attracted more than $50 million of investments, and the company’s staff reached 60 people, but Viktor had to sell this business to the Chinese social network RenRen due to disagreements between his partners.

A short-term work in Seed neobank became the next step to the creation of a decentralized Trust Wallet. Viktor invited to the project another CIS native, Maxim Rasputin. In just a year, the number of Trust Wallet users exceeded 20,000, and the Binance crypto exchange got its eye on it.

After the acquisition, Trust Wallet has kept a status of an autonomous team within Binance corporation, and the wallet has expanded due to the function of buying cryptocurrencies using cards, DEX integration, and staking. Trust Wallet supports more than 40 blockchains and aims to expand its audience to up to 100 million people.

Delta.theta

Delta.theta is a decentralized cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. Delta.theta is a platform for peer-to-peer options trading, which currently operates on the Ethereum and Binance Smart blockchains, providing access to digital options liquidity from centralized exchanges (CEX). Delta.theta allows market makers to hedge its DEX options against orders on CEX platforms in real-time, and DeFi farmers to get access to the lowest premiums for insurance against price declines.

The project founders are Moscow natives Danil Zatologin and Ilya Chesnokov. In the summer of 2021, another former Russian, the managing partner of venture fund Thundermark Gleb Chuvpilo joined them. They get the status of venture partners to conduct the search, verification, and development of prospective DeFi startups.

At the same time, Delta.theta has announced plans to relocate its headquarters to Miami to join the developing blockchain technology ecosystem supported by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. In this way, a well-known cryptocurrency supporter Suarez intends to seize technological leadership from well-known IT clusters of Silicon Valley, Switzerland, and Singapore.

BitFury

Bitfury is an integrative blockchain company which interest spread to mining, software and hardware development, and Bitcoin blockchain tools. The company’s offices are located in the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and data centers — in Iceland and Georgia. Until 2021, BitFury had the status of the largest industrial miner outside of China, but the ‘great exodus of miners’ from China, which has been taking place since the spring of 2021, has significantly changed the market balance.

The BitFury founder is Latvia original Valery Vavilov. His 15-year experience in various technical and managerial positions allows him to develop technological solutions which improve people’s lives all around the world.

Under his leadership, Bitfury has developed five generations of advanced mining chips and cutting-edge data centers, as well as unique soft. Later the company has become a key provider of consulting solutions and one of the largest providers of security services for blockchain transactions.

Wirex

Founded in 2014, the E-Coin startup rebranded to Wirex in 2015. In March 2017, Wirex raised $3 million during the Series A funding round from the fintech fund of the Japanese financial giant SBI Group. Since 2018, Wirex offers contactless cryptocurrency debit cards and has become a key market player. Wirex operates in 130 countries, has 3.1 million registered users, and is supported by Visa and Mastercard.

The founders of Wirex, Russians Pavel Matveev and Dmitry Lazarichev, once suggested cryptocurrencies (especially BTC) will be interesting not only for geeks but for a wide range of users also. In London, they met a third partner, Georgy Sokolov, who initially invested up to $30,000 in the project.

The Wirex 3.0 platform allows opening accounts in 9 digital and 11 fiat currencies. Wirex Business is the world’s first service for companies working with digital assets, attracting thousands of new customers. To ensure security, Wirex has developed multi-currency IBAN accounts with access to SWIFT/SEPA/Faster Payments and secure wallets with multi-signatures.

Now Wirex is to open more than new 26 stablecoins. This will significantly speed up payments and transfers. While SWIFT payments get the addressee in 1–5 days, stablecoins transfers need only seconds and cost hundreds of times less than usual.

Weld Money

The success of our countrymen all around the world inspired Weld Money to launch its cryptocurrency card service. There’s a powerful team is working on the project currently, it has several successful initial funding rounds. Now we’re preparing IDO on the leading DEX platforms. Join the Weld Money community to become the early investors & users of the project.