Anthony Di Iorio

Why Anthony is the canonical Community Organizer

In 2012, Di Iorio sold his Toronto rental properties, bought his first bitcoin for $9.73, and immediately started organizing — founding the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup, which grew from eight people at a pub to hundreds of attendees and eventually became the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada. That community-building instinct was the direct precondition for Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin attended Di Iorio's meetups, and when Buterin drafted the Ethereum whitepaper in 2013, Di Iorio became a co-founder and early financier of the project. He provided the physical space — his Toronto hub Decentral — where the Ethereum team first convened and built, and he funded critical early development at a time when the project had no institutional backing and needed someone willing to bet on a room full of people who shared a conviction.

After Ethereum launched, Di Iorio channeled the same organizer logic into product: he founded Decentral Inc. and built Jaxx, a unified wallet that bridged Bitcoin and Ethereum for ordinary users — the interface layer that let a broader public engage with what the protocol community had assembled. He briefly served as the first Chief Digital Officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2016 before leaving to focus full-time on Jaxx. Forbes placed his net worth at $750 million to $1 billion in early 2018. In 2021, Di Iorio publicly announced he was stepping back from crypto entirely, citing personal safety concerns that had come with extreme wealth and public visibility in a space that had grown far beyond the meetup room where it started.

Di Iorio is the Community Organizer archetype made concrete: his most consequential act was not writing code or deploying capital but convening people. The Toronto meetup was the seed; Ethereum was the harvest. The pattern — build the room first, let the network decide what to build next — is exactly how community organizers convert local social capital into category-defining outcomes.

The Community Organizer builds networks and ecosystems that generate convertible social capital. See the Community Organizer role → · Read the full Community Organizer deep-dive →

Same role, different wave