Crypto's Next Big Thing: Dorm Rooms, Not Boardrooms

Crypto’s most innovative companies are not being developed in corporate boardrooms but rather in dorm rooms, group chats, and hackathons. This trend is not a coincidence but a pattern that has been observed before, characterized by bold ideas, early action, and disregard for institutional timelines. Before Ethereum had a market cap, it was just an idea in a college dropout’s head. This spirit of early action and innovation is what drives the crypto industry forward.

In 2014, a group of students launched the Blockchain Education Network (BEN) to connect students exploring bitcoin and blockchain across college campuses. Within a year, BEN had grown to over 160 chapters in more than 35 countries. What started as grassroots education quickly became a launchpad for builders. BEN became a catalyst for its core members and for a global cohort of students who saw crypto as a blank canvas. Some dropped out. Others stayed in. Nearly all started building before the rest of the world caught on. Projects fostered by that ecosystem have gone on to collectively reach over $20 billion in peak valuations, including IOTA, Optimism, Bitso, Augur, Wanchain, Notional and Roll.

This urgency isn’t new. It’s the same drive that shaped early tech giants. Steve Jobs (Apple), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), and Patrick & John Collison (Stripe) all left college behind to build companies that redefined their industries. Web3 founders are following the same path. Some of crypto’s most influential founders started the same way. Vitalik Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo to launch Ethereum. Charles Hoskinson left the University of Colorado before founding Cardano. Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple and Stellar, dropped out of UC Berkeley. Jesse Powell left Cal State to build Kraken. Shayne Coplan dropped out of NYU in his first semester to start Polymarket. Joey Krug left Pomona to co-found Augur. Jeremy Gardner, who co-founded Augur with Krug, dropped out of the University of Michigan. Jinglan Wang left Wellesley to build Eximchain and later helped lead Optimism. Noah Tweedale, co-founder of Pump.fun, never enrolled.

At Dropout Capital, we’ve backed early-stage companies including Vana, founded at MIT, building a decentralized data marketplace. SatLayer, started by MIT alumni and former VCs, creating Bitcoin-native compute for AI. Tenderize, launched by students at Marquette University, building a liquid staking marketplace. Algebra.Finance, founded by a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a background in mobile operating systems, rethinking on-chain prediction infrastructure. One place where these stories, and the stories of the next generation are already being shared is ChainStories, a podcast hosted by Erick Pinos and myself. ChainStories takes listeners behind the scenes of some of the most successful projects in crypto, including Plume Network, YesNoError, Algebra.Finance, Virtuals.io, TON, Horizon Labs, and many others, breaking down how real companies are built from idea to launch, and helping founders and VCs understand the decisions, tradeoffs, and risks that happen long before anyone notices.

The future of crypto isn’t being theorized at conferences or slow-walked through corporate committees. It’s being built by people who move early, take risks, and start building before the world even realizes what’s happening. And, if history is any guide, the companies that matter most won’t be the ones that waited. This spirit of innovation and early action is what drives the crypto industry forward, and it is likely that the next big thing in crypto will come from a dorm room or a college dropout.