Quorum Media has released the first edition of its “Top Entrepreneurs to Watch” report, a research-driven series highlighting founders in fintech, Web3, and emerging technology whose ongoing efforts are expected to capture investor interest over the next two to three years.
The report is produced by Quorum’s research desk, which continuously monitors founder and company signals through public filings, product release histories, and independent media coverage—not submissions or paid placements. This edition features three founders selected using that approach.
METHODOLOGY
This research desk maintains an ongoing watchlist of founders across fintech, Web3, and adjacent technology sectors, built from public filings, product release histories, independent media coverage, and direct statements made in interviews and public appearances.
Selection places greater weight on three factors than on headline size or funding amount:
Longevity. A product still actively used years after launch is seen as a stronger indicator than one that generated buzz at release but little since. Most Web3 products fail to survive a single market cycle; those that do warrant examination.
Decision record. When a founder chose a more difficult, less immediately visible path over an easier one that would have drawn more attention, that decision is evaluated on its own terms, regardless of its eventual commercial outcome.
Independent verifiability. Claims in this report are checked against public sources wherever feasible. When a claim originates mainly from the company or founder, it is labeled as such rather than presented as independently verified.
This is not a ranking. The three founders included are not ordered by size, valuation, or any composite score. They are grouped because each, in the research desk’s assessment, demonstrates a decision pattern worth observing over the next two to three years, and the order of appearance reflects publication sequence, not relative standing.
Alexander Guseff — an engineer who maintained an engineering mindset
Founder and CEO of Tectum, a blockchain platform where he previously served as lead architect. He took over from the outgoing chief executive, who transitioned into an advisory capacity. Tectum operates under CrispMind, Ltd., the intellectual property holding company Guseff also founded to develop and manage a portfolio of cybersecurity, distributed ledger, and mobile application technologies.
His flagship product, SoftNote, has been actively used for over three years—a fee-less payment system designed for everyday spending, not trading. It functions by adding a passcode-based ownership transfer layer on top of existing Bitcoin wallets, enabling value transfers between two people without a new on-chain entry each time; it also supports other digital assets, including fiat. SoftNote ePoS brings the same engine to merchants: any smartphone becomes a contactless payment terminal through a dedicated software application, with no extra hardware needed.
The security side relies on hardware-based logic: TectumKeys, offered through tectumkeys.com – a chip-encrypted private key generation engine, making Tectum the only Web3 team to have produced its own encryption hardware device.
TectumKeys is a hardware layer designed to withstand quantum brute-force attacks, built on genuine random number generation rather than the pseudo-random methods most competitors use for private key generation. It is the kind of infrastructure that rarely makes headlines but underpins everything else in the ecosystem, since a payment system is only as secure as the keys behind it.
Tectum Labs provides outside founders with infrastructure to tokenize a business without building settlement systems from scratch, and Tectum Explorer maintains a public ledger of everything moving through the network—from SoftNote bills to Labs tokens and the decentralized blockchain system of Tectum 4.2. Two tokens underlie it all: TET powers core network operations, while TCT handles governance, giving holders a direct role in ecosystem development rather than pure price exposure.
CrispMind’s broader team draws on backgrounds spanning secure messaging, user authentication, and distributed data storage—a mix reflected in how diverse the product line is compared to most single-application crypto ventures.
The current direction traces back to a specific decision. Tectum’s team was already leading on a widely tracked speed benchmark, a metric it still leads today, with throughput the company reports at 3.5 million transactions per second. Guseff shifted the roadmap toward usability. “There’s always going to be a faster guy, a smarter guy, or a better-funded competitor,” he said of that choice at the time.
He writes as a published author with Cointelegraph, focusing on blockchain scalability and payment adoption, and was named Best Innovator of the Year at the 2024 Entrepreneur Agility Awards for SoftNote’s role in making crypto payments usable day to day. Yahoo Finance has separately recognized Tectum as one of the fastest blockchains in operation.
Hicham Chahine — the finance executive who took a bankrupt esports team public, then bet it on Bitcoin
Hicham Chahine was managing hedge fund investments at Formue, the Nordic region’s largest wealth management firm, by his mid-twenties, after being headhunted into finance at 18. In 2016, he acquired Ninjas in Pyjamas, the storied esports organization, which was effectively bankrupt at the time. “Two years into rebuilding Ninjas in Pyjamas was the hardest period of my life,” he has said of the turnaround. He stayed on well past the six-month cleanup he originally planned, building the brand into a business Forbes reported had reached roughly $100 million in revenue.
That turnaround became NIP Group, which went public on NASDAQ under the ticker NIPG following a 2023 merger, with Chahine serving as co-CEO alongside Mario Ho. Being a listed company changes the nature of what Chahine is building: NIP Group now carries SEC reporting obligations and audited financials that a private esports brand never had to answer to.
The bigger pivot came in mid-2025, when NIP Group moved into Bitcoin mining, framing it as evolving from a gaming company into what Chahine has called “a next-gen digital infrastructure company.” The scale-up was fast by any standard: from a 3.11 EH/s hash rate at launch in July 2025 to 11.3 EH/s by November, making NIP Group roughly the 12th-largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner globally and the largest in the MENA region—a claim that is independently trackable through public hash-rate data rather than relying on the company’s own reporting. A parallel Web3 partnership with Chiliz launched the $DOJO fan token for NIP’s esports community, a smaller, separate initiative from the mining business.
Chahine now operates out of Abu Dhabi, where NIP Group works under a partnership framework with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, positioning the company inside the UAE’s push to become a hub for AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure investment.
Executives who move a public company from entertainment into industrial-scale Bitcoin mining in under six months are rare, and the fact that this one already survived rebuilding a bankrupt organization from nothing is exactly the kind of prior track record worth weighing when judging whether the next bet pays off.
Ermo Eero — the wallet built on what compliance and loss both teach you
Ermo Eero, CEO of IronWallet, brought financial and compliance experience from traditional banking into a product born out of a personal loss: a founding team member’s crypto holdings wiped out overnight in an exchange hack. IronWallet, operated by INWAY AG in Liechtenstein since 2017, is built non-custodial by design—seed phrases stay on the user’s device, never transmitted to company servers, so IronWallet itself cannot freeze, access, or recover a user’s funds. It requires no registration and no KYC verification, a stance the company frames as core to its privacy commitment.
That position puts Eero in a genuinely uncomfortable spot as regulation tightens globally, and he doesn’t dodge it. Commenting recently on the US CLARITY Act, he argued that domestic legislation alone can’t set a global standard: “Important pivot for domestic capital, but not yet the Bretton Woods moment for crypto.” It’s an unusual thing to hear from the CEO of a no-KYC wallet, arguing for more international regulatory coordination rather than less, and pushing the industry to police itself rather than wait to be policed.
In January 2026, IronWallet became a confirmed partner in the WalletConnect Pay rollout, live across more than 120 countries through the Ingenico payment terminal network—a compliance review from a payments company, not a self-reported milestone.
Founders who build the most privacy-preserving version of a product while personally arguing for tighter global regulation are rare, mostly because the two instincts usually pull in opposite directions. That tension is exactly why Eero’s next moves, on product and on policy, are worth watching.
This edition concludes Quorum Media’s “Top Entrepreneurs to Watch Over the Next Few Years” report, covering Alexander Guseff of Tectum, Hicham Chahine of NIP, and Ermo Eero of IronWallet. Each entry was researched independently by Quorum Media’s research desk. Inclusion in this report reflects a decision pattern the desk judged worth tracking, not an endorsement of any individual, company, product, or investment, and readers should conduct their own due diligence before acting on any information in this report.
Additional installments will follow as the research desk identifies new founders meeting the criteria outlined in this report’s methodology.
Media inquiries, including requests for the underlying research behind this report, can be directed to hello@quorum-media.com.
About Quorum Media
Quorum Media is a global public relations and reputation management agency founded in 2018, with offices in Moscow and Dubai. The agency’s media network spans more than 15,000 outlets worldwide across editorial placement, press distribution, and AI search visibility.
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