Casting aside too well-known examples like Satoshi and Vitalik, here's my list (in no particular order):
- Phil Daian - For pioneering the field of MEV through Flashbots 2.0
- Shaolinfry - For introducing user-activated soft-forks (UASF) to blockchain consensus
- Eli Ben-Sasson - For the co-inventing zk-STARKs
- Paul Sztorc - For inventing drivechains (BIP 300 & 301) and peer-to-peer prediction markets
- Arthur Hayes - For the invention of the perpetual swap
- Tadge Dryja - For co-inventing the Lightning Network and UTXO accumulators
- Dan Robinson - For co-inventing Uniswap v3
- John Adler - For inventing optimistic rollups and parallelizable UTXO-based execution
- Richard Heart - For running the longest social experiment in crypto
- Jae Kwon - For the invention of Tendermint consensus