Quorum Media release the Top Entrepreneurs to Watch

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, August 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Quorum Media today published the first installment of its "Top Entrepreneurs to Watch" report, a research series identifying founders in fintech, Web3, and emerging technology whose current work is likely to shape investor attention over the next two to three years.
The report is compiled by Quorum’s research desk, which tracks founder and company signal on an ongoing basis using public filings, product release histories, and independent media coverage rather than submissions or sponsored placements. This installment covers three founders selected on that basis.
METHODOLOGY
This current 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 weighs three factors more heavily than headline size or funding total:
Longevity. A product still in active use years after launch is treated as a stronger signal than a product that generated coverage at launch and little since. Most Web3 products do not survive a single market cycle; the ones that do are worth asking why.
Decision record. Where a founder chose a harder, less immediately visible path over an easier one that would have generated more attention, that decision is weighted on its own merits, independent of how well it performed commercially afterwards.
Independent verifiability. Claims included in this report are cross-checked against public sources wherever possible. Where a claim originates primarily with the company or founder in question, it is identified as such rather than presented as independently confirmed.
This is not a ranking. The three founders in this report are not ordered by size, valuation, or any composite score. They are grouped because each, in the research desk's judgment, represents a decision pattern worth watching over the next two to three years, and the order they appear in reflects publication sequence, not relative standing.

Alexander Guseff — an engineer who never stopped thinking like one
Founder and CEO of Tectum, a blockchain platform he previously served as lead architect for. He succeeded the company's outgoing chief executive, who moved into an advisory role. Tectum sits 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 in active use for more than three years, a fee-less payment system built for everyday spending, not trading. It works by layering a passcode-based ownership transfer on top of existing Bitcoin wallets, so value moves between two people without a fresh on-chain entry each time; it also handles other digital assets, fiat included. SoftNote ePoS takes the same engine to merchants: any smartphone becomes a contactless payment terminal through a dedicated software application, without extra hardware required.
The security side runs on a hardware-based logic: TectumKeys, offered through tectumkeys.com - a chip-encripted private key generation engine, which makes Tectum the only Web3 team to have produced its own encryption hardware device.
TectumKeys is a hardware layer designed to hold up against quantum brute-force attacks, built on genuine random number generation instead of the pseudo-random methods most competitors use to generate private keys. It's the kind of infrastructure that rarely gets its own headline but underpins everything else in the ecosystem, since a payment system is only as secure as the keys behind it.
Tectum Labs gives outside founders infrastructure to tokenize a business without building settlement systems from the ground up, and Tectum Explorer keeps a public ledger of everything moving through the network, from SoftNote bills to Labs tokens and decentralised blockchain system of Tectum 4.2. Two tokens sit underneath all of it: TET runs core network operations, TCT handles governance, giving holders a direct role in how the ecosystem develops rather than pure price exposure.
CrispMind's broader team draws on backgrounds spanning secure messaging, user authentication, and distributed data storage, a mix that shows up in how spread out the product line is compared to most single-application crypto ventures.
The current direction traces back to a specific call. Tectum's team was already leading on a widely tracked speed benchmark, a metric it still leads on today, with throughput the company states at 3.5 million transactions per second. Guseff moved the roadmap towards usability. "There's always going to be a faster guy, a smarter guy, or a better-funded competitor," he said of the decision at the time.
He writes as a published author with Cointelegraph, focused 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's independently trackable through public hash-rate data rather than resting 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 installment 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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