This bet gave Mr. Novogratz, 53, who was a wrestler at Princeton, a good shot at redemption after his big hedge fund at Fortress shut down. Last year, Mr. Novogratz started what he has described as a sort of full-service investment bank for cryptocurrency projects, called Galaxy Digital.

He had to reverse course on plans to open an enormous crypto hedge fund when the markets suddenly turned sour in December. But he is still putting his money where his mouth is, setting up what is likely to be the biggest institution selling Wall Street on the virtues of cryptocurrencies.

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Elizabeth Stark

In the continuing struggle to get Bitcoin into mainstream use while staying true to its ideological roots, nobody is more crucial than Elizabeth Stark. Ms. Stark, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is the chief executive of Lightning Labs, a start-up that is building tools that can layer new capabilities — and new transaction channels — on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

There is currently a hard limit on the number of transactions the Bitcoin blockchain can handle, which has led to significant battles between companies and developers over the best way to expand the network. Ms. Stark, who was already an advocate for a more open and egalitarian internet, became a leader of the camp that wanted to keep Bitcoin relatively small, true to its ideological roots as a decentralized network, with no one in control.

At the same time, she proposed and began building a method of adding layers on top of Bitcoin that can handle lots of new customers and transaction types. These “layer two solutions,” as she has called them, appear to be Bitcoin’s best chance of expanding to take on the world, and are already being rolled out. The work has turned Ms. Stark into a leading public face of a far-flung Bitcoin community that often defies organization.