Crypto startup advisors are the people a company names as advisors rather than as staff or as backers, and NAUT's data shows 78 of them at 58 funded crypto projects, read on 4 November 2026. 14 of the 83 advisor rows in that pull were put to outside sources first, where 9 came back confirmed, 4 came back contradicted and 1 found no source at all, so the 4 contradicted rows sit in their own table below instead of in the advisor list.
Data note. Every count here was read from NAUT's own database on 4 November 2026, read-only. NAUT published 14,361 people and 6,955 projects that day. 277 of those people carry a word from the advisor family in their job title. 99 of the 277 sit at a project NAUT files as funded, meaning a project row with at least 1 priced round on its record, and 16 of those 99 belong to a person with no NAUT page of their own, which leaves the 83 rows this article works from: 80 people at 60 companies. 14 of the 83 had their title put to outside sources, which is the sample, never the whole list. The 4 the sources contradicted come out of the advisor table, leaving 79 rows, 78 people and 58 companies. 69 of the 83 rows were never put to an outside source, so their titles are NAUT's record and nothing more. NAUT Research wrote it, and the rows where NAUT's own record loses to an outside source are printed rather than tidied away. Anyone listed can ask NAUT to remove their page at https://naut.so/legal/data-deletion.
How to find crypto startup advisors in 5 steps
An investor list is filed. An advisor list is announced once and then left alone, which is why it is the harder half of the question and the more useful one: an advisor took the call the founder was too busy for, and they still answer.
- Start from the company, then the person. All 58 of these companies have a NAUT page that carries their people, so the advisor sits next to the founders and the operators on 1 page.
- Read the title string itself. 45 of the 79 rows say only Advisor, and the other 34 spread across 27 different strings, from Chairman of Advisory Board to BD Advisor, so the words carry the function.
- Check whether the advisor is also an insider. 5 of the 79 rows carry a founder word next to the advisor word, so those 5 are the company's own people wearing a second hat.
- Date the title before you use it. 4 of the 14 rows put to outside sources came back contradicted, and 3 of those 4 were true at some point and had stopped being true.
- Reach them on their own channel. An advisor who sits on 3 boards reads a note addressed to the 1 you mean.
- Open the company pageAll 58 companies here carry their people on 1 NAUT page, advisors next to founders.
- Read the exact title45 of 79 rows say only Advisor; the other 34 use 27 different strings that name a function.
- Separate the insiders5 of the 79 rows carry a founder word as well, so they are staff with a second hat.
- Date it against a source4 of the 14 rows checked for this article came back contradicted by the person's own account.
- Write to the personJ. Christopher Giancarlo chairs the advisory board at Polymarket, which has 4 priced rounds on NAUT.
Step 1: open the company, then look for the advisor
A crypto advisory board is published by the company that formed it, so the company page is where the names live. On NAUT each of these 58 projects carries its people on 1 page, and the advisor rows sit in the same list as the founders, which means 1 page answers both halves of a BD question: who decides, and who else gets asked.
The depth is thin by design. 47 of the 58 companies carry exactly 1 advisor row, 5 carry 2, 4 carry 3 and 2 carry 5. So on most of these companies the advisor is 1 name, and finding it is the whole job.
Step 2: read the title string, because it names the function
45 of the 79 rows say Advisor and nothing else. The remaining 34 use 27 distinct strings, and those strings are the signal: 5 of the 79 say exactly Strategic Advisor, 11 carry a strategy or strategic word of some kind, 3 name a board, a council or a committee, and single rows run from Advisory Board Director and Chief Scientific Advisor through to Marketing Advisor, BD Advisor and Advisor, Investor Relations and Market Strategy.
That matters for a seller. BD Advisor and Advisor, Investor Relations and Market Strategy are 2 doors into a company, and a Blockchain Advisor is a third. Web3 advisors are hired for the thing the team cannot do yet, so the title is a rough map of what the company knows it is missing.
Step 3: separate the advisors from the insiders
5 of the 79 rows carry a founder word next to the advisor word: Joel B. at Whop, S. Y. (Seung Yoon) Lee at DATA Network, Yaron Velner at Kyber Network Crystal, Prateek Saxena at Zilliqa and Andres Junge at Notabene. Each of those 5 is a founder who stayed on in an advisory seat, so they answer for the company itself.
The other 74 rows are the outside half, and that is the half worth the outreach. An outside advisor has no inbox duty to the company and usually has a reason to take an introduction, which is the opposite of the founder inbox a cold note lands in.
Step 4: date the title against a source the person controls
A stored advisor title is a record of an announcement. 4 of the 14 rows put to outside sources for this article came back contradicted, and the pattern in those 4 is worth copying: in 3 of them the person's own account named the seat they hold now and the earlier one in the past tense, and in the 4th the outside sources named a different job entirely.
The person's own account is the fast check, and the company's own announcement is the second. Where the 2 disagree, the account wins on what is current and the announcement wins on what the title was called.
Step 5: write to the advisor, not to the company
An advisor is reachable in a way a founder is not, because the volume is lower. Ask for the thing an advisor can actually give: a read on whether the company has the problem you solve, and an introduction to whoever owns it inside. NAUT marks which channels it holds for each person on their page, and the verified ones open on a paid plan.
Which crypto startup advisors does NAUT name, and at which companies?
78 people across 58 funded crypto projects, ranked below by the total each company has raised on NAUT's record. The 4 rows the outside check contradicted are not in this table; they are in the next one. The title NAUT stores on each row is counted in Step 2 above and printed in full for the 14 checked rows further down.
Joel B.
Whop
S. Y. (Seung Yoon) Lee
DATA Network
Bancor Network
Justin Kan
Theta Network
Steve Chen
Matthew Kendall Clark
blackbird
Nillion
Space and Time
Anthony Cargill
Polyhedra
Justin Schmidt
Ondo Finance
Sebastien Borget
Cross The Ages
Beatrice O'Carroll
io.net
Zebec Protocol
Alex Becker
Play Network (prev. READYgg)
Austin Seiberlich
Shawn Layden
Sinjin Bain
Strauss Zelnick
Qiao Liang
SynFutures
Asse Sauga
LimeWire
Ari Emanuel
Render
Emad Mostaque
J.J. Abrams
Mike Winkelmann
Ryan Shea
Justin Sun
BitTorrent
Yaron Velner
Kyber Network Crystal
Eduardo Fonnegra
Bondex
Prateek Saxena
Zilliqa
Vijay Michalik
Superfluid_HQ
Meower
entropy
Darren Lau
Nyan Heroes
Thomas Vu
Sandra Leow
Kaito
Reserve Rights
Alchemy Pay
Mikhail Melnikov
STON.fi
Justin Hernandez
Self (prev. OpenPassport)
eesee
Nicholas Fouriezos
Arch Network
Pranay Sanghavi
E Money Network
Ralf Gerteis
Cookie3
gizatechxyz
Owl of Moistness
Anichess
Lisa Andrews
WandrLust
Perena
Joe Wong
paradisetycoon
Pietro Montaldo
Uomi
Hassan (Hatu) Sheikh
Bitflix
Tom Slikboer
BoundlessPay
Faraj Abutalibov
Stellar
Chris Newhouse
pear_protocol
Velo
Jed McCaleb
XYRO
Alessandro Troia
DAC | Quantum Chain
Luca Eugenio Barlassina
Piersandro Guerrera
Omar Hamwi
EarnBIT
Bruno Pinto
Betarena
Alaya AI
HashKey Group
Da Viking
FLOKI
MrBrown Whale
Sabre
Kled AI
Andres Junge
NotabeneRounds and raised figures are the company's totals on NAUT's record, not the advisor's own. 11 of the 79 rows sit at a company whose latest round carries no date on NAUT, and 8 companies here closed their latest round in 2026: Polymarket, Whop, DATA Network, LimeWire, entropy, DAC | Quantum Chain, Notabene and Kled AI.
Which companies carry the most crypto startup advisors?
2 companies carry 5 advisor rows each, and 47 of the 58 carry exactly 1.
DAC | Quantum Chain also carries 3 rows and is left off the chart because its name contains the character the chart uses to split a row. Nyan Heroes and Velo carry 2 each, which completes the 11 companies with more than 1. The deepest bench and the biggest raise are different companies: Play Network (prev. READYgg) has raised $37.75M on NAUT's record across 10 rounds and Render $30M in 1, against the $1.07B at Polymarket, which carries 1 advisor row.
What happened when 14 of those titles went to outside sources?
9 of the 14 came back confirmed, 4 contradicted and 1 with no source found. Those 14 were picked by company raise, so they are the rows a deal maker is most likely to open, and the failure rate in them is not a rate for the other 69.
| Person | Company, title and check |
|---|---|
 J. Christopher Giancarlo |
 Polymarket. Chairman of Advisory Board. Confirmed: a page read on 4 November 2026 still has him chairing the board. |
 ogle |
 World Liberty Financial. Advisor. Confirmed: his own account states the role and the company tagged him in an advisor post. |
| Jocy Lin |  NEAR Protocol. Advisor. Confirmed, and more exact: Community Advisor, held since 2019. |
 Steven Clarke |
 BlockDAG. Senior Advisor. Confirmed, and longer: Senior Advisor for Partnerships and Policy. |
 Pamela Drucker Mann |
 Aptos. Advisor. Confirmed: Aptos Labs named her and  David Lawee as advisors in May 2024, and no departure was found. |
| David Lawee |
Aptos. Advisor. Confirmed by the same Aptos Labs announcement and its company blog post. |
 Dan Boneh |
Aptos. Advisor. Confirmed: the Stanford professor was named an advisor and still listed as one in 2024. |
| David Cohen |  Hedera. Founding Advisory Member. Confirmed by Hedera's own post welcoming him. |
 Dr. Maurice Herlihy |
BlockDAG. Blockchain Advisor. Confirmed by 2 crypto outlets, with the exact wording not on the page cited, so it stays NAUT's record. |
 James Zhang |
NEAR Protocol. Advisor. No source found: his own account does not mention NEAR and near.org does not list him. |
 Ajit Tripathi |
 Polygon. Strategic Advisor. Contradicted: he is Executive Director at Eigen Foundation, and the Polygon Labs advising reads in the past tense. |
 Michael Sonnenshein |
Aptos. Advisor. Contradicted: his current bio omits Aptos, and PitchBook reported on 29 May 2026 that he left crypto for a venture role. |
| Michael Sonnenshein |
 Securitize. Advisor. Contradicted: he joined as Chief Operating Officer in December 2024 and his last day was 3 October 2025. |
 Andrew Masanto |
Hedera. Strategic Advisor. Contradicted: 2 outside sources call him Hedera's founding CMO, and his own account puts the role in the past tense. |
Read the right-hand column as 4 outcomes. 8 of the 14 ended with outside support this article can state: 1 where the exact wording was located on the page, and 7 where the page could not be fetched again and the row rests on a second source as well. 1 more, Dr. Maurice Herlihy at BlockDAG, came back confirmed by 2 outlets with the quoted wording not found on the page cited, so it is printed as NAUT's record. 1, James Zhang at NEAR Protocol, found no outside source and is printed as NAUT's record too. The last 4 are the contradicted rows, and they are out of the advisor table above.
The 4 failures also split in 2 ways. 3 of them are time: Ajit Tripathi and both Michael Sonnenshein rows describe seats that existed and then ended, 1 of them a Chief Operating Officer job that NAUT stores as Advisor. The 4th is a kind error: Andrew Masanto was Hedera's founding CMO, which is a staff job rather than an advisory one, and NAUT still holds 2 other Strategic Advisor rows for him, at Nillion and Reserve Rights, that nothing in this check tested.
What this tells a crypto BD team
An advisor row is the cheapest warm route into a funded company, and these 79 rows are a short list you can work in an afternoon.
- The list is small and the companies are real. 58 companies, $5.32B raised between them on NAUT's record, 223 priced rounds.
- Most of these companies give you 1 advisor and no choice. 47 of 58 carry exactly 1 row, so the name you find is the name you write to.
- The title tells you the door. 5 rows say exactly Strategic Advisor, 11 carry a strategy or strategic word, 3 name a board, a council or a committee, and the rest of the 34 non-bare titles name a function such as BD, marketing, research or investor relations.
- Check before you send. The 14 rows checked here failed 4 times, every failure in the direction of a seat that had ended.
- Pick by raise, then by recency8 of these companies closed their latest priced round in 2026, from Polymarket at $1.07B down.
- Take the deepest benches firstPlay Network (prev. READYgg) and Render carry 5 advisor rows each, so 1 miss is not the end.
- Match the title to your ask5 rows say exactly Strategic Advisor, 11 carry a strategy word and 3 sit on a board, a council or a committee.
- Date the title, then write4 of the 14 rows checked for this article were contradicted by the person's own account.
What this tells a founder raising a round
An advisory seat is a signal you can read off other people's cap tables before you fill your own. These 58 companies show what the seat is used for in practice, and 3 patterns are worth copying.
- Advisors cluster where the raise is early and the bench is being built. Play Network (prev. READYgg) carries 5 rows at $37.75M raised across 10 rounds, where Polymarket carries 1 at $1.07B.
- The named function is the gap. The 34 rows with more than the bare word Advisor name marketing, BD, research, investor relations, capital markets and blockchain, which is a list of things a seed team cannot hire for yet.
- An advisor who is also a founder is a different animal. 5 of the 79 rows are the company's own founders in an advisory seat, usually after the operating job ended.
- Read the gap you are hiring forThe 34 rows with a named function cover marketing, BD, research, investor relations and capital markets.
- Ask someone already in a seat78 people here hold an advisor title at a funded crypto project, and 11 companies carry more than 1.
- Announce it where it can be checked4 of the 14 titles checked here were contradicted by the person or an outside source.
How to reach an advisor on NAUT
Every person in the table above has their own NAUT page, which is the whole reason these 83 rows were cut down from 99: the other 16 rows belong to people NAUT names without a page of their own. A person page lists the companies NAUT ties them to and which channels NAUT holds on file for them.
That matters most on the people who sit at more than 1 of these companies. Andrew Masanto carries Strategic Advisor rows at Nillion and Reserve Rights on top of the contradicted Hedera row, so 1 conversation reaches 2 of these teams.
Related reading on NAUT: How to find decision makers in a company: 5 steps for crypto and Crypto BD leads: 11 names at 10 teams that raised in 2026.
Can you pull this data through the NAUT API?
Yes. The people search behind this article is GET https://api.naut.so/v1/people?q=advisor, which takes q against a name, a handle or a title, and a company's full team, advisors included, comes back from GET https://api.naut.so/v1/projects/aptos. Each call costs 5 credits, the first reveal of 1 person's private channels through GET https://api.naut.so/v1/people/{id}?include=private costs 10 and is a permanent unlock, and the plans and credit bundles are on NAUT pricing with the parameters in the NAUT API docs. Verified Telegram, email and LinkedIn for these people unlock on any paid NAUT plan, so start a 7-day trial if you want the channels as well as the names.
Crypto startup advisors FAQ
Who advises a crypto startup?
Whoever the company announced, which on NAUT's record on 4 November 2026 is 78 people holding an advisor title at 58 funded crypto projects. The titles run from a bare Advisor on 45 of the 79 rows to Chairman of Advisory Board at Polymarket, Blockchain Advisor at BlockDAG and Founding Advisory Member at Hedera.
How do I find a crypto startup's advisors?
Open the company page on a directory that carries its people, read the exact title string, then check it against the person's own account before you use it. On NAUT that is 1 page per company for all 58 here, and 14 of the 83 rows in this pull were put to outside sources for this article, where 4 came back contradicted.
Where can I find these crypto startup advisors and their contact channels?
On NAUT. All 78 people in this article have their own NAUT page, each reachable from its company page, and the same rows come back from the API with GET https://api.naut.so/v1/people?q=advisor at 5 credits a call. Verified Telegram, email and LinkedIn unlock on any paid NAUT plan, so start a 7-day trial to open the channels on those 78 pages.
How current are the advisor titles in a crypto startup team list?
Treat 1 as a lead until you date it. Of the 14 rows put to outside sources for this article, 9 came back confirmed, 1 found no source and 4 were contradicted, with 3 of those 4 naming a seat that had ended, so the other 69 rows carry NAUT's record and no outside check.
Which crypto companies have the most advisors on NAUT?
Play Network (prev. READYgg) and Render, with 5 advisor rows each of the 79 printed here, read on 4 November 2026. Aptos, HashKey Group, FLOKI and DAC | Quantum Chain carry 3 each, 5 companies carry 2 and the other 47 carry exactly 1.
Sources
- NAUT's own database, read on 4 November 2026, read-only: published people and their job titles, the companies they are tied to, and each company's priced rounds and total raised. Every count above was computed from those rows at that time. 277 title rows matched the advisor family, 99 of them at a funded project, 83 of those with a person page, and the 79 printed here are those 83 less the 4 the outside sources contradicted.
- The X account of each person checked, read on 4 November 2026, for the 9 of the 14 rows where the person's own account was one of the sources read:
x.com/giancarlomkts,x.com/cryptogle,x.com/jzconcepts,x.com/chainyoda,x.com/DruckerP,x.com/Sonnenshein,x.com/dlawee,x.com/danbonehandx.com/AndrewMasanto. - Company announcements, read on 4 November 2026: the Aptos Labs post naming David Lawee and Pamela Drucker Mann as advisors and its blog version on
medium.com/aptoslabs, the Hedera post welcoming David Cohen onmedium.com/hedera, and the Aptos Labs post naming Dan Boneh. - Third-party pages, read on 4 November 2026:
analyticsinsight.netandcrypto-reporter.comon Steven Clarke at BlockDAG,crypto-economy.comandtechbullion.comon Dr. Maurice Herlihy,crunchbase.comandsignal.nfx.comon Jocy Lin at NEAR Protocol,ibtimes.comon ogle,thecooldown.comon J. Christopher Giancarlo,pitchbook.comandprnewswire.comon Michael Sonnenshein, andconcordia.neton Andrew Masanto. - NAUT API facts, prices and plans:
naut.so/docs/apiandnaut.so/pricing, read on 31 October 2026.