Most Influential: Will and Dan Roberts
TL;DR
Daniel and Will Roberts, co-founders of IREN Limited, have transformed the company from a bitcoin miner into an AI infrastructure leader, securing a major Microsoft contract and targeting $3.4 billion in AI revenue by 2026.

Daniel and Will Roberts, co-founders and co-CEOs of IREN Limited (IREN), have positioned the company at the center of the AI infrastructure boom by transforming its bitcoin mining assets into high-performance data centers for artificial intelligence.
This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.
Founded in 2018 as a renewable energy-powered bitcoin miner in Canada, IREN anticipated that the real opportunity would lie in supplying affordable, reliable compute for AI. That vision is now taking shape.
In full fiscal year 2025 (FY25), IREN tripled its operating capacity to 810MW, grew revenue 168% to $501 million, and reached a record 50 EH/s in bitcoin output.
IREN’s pivot into AI cloud services gained momentum with a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Microsoft, which includes a 20% prepayment (about $1.9 billion) for GPU capacity at IREN’s Horizon 1 data center in Texas. The company is now targeting $3.4 billion in AI Cloud annualized run-rate revenue (ARR) by the end of 2026, supported by a planned 140,000 GPU buildout and a 2GW Sweetwater AI campus set for completion in 2027.
IREN shares had risen more than 500% in 2025, reflecting its evolution from bitcoin miner to AI powerhouse.
- 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.
- DAWN raised $13 million in a Series B led by Polychain Capital.
- The protocol enables individuals and organizations to own and monetize wireless broadband infrastructure.
- New funding will support U.S. growth and international rollouts.
Disclosure & Polices: CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of Bullish (NYSE:BLSH), an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. Bullish owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets and CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish equity-based compensation.