What to Watch in Crypto
A deep dive into the Greek crypto landscape
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What to Watch in Crypto
A few days ago, I came across this tweet:
Most people don’t know this, but here’s the thing…
There’s an extremely high density of amazing Greek talent in cryptography and the broader blockchain industry. I suppose the great STEM education in the country plays a role, and the recent economic crisis in Greece led more people to realise the benefits of blockchain and decentralisation;
pulling a quote from our chat with Kostas Chalkias (co-founder & Chief Cryptographer of Mysten Labs) two years ago. Some were also orange-pilled by Andreas Antonopoulos in the early days—an information security expert turned one of the most well-respected figures in crypto.
In today’s post, we follow the breadcrumbs of Greeks in crypto doing cool shit and pushing the frontiers of decentralisation. Let’s begin.
From a few early nodes…
Despite Greece’s small size, Greek scientists and engineers play an important role in influencing the industry. An early crypto hub in the University of Athens led by Aggelos Kiayias, the scientific mind behind Cardano (a blockchain that reached a market cap of $77 billion in May 2021, which was the fourth highest for a cryptocurrency at that time), created an entire cohort of household names in academia and industry. In a post he wrote four years ago:
It was the idea of a grassroots driven digital ‘parallel currency’ to unlock Greece from its debt-ridden banks that inspired me to devote my research efforts to creating a blockchain protocol that could realise the vision of democratising access to all financial services.
The Greek economic crisis pushed many researchers to explore novel solutions. Aggelos was one of them.
Among his students was Dionysis Zindros, founder of Common Prefix and Pod network, a new Layer 1 that prioritises speed and security. Dionysis is the reason Georgios Konstantopoulos got into the space. Georgios is a Partner & CTO at one of the largest crypto funds (Paradigm) and CEO of the company behind a new open-source Layer 2 (Ithaca). His interview for this newsletter a few months ago is a must-read:
On a global scale, crypto has already changed the world.
Talking about OGs, Lefteris Karapetsas had a significant contribution to Ethereum in the early days. He was part of the network launch in Berlin working on the Solidity compiler and C++ client. He now runs open source portfolio tracker, Rotki. Berlin is also the city of Eleftherios Diakomichalis. While still at SoundCloud, Eleftherios said he felt the state of the internet was mostly incremental improvements and started looking more into crypto networks. Radicle was born to build decentralised code collaboration.
Plenty of crypto projects have started at MIT, including Algorand by Silvio Micali, a recipient of the Turing Award for his work in cryptography. Georgios Vlachos was part of the founding team. Georgios later found Axelar, an interoperability platform—can be thought of as an overlay network for blockchains. Among MIT alums, there’s Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos and Metrika, a blockchain monitoring and analytics company backed by Microsoft and Coinbase. Nikos joined me in 2022 to discuss why crypto matters. As per Richard Hendricks, the main protagonist of comedy series Silicon Valley:
An internet that is of the people, by the people, and for the people... so help me God.
High density of great talent
A company that doubled down on the Greek crypto talent is Mysten Labs. The creators of Sui, a Layer 1 that prioritises a faster and more secure experience and one of the top networks in transaction volume today, have formed an extended Greek team. It counts Kostas Chalkias and George Danezis as co-founders, previously at Meta’s blockchain team, Novi. Meta pulled the plug on the stablecoin payment system they were working on and the whole team was dismantled. Behind Sui are plenty of cryptographers and engineers like Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias and Anastasios Kichidis. According to LinkedIn, the team currently has 25 employees in Greece.
The list of Greek engineers and cryptographers in prominent blockchain projects is long, and the below is by no means exhaustive: Panagiotis Chatzigiannis (Visa), Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Thodoris Karakostas (Chainlink), Nikos Papadis (Nokia Bell Labs), Georgios Gontikas (Gnosis), Vangelis Andrikopoulos (Sei Labs), Anastasios Andronidis (Worldcoin), Dimitris Mouris (Nillion), Giorgos Panagiotakos (IOHK), Michalis Alifierakis (Gauntlet), Isidoros Passadis (Lido), Chris Ziogas (ETC), Orestis Alpos (Common Prefix), George Kadianakis (Ethereum Foundation), Andreas Kouloumos (Chaincode Labs), John Terzis (Here Not There Labs), Evangelos Barakos (Ritual), Yannis Stamelakos (ex Synthetix).
And it’s not only engineers but also people on the business side like Vassilis Tziokas (Matter Labs), Alex Letsas (Dune Analytics), George Adams (Graph Protocol) or investors like Danny Sursock (Archetype), Alex Evans, Theo Diamandis (Bain Crypto), Marcos Veremis (Accolade Partners), Yiannis Varelas, and others.
Greece hosts several crypto meetups (a few of them running for years like Bitcoin & Blockchain Tech Meetup), annual events (e.g. Athens Cryptography Day at NTUA), and hacker houses (Solana hacker house hosted by Dean and Chris). One of the largest (if not the largest) global events for Zero-knowledge proofs recently took place in Athens too (zkSummit).
Scientists at the top of their fields
Greek scientists are household names in top financial cryptography conferences, while many have thousands of citations: Foteini Baldimtsi (George Mason), Zeta Avarikioti (TU Wien), Dimitris Papadopoulos (HKUST), Charalampos Papamanthou, Georgios Palaiokrassas, Katerina Sotiraki (Yale), Giorgos Tsimos (University of Maryland), Stefanos Chaliasos, Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos (Imperial), Dimitris Karakostas (University of Edinburgh), Zoe Paraskevopoulou, Nikos Leonardos (NTUA), Pyrros Chaidos, Yannis Smaragdakis (University of Athens), Stefanos Leonardos (Kings College), Vassilis Zikas (Purdue). Special mention to the University of Nicosia, which has had a blockchain program since 2013, now led by George Giaglis.
Greek-founded crypto companies
This list should give you a glimpse of the problems people are working on. They vary from infrastructure to applications to security and gaming, and most are backed by the biggest crypto investors globally.
Axelar - blockchain interoperability layer
Phylax Systems - security protocol for decentralised applications
Dedaub - smart contract audit
Come Together - event ticketing
Pod Network - Layer 1 that prioritises speed and security
Radicle - decentralised code collaboration
Mysten Labs - faster and more secure Layer 1 (Sui)
Fileverse - p2p alternative to Google Workspace & Notion
WeatherXM - decentalised weather network
Metrika - blockchain analytics
ChainSafe Systems - blockchain R&D firm
Rated - data for proof-of-stake validators
Ithaca - Layer 2 on Ethereum
Lucid Labs - no-code platform for DeFi apps
Rotki - portfolio tracker
Bitquery - blockchain data products
Nayms - (re)insurance market
Mintify - NFT trading terminal
The Greek economic crisis is likely why many engineers and scientists were initially pushed to explore crypto. But those early nodes formed small hubs around them and then influenced a wider net of people to enter the industry.
The effect is what we explored today: a country with 0.12% of the global population, yet an outsized network of people who push the frontiers of cryptography and decentralisation in industry and academia alike.
Jobs
Check out job openings here from startups hiring in Greece.
News
Pantheon AI (AI for architects) raised $25m led by a16z.
Oriole Networks (photonics) raised €20m.
Ithaca (Layer 2 blockchain) raised $20m by Paradigm.
Dyania Health (AI for clinical trial recruitment) raised $10m Series A.
Ikerian (AI for healthcare) secured $8m Series B.
Biological Lattice Industries (biofabrication) raised $1.8m Pre Seed led by UniFund.
Circuland (materials re-use for AEC) raised €750k led by Apeiron Ventures.
Edencore (AI for agriculture) raised €400k from UniFund.
Uplodio (marketing agency tech) secured a Pre Seed from Genesis Ventures.
Resources
The back seat gang by George Hadjigeorgiou, co-founder & CEO of Skroutz.
The founder role by Nick Papanotas, founder & CEO of Geekbot.
Shaping the future of cybersecurity with Gerasimos Marketos, SVP Product at Hack The Box.
Creating a pricing strategy with Spyri Karasava, founder & CEO of Dealops.
Events
“Pitch Your Startup to Greek VCs” on Oct 29
“Athens WordPress Meetup” on Oct 31
“Open Coffee Thessaloniki #84” on Nov 1
“START your night UP” on Nov 6
“2nd Athens Causal Data Science Meetup” on Nov 7
Thanks for reading, and see you in two weeks. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, share it with some friends or drop a like by clicking below ⤵️
Find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Thank you so much for reading,
Alex
Great one!