Authors: Rhythm Little Worker, BUBBLE
Founders often become part of the narrative essence.
Whether it's Vitalik's geekiness, Jeff Yan's trader intuition, or Do Kwon's arrogance, they all, in some way, define the soul of the project. However, in recent years, these 'crypto star founders' have faded from the stage one after another.
Recently, Jason Zhao, the founder of Story Protocol, announced his resignation as CEO, reigniting discussions among people. The young Korean-American, an entrepreneurial youth from MIT’s summer camp, a student in Fei-Fei Li's lab, and the youngest product manager at DeepMind—his script could have led him to a star sequence in Silicon Valley. Yet, he chose to write his chapter in the crypto industry and then decided to leave after three and a half years.
Rhythm BlockBeats compiled seven 'disappeared' founders, some turned away voluntarily, while others were forced to withdraw; some said goodbye with a gentle idealism, while others hurriedly exited amid scandals and controversies... Of course, they are just a microcosm; there will definitely be more and more founders leaving after issuing tokens, starting their next stage of life that should be quite good.
From 'metaphysical' to 'realistic', the child of someone else's family.
On August 16, Jason Zhao wrote an emotional post on X, announcing that after founding Story for three and a half years, he would resign as full-time CEO, only serving as a strategic advisor, and would devote himself to a new AI project, Poseidon (which just received $15 million in seed funding from a16z last month). He stated that new industrial revolutions in cutting-edge fields such as space and life sciences reignited his passion. However, this post, viewed by 5 million people, only received 2,000 likes.
Jason Zhao, a Korean-American, grew up in Austin, Texas. During high school, Jason began managing the local TED x AustinYouth. At 19, during the MIT Launch training camp, he co-founded a political crowdfunding platform, PolitiFund. With a SAT score of 2400, he chose Stanford University, receiving full scholarship invitations from nearly all Ivy League schools.
After obtaining a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Stanford University, he continued to pursue a master's degree in computer science focusing on artificial intelligence research, studying under 'AI mother' Fei-Fei Li in a computer vision lab. After graduating, he entered Google's AI lab, DeepMind, becoming the youngest product manager. With this script, he appeared to be a clear winner in life from any angle. If he were still working at a big AI company now, he might also receive a 'big money transfer' invitation from Zuckerberg, but fate did not let him take that path.
The 'DeFi Summer' of 2020 introduced him to blockchain, and his background in philosophy and artificial intelligence led him to think that 'AI reshapes creativity and enriches content, while blockchain determines digital property rights and grants data verifiable scarcity.' IP + AI + Blockchain led to the successful financing of $140 million for the project Story Protocol at the age of 25. This project aimed to program intellectual property (IP), track usage and distribution on-chain, and promote new business models for creator royalties, licensing, and AI training.
They launched the Story Academy to promote the Builder program for entrepreneurs and developers. Collaborating with Yakoa to use AI to detect IP duplication and manipulation; integrating with Pastel Network to ensure the rarity of certificates and asset scarcity; teaming up with Lit Protocol to enhance transaction security and privacy; collaborating with Stability AI to bring on-chain authorization and copyright tracking into AI model training.
The business logic of Story: Source: Starzqeth
However, linking on-chain with physical entities, although grand in narrative, seems incompatible with the current crypto inclination, and during the six months post-TGE, they collaborated with well-known brands like Justin Bieber, BTS, BlackPink, Adidas, and Crocs, but this did not change the fact that Story's on-chain revenue was mostly in single or double digits. Noted venture capital analyst Adam Cochran pointed out that the fully diluted valuation of nearly $6 billion compared to this revenue raises questions about whether the project is more focused on 'fancy demonstrations'.
However, in fact, before Zhao's exit, Story still gained the trust of capital, with Grayscale launching the Story IP Trust, and Heritage Distilling Holding Company (CASK) starting the IP DAT plan with a $220 million private placement, allowing the IP's market value to reach a new high when he left. His departure may not have been dignified but also not entirely disgraceful. Perhaps for this young man who had already walked half of others' lives by age 26, his inner inclination after experiencing this journey shifted from 'Plato' to 'Aristotle', from IP to the more tangible construction of physical AI. He plunged into a new world, perhaps a broader wilderness awaits his exploration.
Jason's 'X' Banner—Raphael's 'School of Athens', the left depicts Plato pointing upward 'Ideas/Metaphysics', while the right shows Aristotle with his hand downwards 'Experience/Real Order'.
The long-disappeared Gavin Wood is returning.
Gavin Wood is about to return.
As Ethereum reattempted to break through $4,000, someone suddenly thought of this early core co-founder of Ethereum, the author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper, the creator of the Solidity language, and the founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood.
In October 2022, Gavin Wood announced to the outside world that he would resign as CEO of Parity Technologies. This was his proactive withdrawal from Polkadot. For the industry, this was the second project he exited after Ethereum.
Gavin Wood was born in Lancaster, UK, holds a PhD from Cambridge University, focusing on music visualization and human-computer interaction. Before entering the crypto world, he was a researcher at Microsoft and an active contributor to several open-source communities.
In 2013, he met Vitalik Buterin and became one of Ethereum's earliest co-founders. He not only wrote the first version of the Ethereum Yellow Paper, but also personally implemented Ethereum's first client and invented the Solidity language. It can be said that he laid the initial foundation for the availability of 'smart contracts'.
But in 2016, he chose to leave Ethereum due to ideological differences. He hoped that blockchain would not just be a single virtual machine environment, but a multi-chain interconnected world. This ideal ultimately materialized as Polkadot. In 2017, Gavin Wood co-founded Parity Technologies with Björn Wagner and others, subsequently driving the design and implementation of Polkadot. The Substrate framework he proposed made building blockchains as easy as 'assembling Lego'; while the relay chain and parachain design of Polkadot attempted to solve the issues of multi-chain interoperability and shared security.
In a sense, Gavin Wood and his once-close partner Vitalik are quite similar. In the Polkadot community, Wood has always been the most symbolic engineer. His identity is more of an architect and thinker rather than a manager. He is good at writing code, documents, and manifestos, but not adept at managing large teams and complex interests.
Therefore, in October 2022, Gavin Wood announced his resignation as CEO of Parity Technologies, handing the position over to Björn Wagner. 'The role of CEO was never what I dreamed of; I could serve well as CEO for a period, but it's not where I can find eternal happiness.' This statement carried a typical engineer's idealism. Over the next two years, his public presence gradually diminished: in the summer of 2024, he had a rare photo with Vitalik and Lubin on stage at EthCC7 in Brussels; at Polkadot's developer training camp, he appeared as a DJ, seemingly more inclined to immerse himself in the world of music and code.
However, a dramatic twist occurred recently. At the end of August, Gavin Wood announced his return to Parity, resuming the role of CEO.
In the statement, he said he had dedicated all his energy to protocol research and development over the past few years, and the foundation is now solid; it is the time to 'leverage'. Only by reuniting vision and execution can Polkadot run faster. He thanked Björn for his leadership over the past three years, maintaining delivery even in the bear market, and now he takes over to start a new chapter. This time, Gavin’s identity is no longer just a 'architect', but he steps back to the management stage. He describes it as 'making Polkadot the launch platform for all new chains and Web3 applications, while Parity is the team that refuels the rocket at any time.'
Gavin Wood's story resembles a cycle: from engineer to CEO, back to engineer, and now returning to CEO. He may still not love power, but as Polkadot enters the critical next phase, he chooses to step back into the spotlight.
After leaving EOS, BM began studying theology.
'Looking back at EOS seven years later,' Li Xiaolai's words from back then have too much 'gold content', and now they seem to have found some confirmation.
In the year of the seven-year agreement, 2025, the EOS community separated from its parent company, while the parent company Block.one took away over $4 billion raised for EOS back then, exchanging it for 160,000 bitcoins. This huge liquidity was also brought by Block.one to a new trading platform, Bullish. Born with a golden key, Bullish became the second cryptocurrency trading platform to go public in the US after Coinbase, with a market value of about $10 billion.
It seems they are trying to cut ties with the past. EOS's token has now been renamed to A, currently valued at $321 million, which is less than one-twentieth of Bullish. The most core figure of EOS back then, Daniel Larimer, had already resigned as CTO of Block.one in 2020. In the crypto industry, Daniel Larimer is better known by the name 'BM'.
BM was born in Virginia, USA, and is a staunch libertarian. He claims that his most admired book is 'Atlas Shrugged', believing that free markets and censorship-resistant technology tools can protect individuals' lives, property, and freedom.
After entering the crypto industry, he quickly established projects: in 2009, he attempted to develop a cryptocurrency exchange; in 2013, he founded BitShares, introducing early models of decentralized exchanges (DEX) and stablecoins; in 2016, he founded Steemit, promoting the first large-scale experiment of 'blockchain social'; in 2017, he made another move, co-founding Block.one with Brendan Blumer (BB) and launching EOS.
In Block.one, this family business of BB, BB's sister was parachuted in as Chief Marketing Officer, her only visible 'achievement' being to change EOS's brand color from tech blue to 'softer Morandi gray'. BB's mother runs a venture capital fund, and the social app Voice, which she led the investment in, had fewer than 10,000 users after one year, costing $150 million.
While BM had very little say, he jokingly referred to himself on Twitter as 'having no decision-making power.' This co-founder, known as a 'genius programmer,' became a sidelined shadow within the parent company. Thus, in 2021, the EOS community initiated a 'fork uprising' to attempt to cut off Block.one's control. BM resigned from his position as CTO of Block.one and left the community.
Afterward, BM's personal footprint became vague, rarely posting crypto-related content. Over the past two years, his Twitter activity has been highly concentrated on biblical interpretations, apocalyptic predictions about geopolitical conflicts, and criticism of mainstream Christianity.
Dirty behind-the-scenes operations.
'Who exactly messed up Movement?' When the MOVE token was delisted by Coinbase due to scandal, many began to question this young co-founder of Movement Labs, who was barely in his twenties, how he could exit the stage in such a dramatic manner after once boasting in hackathons and podcasts that 'Move will change Ethereum's security model'.
Rushi Manche was born in Illinois, USA, majoring in computer science and data science at Vanderbilt University. Like many Gen-Z individuals, he became immersed in hackathons, AI labs, and blockchain code repositories during his college years. In 2022, he co-founded Movement Labs with his classmate Cooper Scanlon in their dormitory. The inspiration was not complex; their internship experience at Aptos made them see the potential of the Move language, a new smart contract language that was safer than Solidity and capable of parallel processing. However, Aptos also had obvious limitations: a lack of liquidity and a limited developer base. Thus, they came up with a bold idea to 'bring Move into Ethereum'.
The startup quickly attracted the attention of capital. In the pre-seed stage, they brought in a dozen angel investors, raising $3.4 million. A year later, Movement Labs completed a $38 million Series A financing, with well-known funds like Polychain, Placeholder, and Archetype all participating. In the narrative of the industry, Movement Labs became the 'flagship project of the Move language in the EVM world'.
Rushi quickly became the spokesperson for Movement. He frequently appeared on podcasts, technical conferences, and industry interviews, embodying the passion typical of a young entrepreneur. His voice was upbeat, his speech rapid, always carrying a confidence that 'the industry needs new people to reshape it'. Under his promotion, Movement Labs announced the development of M2 Rollup (ZK-based Move Layer2), Shared Sequencer, and other infrastructures, hoping to become a representative of the new generation of Ethereum scaling solutions.
By the end of 2024, MOVE token will go live. At that moment of TGE, Rushi seemed to really stand at the center of the stage, but the problems also began here.
Soon after the launch, some in the community questioned whether the airdrop list was 'pre-determined'. Movement's 'shadow consultant' Sam Thapaliya revealed that over 75,000 wallets were designated by co-founder Cooper, thereby acquiring 60 million MOVE tokens in a pre-mined manner, profiting far beyond ordinary users. And Sam is not a 'good guy'; subsequent two business memorandums show that Movement Labs signed agreements with two 'shadow consultants' (including Sam Thapaliya), promising up to 10% of the MOVE token supply (worth over $50 million), which became the first crack in the project.
Months later, the real storm arrived. In April 2025, CoinDesk revealed that Movement had signed a market-making agreement with the little-known intermediary Rentech. Rentech gained control of 66 million MOVE tokens on the day of the TGE, selling approximately $38 million the next day, triggering a token crash. Binance even froze accounts urgently to calm the chaos. The contract further revealed that Rentech acted as both the agent of the Movement Foundation and a subsidiary of Web3Port, playing a dual role in the transaction.
This was the last straw that broke the camel's back.
On May 2, 2025, Movement Labs announced that Rushi Manche was temporarily suspended. Five days later, he was officially relieved of his co-founder position, and a new leadership team took over the project. When the news was released, Rushi did not publicly respond. His image shifted from a young engineer who publicly preached the 'blockchain security revolution' to the center of a token scandal.
Rushi's exit appeared hasty and chaotic, even tinged with a sense of 'expulsion'. No one knows exactly what happened in between; various parties have conflicting narratives. Subsequently, MOVE was delisted by Coinbase, and he himself filed a lawsuit against Movement Labs in Delaware, seeking clarification of rights and responsibilities. As of now, Rushi's last post still remains a retweet from May 8 regarding the business memorandum about Sam. And similarly, who exactly messed up Move? This question has become irrelevant and no one cares to inquire anymore. Just like many blockchain project teams, after exiting the historical stage, they left behind a mess.
From IO to OI, from 'decentralized computing power' to 'super AI'.
When the IO token went live on Binance Launchpool, a question kept arising in the crypto community: 'How did Ahmad Shadid suddenly step down?' This entrepreneur, who had a background as an advisor at the Ethereum Foundation, was once one of the most watched founders in the DePIN field. On June 9, 2024, just two days before the public offering of the IO token, he suddenly announced on X that he would resign as CEO of io.net, passing the baton to COO Tory Green.
Ahmad Shadid's story began not with GPU or AI, but with quantitative analysis. He initially worked as a data analyst at a small to mid-sized commercial firm in Saudi Arabia, Cordoba Partnerships, then served as a quantitative systems engineer at ArabFolio Capital and Whales Trader, where he deeply expanded his technical skills related to GPUs. Beginning in 2018, he started developing a machine learning-driven risk management engine, DarkTick, which uses quantitative/statistical techniques to develop and test highly automated quantitative trading strategies applicable to stocks/non-stocks and statistical arbitrage.
Since 2022, he has been advising the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on the scalability issues of smart contracts and infrastructure. As the narratives around multi-chain and L2 gradually matured, he turned his attention to another overlooked area: computing power.
In 2023, the wave of generative AI swept across the globe. ChatGPT drove a surge in computational demand, making GPU supply one of the most strained resources in Silicon Valley. Shadid keenly realized that if DeFi could liberate finance, DePIN could liberate physical resources. His answer was io.net, a network connecting idle GPUs to provide decentralized computing power for AI models.
In his narrative, IO is not just a company, but 'the world’s largest decentralized AI supercomputer'. This slogan quickly attracted the attention of capital and the community. From studios to cloud service providers, it seemed that everyone was suddenly 'providing computing power' for IO.
However, just before the token was about to go live, Shadid stepped down. 'I resigned as CEO not because of external doubts about me, but to allow the project to grow without interference,' he wrote on X. Prior to this, there were accusations in the community that the GPU computing power promoted by io.net was overstated, raising concerns that he might take the opportunity to cash out.
In the face of these doubts, Shadid chose a sunny way to deliver: 'donating 1,000,000 IO tokens to the Internet GPU Foundation to promote ecological development, emphasizing that all team members, advisors, and investors' tokens have a four-year lock-up period, and only begin partial unlocking after June 2025.' Although this action sparked speculation, it seemed quite 'sunny' from the perspective of exiting through donations in the 'shadowy' DePin industry.
After leaving IO, he started a new project O.XYZ, whose governance token is OI, claiming its concept is a 'sovereign super AI' governed by the community. He also launched an index token 'Osol' for AI projects in the top 100 on Solana, and recently introduced 'AI CEO'. However, his product claims of 'connecting over 100,000 AI models' and '20 times faster than competitors' also faced community skepticism, and the market value of this project's token has continuously declined. After the transition from IO to OI, perhaps after repeated disappointments from the market regarding the narrative of 'CryptoAI', Shadid is no longer as popular.
Mihailo, the ZK evangelist exiting from Polygon.
On a morning in May 2025, Mihailo Bjelic decided to withdraw from the Polygon Foundation's board and the daily affairs of Polygon Labs. This was his formal farewell to this project that had accompanied him for eight years. For the crypto industry, this was the third co-founder to leave Polygon; for him personally, it was a turn marked by relief and divergence.
Mihailo hails from Serbia, studying information systems and computer science at the University of Belgrade. He entered the crypto world relatively late, starting to engage with Bitcoin and Ethereum communities in 2013. He gradually immersed himself in the question of 'how to make blockchains truly usable'. After graduating, he participated in a startup providing AI/machine learning solutions for the automotive industry and attempted several small software projects, but none ignited the fire within him. His true obsession was to find answers in the maze of blockchain scalability.
In 2017, he met the team then known as 'Matic Network'. Ethereum was experiencing network congestion due to CryptoKitties, with soaring fees making it difficult for developers. Mihailo was convinced that this was the direction in which he could invest all his passion: to create a truly usable Ethereum scaling solution.
Within Polygon, Mihailo is known as the 'evangelist of ZK'. He leads the technical strategy, especially the zero-knowledge proof (ZK) route. Under his promotion, Polygon has successively spent hundreds of millions to acquire Hermez and Mir, heavily investing in ZK technology, laying the foundation for the later Polygon zkEVM.
He not only played a role in technical direction but was also a representative figure in Polygon's external narrative. Whether in podcasts, technical summits, or long articles in research communities, he was one of the voices telling the story of Polygon: Polygon is not just a sidechain, but a multi-chain universe and a key piece in the Ethereum scaling landscape. His figure appeared in media interviews as well as on the podium of developer conferences, resembling both an engineer and a promoter.
But with the project's expansion and maturation, cracks gradually appeared. In 2023, one of the four co-founders, Anurag Arjun, left first to build his own modular chain Avail; in October of the same year, another co-founder, Jaynti Kanani, also announced his retirement from daily affairs. The once-close comradeship among the founders was gradually diluted by time and the complexity of the project.
Two years later, Mihailo became the third person to leave. In his statement, he mentioned 'vision differences' and also admitted that he could no longer contribute at his best. The foundation was then solely led by Sandeep Nailwal. Mihailo's story had no escape, no scandal, and no dramatic collapse; his words were gentle, appearing quiet and clean.
After stepping down as CEO of Morph, she left behind the 'foot photo meme'.
Cecilia's departure from Morph can be summarized as a process of being swept along by internal strife, power struggles, and external controversies.
In June of this year, Morph co-founder and CEO Cecilia Hsueh announced on social media that she would officially step down as CEO, handing the position over to former YGG executive and Binance veteran Goltra. She said this was a 'well-considered decision', and she would continue to support the team in an advisory capacity.
Cecilia was born in Taiwan and is based in Singapore. Her entry into the crypto industry began at the exchange Phemex, where she served as Chief Marketing Officer and briefly acted as CEO. Prior to this, her resume mainly focused on marketing and operations. In 2023, she was selected by Bitget and Foresight Ventures, teaming up with former Gitcoin member Azeem Khan to become the co-founder of the newly incubated public chain Morph. Cecilia served as CEO, tasked with building Morph into a 'consumer-grade public chain', attempting to find the next L2 breakout point after Coinbase launched the Base chain.
In March 2024, Morph completed a $20 million seed round financing, with a valuation of $125 million. Once the financing news broke, Morph's popularity quickly surged, and the community once expected it to become a competitor to Base. However, cracks soon became apparent: Cecilia and Khan, who originally did not know each other, were 'forcibly paired' as founding partners, with significant ideological differences—Khan emphasized emerging markets, while Cecilia focused on external image and marketing. As time went on, the contradictions gradually intensified.
After this, Morph frequently made headlines for its extravagant spending and strategic confusion: spending hundreds of thousands at Token2049 in Singapore to invite K-pop band tripleS and DJ SODA; renting an office on the 77th floor of the World Trade Center in New York, sharing it with Foresight and The Block; and paying over $200,000 in development fees for the project BulbaSwap, which aimed to replicate Uniswap v2, yet this DEX only ranked within the top 200 globally.
Meanwhile, Morph's mainnet transaction volume remained sluggish, averaging only 16,000 transactions per day, far less than Base's millions. The planned token issuance was repeatedly postponed, with severe internal personnel turnover, and some even failed to secure clear token contracts.
At the beginning of 2025, Khan announced his departure from Morph to start a new blockchain, Miden. Cecilia still held the title of CEO, but her real power further weakened. Ultimately, in June 2025, she chose to leave.
More dramatically, the true helm of Morph may never have been the CEO on the surface. According to Blockworks, Foresight Ventures co-founder Forest Bai is referred to by employees as the 'ghost helmsman'. Although he is not part of Morph's management, he is deeply involved in strategy, budgeting, and personnel matters and has even been formally added to the Slack channel, directly influencing the team. This has raised significant doubts about Morph's governance and power structure.
More abstractly, in the minds of most people in the crypto community, Cecilia's image remains vague. However, because she once posted a photo of her feet on social media, it ironically left the deepest impression of her feet on the public.
