Kris Marszalek

In 2004, Marszalek founded Starline, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer with a plant in mainland China that made white-label hardware such as solid state drives, hard drives and USB flash drives; he wrote on LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry that the company grew to 400 people and $81 million in sales in three years. He owned half of the company, with the other half held by a Hong Kong-based partner.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2009, Starline settled with client Dexxon over a faulty shipment of flash drives for $5 million (a $1 million payment and a $4 million credit note). By the end of that year, Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong pursued about $2.2 million in loans and Starline was forced into liquidation; because Marszalek had personally guaranteed the loans, he was forced into bankruptcy as well. He later wrote that being bankrupt at 30 was a painful experience.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In later Hong Kong court proceedings, the court found that Starline had transferred nearly $3 million to him and his partner in 2008 and 2009, more than $1 million of it to him personally, in what it called “impugned payments”; Judge Anthony Chan wrote that “it appears that there was a concerted effort to strip the cash from Starline” and described his explanation for a $300,000 transfer as “inherently incredible.” His side said Starline failed because customers could not repay credit lines the company had extended during the 2007–2008 financial crisis.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

As Starline was shutting down, he and the same partner set up Middle Kingdom Capital, an offshore holding company in the Cayman Islands that each owned half of, a connection later exposed in the 2017 Paradise Papers leak. The company owned BeeCrazy, a Groupon-like Hong Kong group-buying e-commerce site. Australia’s iBuy group, preparing for an IPO, sought to acquire BeeCrazy on conditions including that the two clear their personal bankruptcies in Hong Kong court and remain for three years; after the partner’s relative stepped in to repay their debts, both bankruptcies were annulled. In October 2013, iBuy bought BeeCrazy for $21 million in cash and stock.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

After its IPO, iBuy struggled against competition from larger players such as Alibaba. In August 2014, Marszalek was promoted to CEO of iBuy and renamed it Ensogo in an effort to retool the company; Ensogo lost more than $50 million in 2015, shut down operations in June 2016, and he resigned the same day. Many sellers did not receive payment after a final clearance sale and petitioned Hong Kong’s Legislative Council; his representative said the shutdown angered many customers and that this was one of the reasons he had opposed the decision.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

The same month he resigned, Foris Limited was incorporated, marking his entry into crypto; its first project was Monaco, whose leadership team was made up of former Ensogo employees. In July 2018, as Monaco’s CEO, he led the purchase of the Crypto.com domain and renamed the company Crypto.com; the domain cost $12 million. He said at the time that the company’s mission was to accelerate the world’s adoption of cryptocurrency.⁠[1][1][2][2][3][2]

When Crypto.com launched its exchange in November 2019, Marszalek said the companies that would thrive in the next bull run were those that built an entire ecosystem, and that companies offering only one type of product would find it very hard to compete. In 2021, the company bought 20-year naming rights to Los Angeles’ Staples Center for about $700 million and renamed it Crypto.com Arena.⁠[4][4][5]

After nearly $34 million was stolen from Crypto.com user accounts in January 2022, Marszalek told Bloomberg TVBloomberg TVBloomberg TV (officially Bloomberg Television) is a global business and financial news television channel owned by Bloomberg L.P. It provides live market news, analysis, and interviews, with separate programming for the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.Open the full entry that the losses were “not particularly material” and customer funds were not at risk. In November, after FTX collapsed and concerns arose about Crypto.com’s liquidity, he said in a livestream on the company’s YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel that its balance sheet was strong and its FTX exposure was only $10 million, adding that the company was “never going to raise funds”; when the company released a proof of reserves in December, he called it an important step for the industry to increase transparency and restore trust.⁠[6][7][7][7][8]

In December 2022, CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry published an investigation into his record at Starline, BeeCrazy and Ensogo. The company responded that there was “never a finding of wrongdoing” under his leadership; ahead of the report he posted a 16-tweet thread saying, “I have nothing to hide, and am proud of my battle scars,” and that early failures taught him humility, how not to overextend and how to plan for the worst. In January 2023, the company cut about 20% of its workforce, which he attributed to the damage FTX’s collapse had done to trust in the industry.⁠[1][1][1][1][9]

In October 2024, after receiving a Wells notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Crypto.com sued the agency. Marszalek said on X that the suit was meant “to protect the future of crypto in the U.S.” and was a response to the SEC’s “regulation by enforcement,” which he said had hurt more than 50 million American crypto holders.⁠[10][10]

In March 2025, it was reported that the ai.com domain had been listed for sale through broker Larry Fischer with an asking price of $100 million. In April, the deal closed: Marszalek bought ai.com for $70 million paid entirely in cryptocurrency, more than double the previous $30 million record set by Voice.com, making it the highest publicly disclosed price paid for a domain. The buyer was represented by John Mauriello of DomainAssets.com, who had also helped Marszalek acquire XBT.com. The details were not revealed until the Financial Times reported them in February 2026.⁠[11][11][3][3][12][3][13][13][13]

In August 2025, Crypto.com and Trump Media & Technology GroupTrump Media & Technology GroupTrump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) is a publicly traded company headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. It operates Truth Social, the Truth+ streaming service and the Truth.Fi financial technology brand. The private company was formed in 2021 and completed its merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) in 2024. A separate proposed merger with fusion-energy company TAE Technologies remained subject to the filing and approval process in late September 2026.Open the full entry announced a partnership to create a company holding CRO as a treasury asset and list it through a special purpose acquisition company; Marszalek announced on X that it would trade under the ticker MCGA, for “Make CRO Great Again,” calling it “a historic day for CRO.” In September, when Crypto.com obtained a full set of derivatives licenses from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, he thanked Acting Chairman Caroline Pham and the commission for advancing President Trump’s crypto agenda.⁠[14][14][15]

On February 3, 2026, Crypto.com launched OG, a standalone prediction market platform. Marszalek said the company had built one of the largest brands in crypto during hypergrowth amid a complex regulatory landscape and now aimed to replicate that in prediction markets, adding that its prediction market business had grown 40x on a weekly basis over the previous six months.⁠[16][16]

On February 6, Marszalek revealed himself as the buyer of ai.com, and on February 8 launched the site with a commercial during Super Bowl LX: a platform letting ordinary users generate personal AI agents that act on their behalf, organizing work, sending messages and executing actions across apps, and that can autonomously build missing capabilities and share improvements across the network. He would serve as CEO of both ai.com and Crypto.com. Traffic from the ad crashed the site for several hours. He said the vision was a decentralized network of billions of agents that self-improve and share those improvements with each other.⁠[13][13][13][13][3][3]

On July 16, 2026, Crypto.com announced a $400 million investment from Citadel SecuritiesCitadel SecuritiesCitadel Securities is an American market maker founded in Chicago in 2002 by Ken Griffin and partners and headquartered in Miami, providing liquidity to institutional and retail investors across a range of financial products. It is a separate company from Citadel, the hedge fund Griffin founded in 1990.Open the full entry at a $20 billion valuation, its first institutional funding round. Marszalek said the size of the opportunity was “staggering” as crypto increasingly becomes the rails for finance, and that the regulatory and technology infrastructure the company had built over the past decade positioned it to capture a new wave of growth across all asset classes.⁠[17][17][17][17]

Crypto.com: Official website: https://crypto.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18][19]

ai.com: Official website: https://ai.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18][20][13]

OG: Official website: https://og.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18][21][16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/kris (opens in a new window)⁠[18]