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Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

web3 developers - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Web3 has transformed the digital landscape over the past decade, fueled by a global community of exceptional developers.

These include prolific open-source contributors, blockchain startup founders still writing code, influential researchers and educators, engineers leading innovation at major Web3 companies, and even competitive programming champions. Below is an updated and ranked list of 14 of the world’s top Web3 developers, selected for their outstanding impact across these areas:

  1. Dr. Gavin Wood
  2. Eli Ben-Sasson
  3. Ethan Buchman
  4. Alex Gluchowski
  5. Andre Cronje
  6. Sunny Aggarwal
  7. Juan Benet
  8. Sam “Samczsun” Sun
  9. Hayden Adams
  10. Péter Szilágyi
  11. Emin Gün Sirer
  12. Robert Habermeier
  13. Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn
  14. Silvio Micali

Now, let’s delve into their remarkable journeys and contributions:

Dr. Gavin Wood

YouTube Video

Nationality: British

Co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot, Gavin wrote Ethereum’s Yellow Paper and co-designed its early architecture, serving as Ethereum Foundation’s first CTO.

He later founded Polkadot (and its canary network Kusama) to enable cross-chain interoperability, authoring Polkadot’s white paper. As Chairman of Parity Technologies, Gavin leads development of Substrate and Polkadot’s cutting-edge multi-chain infrastructure. His work on open-source protocol design and consensus (e.g. Proof-of-Stake variants) cements his status as a top Web3 technologist.

Eli Ben-Sasson

If blockchains are to serve billions, they must become massively more scalable without sacrificing decentralization or security.

Nationality: Israeli

Co-founder and President of StarkWare Industries, and a founding father of zero-knowledge proof technology.

Eli is an Israeli computer scientist who co-invented zk-STARKs (a privacy/scaling tech with no trusted setup) and co-founded StarkWare in 2018 to bring this to production. StarkWare’s products – StarkEx (scaling engine) and StarkNet (general-purpose ZK-rollup) – are built on Eli’s research and have onboarded users from trading to gaming. Previously a professor at Technion, he was also a founding scientist of the Zcash project. In 2024, Eli became StarkWare’s CEO, continuing to lead advances in Layer-2 and cryptographic proofs. His blend of scientific insight and real-world impact puts him among Web3’s elite developers.

Ethan Buchman

Ethan Buchman - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Nationality: Canadian

Co-founder and former CTO of Cosmos (Tendermint) – the “Internet of Blockchains.”

Ethan co-created the Tendermint Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus engine and co-authored the Cosmos whitepaper (2016), introducing a vision for interoperable sovereign blockchains. He helped launch the Cosmos Hub in 2019. Ethan also leads Informal Systems (a cooperative building Cosmos infrastructure) and has served as Vice President of the Interchain Foundation. With a background in computer science research, he has driven open-source development of Cosmos’s ecosystem, making him a key architect of blockchain interoperability.

Alex Gluchowski

Nationality: Polish

Co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync.

Alex is a software architect who has spearheaded Ethereum scaling with zero-knowledge proofs. Matter Labs launched zkSync Era, a ZK-rollup that enables fast, low-cost transactions fully secured by Ethereum. Alex’s focus on zkSNARK research and engineering led to innovations like the Zinc and Cairo languages for ZK circuits. Matter Labs (founded 2018 in Germany) under his leadership has been a trailblazer in Layer-2 technology. By open-sourcing zkSync and actively engaging developers, Alex is pushing the boundaries of cryptography in Web3. His vision is an Ethereum that scales to billions of users without compromising decentralization.

Andre Cronje

Andre Cronje - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Nationality: South African

DeFi architect and prolific software developer best known as founder of  Yearn.finance.

Andre built Yearn in 2020 as a yield aggregator and released it as a fully decentralized protocol, pioneering the “fair launch” ethos. He has contributed to or launched many other DeFi projects (Keep3r Network, PowerPool, SushiSwap, etc.), earning a reputation as a “builder’s builder” in Web3. Andre’s code-heavy approach (often writing and auditing smart contracts himself) and his candid blogs influenced a generation of DeFi developers. He recently took on a leadership role at Fantom (rebranded as Sonic), underscoring his ongoing impact in crypto innovation.

Sunny Aggarwal

Nationality: American

Co-founder of Osmosis, the leading DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem, and former Tendermint core contributor.

Sunny helped launch Osmosis in 2021 as an application-specific Cosmos zone for automated market making, now one of the highest-volume decentralized exchanges on Cosmos. He is also founder of Sikka Tech, running validators on multiple networks, and an outspoken Cosmos advocate (co-hosting the “Epicenter” podcast). With a background from UC Berkeley’s Blockchain at Berkeley, Sunny has been developing blockchain tech since his student days. His work advancing Cosmos’s Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and user-friendly DeFi makes him a key young developer in the multi-chain Web3 universe.

Juan Benet

Juan Benet - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Nationality: American

Inventor of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and founder of Filecoin.

Juan created IPFS in 2014 as a decentralized protocol to make the web faster and more open, revolutionizing file storage and content addressing. He later launched Filecoin (2017) to add incentivization via a crypto-economy for storage miners. As founder of Protocol Labs, Juan has driven research and development for decentralized web technologies (libp2p, IPLD, etc.). Many blockchains and dApps rely on IPFS for data, underscoring Juan’s open-source impact. His focus on decentralizing the internet’s infrastructure places him among Web3’s top innovator-developers.

Sam “Samczsun” Sun

Nationality: American

Renowned white-hat hacker and smart contract security expert.

Samczsun made his name by discovering and responsibly disclosing critical vulnerabilities in many DeFi protocols, preventing massive fund losses. As a researcher (and former Paradigm security advisor), he has published educational audits and tooling that have improved security standards across Web3. Notably, he helped patch a flaw that put over 100k ETH at risk, among other high-profile saves. Sam also co-founded SEAL 911, an initiative to protect white-hat hackers legally. His hands-on contributions – reviewing code, writing exploits to demonstrate bugs, and open-sourcing his findings – have made him one of the most trusted and impactful developers in crypto security.

Hayden Adams

Hayden Adams - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Nationality: American

Creator of Uniswap, the protocol that popularized automated market makers (AMMs) on Ethereum.

Hayden, a mechanical engineer turned self-taught programmer, developed Uniswap in 2018 and ushered in decentralized exchange as a cornerstone of DeFi. Uniswap’s elegant smart contracts (UNI-V1 through V4) facilitate billions in trading volume and inspired countless forks. Hayden’s work earned him recognition on Forbes 30-under-30 and CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2023 list. As CEO of Uniswap Labs, he continues to guide open-source development of the DEX and its ecosystem.

Péter Szilágyi

Nationality: Hungarian

Lead developer of Geth (Go-Ethereum), the most widely used Ethereum client software.

Péter has led Ethereum’s core development team (Ethereum Foundation) since 2015, maintaining the code that underpins a large portion of the network’s nodes. Under his stewardship, Geth has delivered countless upgrades and optimizations, playing a “core force” role in Ethereum’s successful transition to proof-of-stake (The Merge). Péter is an outspoken advocate for decentralization and often shares insights on protocol scalability and client diversity. His long-term commitment to open-source blockchain development makes him one of Ethereum’s unsung heroes.

Emin Gün Sirer

Emin Gun Sirer - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Nationality: Turkish-American

Founder and CEO of Ava Labs, which develops Avalanche.

A Cornell computer science professor, Gün Sirer co-created the Avalanche consensus protocol in 2018 and launched the high-throughput Avalanche blockchain in 2020. Previously known for fundamental research into Bitcoin scaling and selfish mining, he brought academic rigor to his implementations. Avalanche’s subnet architecture and rapid finality reflect Gün Sirer’s expertise in distributed systems and networking. He continues to balance industry and academia, pushing blockchain technology forward (he co-founded IC3 research initiative). His leadership in building Avalanche into a top Layer-1 ecosystem highlights his Web3 engineering prowess.

Robert Habermeier

Nationality: American

Co-founder of Polkadot and accomplished blockchain engineer.

Robert teamed up with Gavin Wood to launch Polkadot in 2020, after being a core developer at Parity Technologies. With a background in cryptography and distributed systems, he was responsible for much of Polkadot’s Proof-of-Stake and cross-chain consensus code. Robert’s contributions extend to Substrate (the framework for building Polkadot parachains) and he is known for performance-minded Rust programming. In 2018 he was selected as a Thiel Fellow, receiving support to work on Polkadot full-time. As Polkadot’s youngest co-founder, Robert exemplifies the new generation of Web3 builders blending research and coding.

Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn

Zooko Wilcox OHearn - Top 14 Web3 Developers Ready to Hire

Nationality: American

Founder and CEO of the Electric Coin Company, which created Zcash.

A longtime cypherpunk and security engineer, Zooko helped invent privacy-preserving blockchain technology. Under his leadership, Zcash launched in 2016 as a Bitcoin codebase fork integrating zk-SNARKs for shielded transactions. Zooko’s background includes working with David Chaum’s DigiCash in the ‘90s and building decentralized storage systems (Tahoe-LAFS). Through blogs and tweets he advocates for privacy and decentralized identity. Zcash and its ECC team (which Zooko led as CEO until 2022) have driven zero-knowledge proof adoption across the industry. His decades of contributions to crypto make him a highly respected Web3 developer.

Silvio Micali

Nationality: Italian

Founder of Algorand and Turing Award–winning cryptographer.

Silvio is an MIT professor who co-invented fundamental cryptographic primitives (zero-knowledge proofs, VRFs, etc.). In 2017, he applied this expertise to create Algorand, a pure proof-of-stake blockchain with a focus on security, scalability, and cryptographic elegance. Algorand launched in 2019 and introduced innovations like verifiable random selection of consensus participants. Silvio’s academic pedigree (Turing Award 2012) and hands-on leadership of Algorand’s development bridge theory and practice. He continues to guide Algorand Inc. as it delivers novel research (e.g., post-quantum signatures) to production.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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