Antony Turner doesn’t fit the mold of your typical crypto founder. No hoodie. No anonymous Twitter handle. No grand promises delivered from a beach somewhere in Bali. Instead, Turner brings something the industry desperately needs but rarely gets: a track record.
As CEO and founder of BlockDAG Network, Turner is overseeing what’s become one of the largest crypto presales in history, over $430 million raised, 312,000 holders, and a community that’s already deployed 20,000 physical mining rigs before the network has even launched. But if you dig into Turner’s background, the success starts to make sense. This isn’t his first rodeo. It’s not even his second.
The Spirit Blockchain Years
Turner cut his teeth in the wild west of early blockchain finance as Chief Operating Officer at Spirit Blockchain, a publicly listed blockchain investment company. That detail matters. Taking a blockchain company public isn’t a participation trophy, it’s navigating regulatory scrutiny, institutional investors, quarterly earnings calls, and all the unsexy infrastructure that separates real companies from vaporware.
“Most crypto founders think going to mainnet is the hard part,” says a former colleague who worked with Turner at Spirit. “Antony learned that going public is harder. Regulators don’t care about your white paper. They care about your compliance framework.”
That experience taught Turner something most crypto entrepreneurs never learn: how to build for institutions, not just retail. Spirit Blockchain gave him a front-row seat to what traditional finance wants from crypto, transparency, accountability. Not memes. Not promises. Results.
The Swiss Innovation
After Spirit, Turner didn’t rest. He founded Switzerland’s first truly equal-weighted crypto index fund, a move that signaled his understanding of both traditional finance and crypto’s emerging infrastructure. Switzerland isn’t a random choice, it’s the jurisdiction where serious crypto builders go when they want regulatory clarity without sacrificing innovation.
An equal-weighted index fund requires a specific kind of thinking. Unlike market-cap-weighted funds that let Bitcoin and Ethereum dominate, an equal-weighted approach spreads risk across multiple assets. It’s portfolio theory applied to an asset class most people were still calling “magic internet money.” Turner was building wealth management products while others were still arguing about whether crypto was real.
“The index fund was Antony proving he could translate traditional finance best practices into crypto,” explains a Swiss fintech consultant familiar with Turner’s work. “He understood that crypto needed to grow up. He just decided to help it along.”
The fund’s success, surviving multiple market cycles, maintaining institutional clients, and navigating Switzerland’s evolving crypto regulations, demonstrated Turner’s ability to build sustainable businesses, not just ride hype cycles.
The BlockDAG Bet
Which brings us to BlockDAG. Turner could have stayed comfortable in Switzerland, managing funds and collecting fees. Instead, he’s building what he believes will be the infrastructure layer that makes Ethereum look slow and Bitcoin look inefficient.
BlockDAG’s architecture, a hybrid Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism combined with Directed Acyclic Graph structure, promises 15,000 transactions per second while maintaining decentralization. The testnet is already hitting 1,400 TPS. For context, Ethereum processes about 15 transactions per second on a good day.
But the technology is only part of Turner’s bet. The real innovation is how he’s launching it.
The presale has raised over $430 million without a single venture capital firm taking a controlling stake. That’s not an accident, it’s strategy. Turner saw what happened to other projects that gave VCs early access at pennies, only to watch them dump on retail at launch. BlockDAG’s model keeps ownership distributed across hundreds of thousands of holders. It’s fair launch principles applied at institutional scale.
“Antony’s experience with public markets taught him that retail investors have long memories,” notes a crypto analyst who’s tracked BlockDAG’s progress. “If you screw them once, they never come back. He’s building for longevity, not an exit.”
The Formula 1 partnership with BWT Alpine Racing is pure Turner. It’s not just marketing, it’s signaling. F1 sponsorships cost millions. They require long-term commitments. They don’t happen for projects planning to pump and dump. When BDAG appears on an F1 car at the Austin Grand Prix, it’s Turner’s way of saying: we’re here to stay.
Why It Matters
The crypto industry has a founder problem. Too many anonymous developers. Too many influencers masquerading as CEOs. Too many projects led by people who’ve never built anything that lasted longer than a bull market.
Turner represents something different. He’s built public companies. He’s navigated Swiss financial regulators. He’s created products that survived multiple crypto winters. Now he’s applying all of that experience to building what could become one of the defining Layer-1 networks of the next cycle.
Whether BlockDAG succeeds or fails, it won’t be because Turner didn’t know what he was doing. It’ll be because the market decided whether it needs another high-performance blockchain, one led by someone who’s actually done this before.
The difference between a visionary and a charlatan is simple: a visionary has receipts. Turner’s got a filing cabinet full of them.
Presale: https://purchase.blockdag.network
Website: https://blockdag.network
Telegram: https://t.me/blockDAGnetworkOfficial
Discord: https://discord.gg/Q7BxghMVyu
