Share this article
Most Influential 2021: Danny Ryan
The Ethereum Foundation programmer took lead on the much anticipated London hard fork.
By CoinDesk
Updated Apr 10, 2024, 3:16 a.m. Published Dec 9, 2021, 8:24 p.m.
Did Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, make ETH “super sound money?” The jury is still out. More data needs to be collected to determine how deflationary the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization may have become following a network update Ryan led.
This summer, Ethereum’s much-anticipated London hard fork went live. And with it, Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) 1559, 3554, 3529, 3198 and 3541, or code upgrades that aimed to improve the Ethereum network’s user experience and value proposition. Most notable was EIP 1559, a change to the network’s gas protocol, which even if it didn’t make Ethereum burn more coins than it mints, made transaction fees more predictable.
Ryan also played a major role in the 2020 launch of the Beacon chain, the first step toward Ethereum 2.0, or the ambitious plan to move Ethereum to proof-of-stake. There’s more coming down the pike.
The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
ZKsync Lite to Shut Down in 2026 as Matter Labs Moves On
The company framed the move, happening in early 2026, as a planned sunset.
What to know:
- Matter Labs plans to deprecate ZKsync Lite, the first iteration of its Ethereum layer-2 network, the team said in a post on X over the weekend.
- The company framed the move, happening in early 2026, as a planned sunset for an early proof-of-concept that helped validate their zero-knowledge rollup design choices before newer systems went live.
Top Stories
