Founders are often also part of the narrative embodiment.

Whether it's Vitalik's geekiness, Jeff Yan's trader intuition, or Do Kwon's boldness, they have all to some extent defined the soul of the project. However, in the past few years, these "crypto rockstar founders" have one by one faded from the stage.

Recently, Story Protocol's founder Jason Zhao announced his resignation as CEO, once again igniting discussions. The young Korean-American, entrepreneurial youth from MIT's summer camp, student in Fei-Fei Li's lab, and the youngest product manager at DeepMind—his script could have led to Silicon Valley stardom. Yet, he chose to write his own chapter in the crypto industry and depart after three and a half years.

Rhythm BlockBeats has compiled a list of seven "disappearing" founders, some voluntarily stepping down, others forced to exit; some bidding farewell with idealistic grace, while others leaving hastily amid scandal and controversy... Of course, they are just a microcosm, and more and more founders will surely leave after launching their projects, embarking on what should be their next good chapter in life.

From the "metaphysical" to the "real," the kids from another house

On August 16, Jason Zhao wrote a heartfelt post on X, announcing that after founding Story for three and a half years, he would step down as full-time CEO, serving only as a strategic advisor, and focus on a new AI project, Poseidon (which just received a $15 million seed investment from a16z last month). He expressed that the new industrial revolution in space, life sciences, and other cutting-edge fields reignited his passion. However, this post, viewed by 5 million people, only received 2,000 likes.

Jason Zhao, a Korean-American raised in Austin, Texas, took on the responsibility of organizing the local TED x AustinYouth during high school. At the age of 19, while attending the MIT Launch training camp, he co-founded the political lobbying crowdfunding platform PolitiFund. With a perfect SAT score of 2400, he chose Stanford University for a full scholarship among invitations from almost all Ivy League schools.

After obtaining a philosophy undergraduate degree from Stanford University, he continued to pursue a Master's in Computer Science focusing on AI research. Under the guidance of the "AI Mother" Fei-Fei Li in the Computer Vision Lab, he graduated and joined Google's AI lab DeepMind as the youngest product manager. With this storyline, he was undoubtedly a winner in life from any perspective. If he were still working at a major AI company, he might have received a "high-value transfer" invitation from Zuckerberg. However, fate did not allow him to follow that path.

The "DeFi Summer" of 2020 introduced him to the world of blockchain. His background in philosophy and artificial intelligence led him to think about how "AI reshapes creativity and enriches content, while blockchain defines digital ownership and grants data verifiable scarcity." IP+AI+Blockchain enabled him to create Story Protocol, a project that successfully raised $140 million in funding at the age of 25. The project aimed to make intellectual property (IP) programmable, track usage and distribution on-chain, and drive new business models for creator royalties, licensing, and AI training.

They launched the Story Academy to promote entrepreneurs and developers through the Builder program. They collaborated with Yakoa to use AI to detect IP infringement and manipulation. Integration with the Pastel Network ensured certificate rarity and asset scarcity. Teaming up with Lit Protocol enhanced transaction security and privacy. Partnering with Stability AI introduced on-chain authorization and copyright tracking into AI model training.

Story's business logic, Source: Starzqeth

However, bridging the gap between on-chain and real-world connections in this "applied" product seemed incongruent with the current state of the crypto market. In the six months following the TGE, despite collaborations with renowned brands such as Justin Bieber, BTS, BlackPink, Adidas, and Crocs, most of Story's on-chain revenue remained in the single or double digits. Well-known venture analyst Adam Cochran pointed out that a nearly $60 billion fully diluted valuation compared to this revenue raised questions about whether the project focused more on "fancy demos."

Nevertheless, before Zhao's departure, Story still had the trust of investors. Grayscale launched the Story IP Trust, and Heritage Distilling Holding Company (CASK) kicked off the $220 million IP DAT program through private funding, which saw a surge in IP valuation upon his departure. His exit may not have been graceful, but neither was it ignoble. Perhaps for this young man who had lived half a lifetime's worth of experiences by the age of 26, his journey shifted his focus from "Plato" to "Aristotle," from IP to the more tangible construction of physical AI. He plunged into a new world, and perhaps even broader horizons await his exploration.

Jason's "X" Banner - Raphael's "School of Athens", Left in the Picture: Plato pointing up "Idea/Metaphysics", Right: Aristotle with palm down "Experience/Physical order"

It's Been a While Since We Heard from Gavin Wood...

"I wonder where Gavin Wood is now."

As Ethereum surged back to $4000, someone suddenly thought of the early Ethereum co-founder, author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper, creator of the Solidity language, and founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood. The crypto world seems to have been without his voice for a long time.

In October 2022, Gavin Wood announced to the world that he would step down as the CEO of Parity Technologies. This was his voluntary departure from Polkadot. This was his second project exit after Ethereum for the industry.

Gavin Wood, born in Lancaster, UK, holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, specializing in 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 the earliest co-founders of Ethereum. 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 usability of "smart contracts."

However, in 2016, due to ideological differences, he chose to leave Ethereum. He envisioned a blockchain that is not just a single virtual machine's execution environment but a multi-chain interconnected world. This vision ultimately materialized as Polkadot. In 2017, Gavin Wood, along with Björn Wagner and others, co-founded Parity Technologies and then drove the design and implementation of Polkadot. The Substrate framework he proposed made building blockchains as convenient as "assembling LEGO"; and Polkadot's relay chain and parachain design 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. Within the Polkadot community, Wood has always been the most iconic engineer. His identity is more of an architect and a thinker rather than a manager. He excels at writing code, documentation, manifestos, but struggles with managing large teams and complex relationships.

Therefore, in October 2022, Gavin Wood announced his resignation from the CEO position at Parity Technologies, handing over the role to Björn Wagner. "The role of CEO has never been my dream job. I can perform the role of CEO well for a period of time, but this is not where I can find eternal happiness." This statement carries typical engineer-style idealism.

Gavin Wood's last two public appearances were also interesting: one was in July 2024 at the EthCC7 event in Brussels, where he took a century-old group photo with Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, and two other Ethereum core founders; the other was at a Polkadot developer bootcamp, where he took his place at the DJ booth, reigniting his passion for music. Perhaps, this is where Gavin Wood is most comfortable.

Beyond EOS, BM Studies Theology

"Seven years later, looking back at EOS," Li Xiaolai's words from back then are still so profound, and now, they seem to have been somewhat fulfilled.

In 2025, the year of the seven-year promise, the EOS community separated from its parent company, while the parent company Block.one took away over $4 billion raised for EOS back then, converting it into 160,000 bitcoins. This significant liquidity was also taken by Block.one to a new trading platform, Bullish. Born with a golden key, Bullish became the second cryptocurrency exchange platform to go public in the US after Coinbase, with a market capitalization of around $10 billion.

Seemingly wanting to sever ties with the past, EOS's token is now renamed A, with a market cap of $321 million, less than one twentieth of Bullish's. And the most central figure of EOS back then, Daniel Larimer, had stepped down from his position as Block.one's CTO as early as 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 work is "Atlas Shrugged" and believes that the free market and censorship-resistant technology can protect individuals' lives, property, and freedom.

After entering the crypto industry, he rapidly founded multiple projects: in 2009, he attempted to develop a crypto exchange; in 2013, he founded BitShares, introducing an early model of a decentralized exchange (DEX) and a stablecoin; in 2016, he founded Steemit, driving the first large-scale experiment of "blockchain social"; and in 2017, he once again took action, partnering with Brendan Blumer (referred to as BB) to establish Block.one and launch EOS.

Within Block.one, BB's "family enterprise," BB's sister was appointed Chief Marketing Officer, with her only visible "achievement" being changing the EOS brand color from tech blue to a "softer Pantone Cool Gray." BB's mother leads a venture capital fund, and the social app Voice, led by her investment, went online for a year with fewer than 10,000 users despite burning through $150 million.

Meanwhile, BM had very little say, self-mockingly claiming on Twitter that he had "no decision-making power." This co-founder referred to as a "genius programmer" became a marginalized shadow within the parent company. In 2021, the EOS community initiated a "fork rebellion" to try to sever Block.one's control. BM then resigned from his position as Block.one CTO and left the community.

Afterward, BM's personal footprint became blurry, with rarely any crypto-related content. Over the past two years, his Twitter content has been highly concentrated on biblical interpretations, world-doomsday prophecies related to geopolitical conflicts, and criticisms of mainstream Christianity.

Dirty Behind-the-Scenes Operations

“Who really messed up Movement?” When the MOVE token was delisted from Coinbase due to a scandal, many began to question the co-founder of Movement Labs, the young man in his early 20s who once eloquently discussed in hackathons and podcasts how "Move will change Ethereum's security model" and how he exited the stage in such a dramatic fashion.

Rushi Manche was born in Illinois, USA, and majored in Computer Science and Data Science at Vanderbilt University. Like many Gen Z individuals, he was deeply involved in hackathons, AI labs, and blockchain code repositories during his university years. In 2022, he and his classmate Cooper Scanlon founded Movement Labs in their dorm room. The inspiration was not complicated; their internship experiences in Aptos exposed them to the potential of the Move language. A new smart contract language that is more secure and parallel-processing-capable than Solidity. However, the limitations of Aptos were also evident: lack of liquidity and a limited developer base. So they came up with a bold idea to "bring Move to Ethereum."

Entrepreneurship quickly caught the attention of capital. In the pre-seed stage, they attracted over a dozen angel investors who invested $3.4 million. A year later, Movement Labs completed a $38 million Series A funding round, with renowned funds such as Polychain, Placeholder, and Archetype all joining the fray. Within the industry narrative, Movement Labs became the "flagship project of the Move language in the EVM world."

Rushi quickly became the face of Movement. He appeared frequently on podcasts, tech conferences, and industry interviews, embodying the typical passion of a young entrepreneur. With a lively voice, rapid speech, and always carrying a sense of confidence that the industry needs newcomers to reshape it. Under his drive, Movement Labs announced the development of M2 Rollup (a ZK-based Move Layer2), Shared Sequencer, and other infrastructure, aiming to become the representative of Ethereum's next-generation scaling solution.

By the end of 2024, the MOVE token went live. At the moment of the TGE, Rushi seemed to truly stand at the center of the stage, but the issues also began from here.

Shortly after the launch, there were concerns raised within the community about the airdrop list being "pre-arranged." Movement's "shadow advisor" Sam Thapaliya revealed that over 75,000 wallets were designated by co-founder Cooper to receive a pre-allocated 60 million Move tokens, resulting in profits far beyond what ordinary users obtained. Sam was also not a "saint", as subsequently two separate business memorandums showed that Movement Labs signed agreements with two "shadow advisors" (including Sam Thapaliya), committing to provide up to 10% of the MOVE token supply (worth over $50 million), marking the project's first fracture.

Several months later, a real storm hit. In April 2025, CoinDesk revealed that Movement had signed a market-making agreement with the obscure intermediary Rentech. Rentech obtained control of 66 million MOVE tokens on the TGE day, sold around $38 million the next day, triggering a token price collapse. Binance even urgently froze accounts to quell the chaos. The contract further revealed that Rentech served as both a representative of the Movement Foundation and a subsidiary of Web3Port, playing a dual role in the transaction.

This is the last straw that broke the camel's back.

On May 2, 2025, Movement Labs announced the temporary suspension of Rushi Manche. Five days later, he was formally removed from his position as co-founder, and a new leadership team took over the project. At the time of the announcement, Rushi did not publicly respond. His image, once a high-profile advocate of the "Blockchain Security Revolution," suddenly turned into a central figure of a token scandal.

Rushi's exit appeared hasty, chaotic, and even carried a sense of "exile," with no one knowing exactly what transpired. Different parties held conflicting accounts of the events. Subsequently, MOVE was delisted from Coinbase, and Rushi himself took Movement Labs to the Delaware court to seek clarification of rights and responsibilities. To this day, Rushi's last post remains on May 8 about the disclosure of Sam's business memo. And who exactly messed up Move? This question now seems to be of no concern, and naturally, no one will inquire. Like many blockchain projects, after exiting the stage of history, they left behind nothing but a mess.

From IO to OI, from "Decentralized Compute" to "Super AI"

When the IO token launched on Binance Launchpool, there was a recurring question in the crypto community: "Why did Ahmad Shadid suddenly step down?" This entrepreneur, with a background as an Ethereum Foundation advisor, was once one of the most prominent founders in the DePIN space. On June 9, 2024, just two days before the IO token's public sale, he suddenly announced his resignation as CEO of io.net on X, passing the baton to COO Tory Green.

Ahmad Shadid's story did not begin with GPUs or AI but with quant. He began as a data analyst at a small business in Saudi called Cordoba Partnerships, later expanding deeply into GPU-related technology while working as a quant systems engineer at ArabFolio Capital and Whales Trader. In 2018, he started developing the ML-driven risk management engine DarkTick, a tool that uses quantitative/statistical techniques to develop and test highly automated quantitative trading strategies suitable for stock/non-stock and statistical arbitrage strategies.

In 2022, he began advising the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on smart contract and infrastructure scalability issues. As the narrative around multi-chain and L2 solutions matured, he shifted his focus to another overlooked area: computational power.

By 2023, the wave of Generative AI swept across the globe. ChatGPT drove a surge in computational power demand, causing GPU supply to become the most strained resource in Silicon Valley. Shadid keenly realized that if DeFi could unlock finance, DePIN could unlock physical resources. His answer was io.net, a network connecting idle GPUs to provide decentralized computational power for AI models.

In his narrative, IO was not just a company but rather the "world's largest decentralized AI supercomputer." This slogan quickly caught the attention of both capital and the community. From studios to cloud server providers, suddenly it seemed like everyone was "contributing computational power" to IO. Related Read: "The Rising Star io.net: Who Is Footing the Bill for the AI Narrative?"

However, on the eve of the token's launch, Shadid stepped down. "I resigned from the CEO position not because of external doubts about me, but to allow the project to grow without interference," he wrote on X. Prior to this, some in the community accused io.net of exaggerating the GPU computational power it advertised and expressed concerns that he might take advantage of the situation to cash out.

Faced with these doubts, Shadid chose a transparent approach to address them: "I will donate 1,000,000 IO tokens to the Internet GPU Foundation to promote ecosystem development. It is emphasized that all team members, advisors, and investors' tokens have a four-year lock-up period, with partial unlocking scheduled to begin after June 2025." While this action sparked speculation, in the "opaque" world of the DePin industry, the act of donating and stepping back seemed rather "transparent."

After leaving IO, he started a new project called O.XYZ, with its governance token being OI, claiming it was based on a community-governed "Sovereign Super AI." They launched a Solana AI index token called "Osol" (representing the top 100 AI projects on Solana), and recently introduced an "AI CEO." However, similar to his previous project, community skepticism arose during the marketing of products claiming to be "connected to 100,000+ AI models" and "20 times faster than competitors," causing the project token's market value to plummet. Transitioning from IO to OI, perhaps after market disappointment in the "CryptoAI" narrative time and time again, Shadid is no longer as well-received.

Mihailo, the ZK Evangelist Who Departed from Polygon

On a morning in May 2025, Mihailo Bjelic made the decision to step down from the Polygon Foundation board and from his day-to-day responsibilities at Polygon Labs. This marked his formal farewell to the project he had been a part of for eight years. For the cryptocurrency industry, this was the third co-founder to depart from Polygon; for him personally, it was a parting filled with both acceptance and divergence.

Hailing from Serbia, Mihailo studied Information Systems and Computer Science at the University of Belgrade. His entry into the crypto world was not late, starting in 2013 with Bitcoin and the Ethereum community, gradually immersing himself in the question of "how to make blockchain truly usable." After graduation, he had been involved in a startup that provided AI/machine learning solutions for the automotive industry and had tried his hand at several small software projects, but none truly ignited the fire in his heart. His true passion 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 caused by CryptoKitties, with high fees and frustrated developers. Mihailo identified this as the direction where he could pour all his passion: building a truly usable Ethereum scaling solution.

Within Polygon, Mihailo was known as the "ZK Evangelist." He led the technical strategy, especially the zero-knowledge proof (ZK) roadmap. Under his leadership, Polygon strategically acquired Hermez and Mir, heavily investing in ZK technology, laying the foundation for the later Polygon zkEVM.

He not only played a role in the technical direction but also served as a public face for Polygon's narrative. Whether in podcasts, tech summits, or in-depth community articles, he was one of the voices telling Polygon's story: Polygon was not just a sidechain but a multi-chain universe, a key piece of the Ethereum scaling puzzle. His presence was seen in media interviews and on developer conference stages, appearing as both an engineer and an advocate.

However, as the project expanded and matured, cracks began to appear. In 2023, Anurag Arjun, one of the four co-founders, first left to build his modular chain, Avail; in October of the same year, another co-founder, Jaynti Kanani, also announced stepping back from day-to-day operations. The once-intimate camaraderie among the founders was gradually diluted by time and the increasing complexity of the project.

Two years later, Mihailo became the third person to leave. In his statement, he mentioned "a divergence in vision" and admitted that he could no longer contribute at his best. Subsequently, the foundation was 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.

Stepping Down as Morph CEO, She Left Behind the "Foot Photo Meme"

Cecilia's departure from Morph can be summarized as being engulfed in internal conflicts, power struggles, and external controversies on her way out.

In June of this year, Morph co-founder and CEO Cecilia Hsueh took to social media to announce her formal resignation as CEO, handing over the position to former YGG executive and Binance veteran Goltra. She described this as a "deliberate decision" and mentioned that she would continue to support the team in an advisory role.

Cecilia, born in Taiwan and based in Singapore, entered the crypto industry starting with the Phemex exchange, where she served as the Chief Marketing Officer and briefly acted as the CEO. Prior to this, her background was primarily in marketing and operations. In 2023, she was selected by Bitget and Foresight Ventures to join forces with former Gitcoin member Azeem Khan as a "temporary duo," becoming the co-founder of the new incubated public chain Morph. Cecilia assumed the role of CEO, responsible for transforming Morph into a "consumer-grade public chain," attempting to identify the next L2 breakout point following Coinbase's launch of the Base chain.

In March 2024, Morph completed a $20 million seed funding round, valuing the company at $1.25 billion. Upon the funding announcement, Morph's popularity surged rapidly, with the community at one point hoping for it to become a competitor to Base. However, cracks soon appeared: Cecilia and Khan, originally unacquainted, were "force-paired" as founding partners, with stark differences in their ideologies—Khan emphasizing emerging markets while Cecilia focused on external image and marketing. As time went on, the contradictions escalated.

Subsequently, Morph frequently made headlines for its extravagant spending and strategic chaos: splurging hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Singapore Token2049 event, inviting K-pop band tripleS and DJ SODA to perform; renting an office on the 77th floor of the World Trade Center in New York, shared with Foresight and The Block; paying over $200,000 in development fees for the BulbaSwap project, an Uniswap v2 clone, which only ranked among the top 200 globally.

Meanwhile, the Morph mainnet transaction volume has always been low, averaging only 16,000 transactions per day, far below Base's millions. The planned token issuance has been repeatedly delayed, there has been significant employee turnover, and some have not even received a clear token contract.

By early 2025, Khan announced his departure from Morph to launch a new blockchain called Miden. Cecilia remained the nominal CEO, but her actual power was further weakened. Finally, in June 2025, she chose to leave.

More dramatically, the true helmsman of Morph may never have been the public-facing CEO. According to Blockworks, Foresight Ventures co-founder Forest Bai was referred to by employees as the "shadow CEO." While not part of Morph's management, he was deeply involved in strategy, budgeting, personnel matters, and was even formally added to the Slack channel, exerting direct influence on the team. This has led to widespread questioning of Morph's governance and power structure. Related reading: "After a $20 Million Funding Round, Morph Is Exposed for Being Controlled by a 'Shadow CEO', Leading to Internal Division."

Adding to the abstraction, in the minds of most of the crypto community, Cecilia's image has always been ambiguous. However, because she once posted a photo of her own feet on social media, her feet have become the most memorable aspect of her to the outside world.

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