Not everyone can say they were there when history was being made. But former ice hockey star Trevor Koverko, on mend from a serious car accident, witnessed it firsthand in his hometown.
I was at a meet-up in Toronto and this guy named Vitalik was handing out documents, which turned out to be the Ethereum whitepaper. We had a cluster of really important high-profile people that came out of that time in Toronto. Vitalik, Joe Lubin and Charles Hoskinson, for example.
In Canada, ice hockey is its own kind of subculture. Koverko had fallen in love with the sport at a young age, and by the time he was a teen, he was competing at the semi-pro level and moved away from home, playing to crowds of 10,000.
Landing your dream job before graduating from high school felt too good to be true. At 18, Koverko was an NHL draft pick for the New York Rangers. He had his whole life ahead of him. Until he didn't.
When he was 24, Koverko was in a serious car accident. He suffered a catastrophic brain injury and was paralyzed on his left side for weeks. It abruptly ended his career as an athlete and nearly ended his life.
Six years later, in 2017, Koverko founded a security token project well before tokenization was a thing that raised $75 million and reached a $1 billion market cap. His journey into crypto was a combination of good luck and good management.
Koverko was in the hospital for months. He had to learn to walk and speak again, while processing the death of his dream. Hockey was over, and he knew he had to reinvent himself. Then, Silicon Valley and the startup scene caught his attention.
He enrolled in business school and moved in with his parents to start the long road to recovery, while accepting that the accident had permanently damaged his body. He became the poster boy for the best-case scenario for brain injuries of that caliber.
Buying Bitcoin on eBay and Hanging with Early Crypto Figures
While completing his studies and feeling disconnected from the traditional banking-consulting path he was going down, he stumbled upon a forum that was talking about this thing called Bitcoin. These were early days, around 2011-2012.
It was such a pure thing because no one was making money. Everyone was living in their parents' basement, so it wasn't just me. It was a hacker and libertarian community. Eventually, it got more technologically minded as time went on and people realized the architecture behind it, he says.
In 2012, he bought his first $20 worth of Bitcoin on eBay.
Koverko started running with the early Bitcoin OGs, such as Roger Ver. Splitting his time between Silicon Valley and Toronto, the ex-hockey star athlete started to see really legit people talking about crypto, like Marc Andreessen. Back in Toronto, the seeds of Ethereum were being sown by a young Bitcoiner named Vitalik.
Toronto: The Right Place and Time for Ethereum's Genesis
Enamored by the technology and obsessed with the idea that there was no big bank issuing the money or insider allocation, Koverko soon decided the traditional path wasn't for him. Now entrenched in the Toronto scene, he would try his hand at entrepreneurship.
There was something oddly liberating about this period, he tells Magazine. I had nothing to lose.
When Ethereum came along, he realized its potential to tokenize real-world assets and other financial instruments, a process that's still in its early stages even today in 2025.
I had the idea to tokenize an existing financial asset I had, which was ownership in a small private equity fund. I told a friend Anthony Di Iorio, the co-founder of Ethereum, but he didn't think it was on-chain enough and felt too TradFi. Finally, instead of building a tokenized fund, I came up with the idea of building a protocol that allowed anyone to tokenize anything, he said. That became Polymath, the original and largest RWA tokenization platform.
It took the better part of a decade for RWAs to become a thing, but Koverko was directionally correct. Not a bad bet for this ex-athlete’s first move.
Predicting the Rise of RWAs on Ethereum in 2017
When asked about how he predicted the rise of RWAs, he says he just followed a pattern he'd noticed. Every couple of years, a new category would get tokenized.
It started out as protocols, then NFTs (the first was on Namecoin in 2014), then cash via Tether, then gold via Paxos. I saw the early trend of that and just kind of extrapolated it out to where we think it's going, he adds.
Polymath got off the ground in 2017 and grew a community from day one. Knowing they had to play the long game, he couldn't start building tokenized goat farms or something cool like that. Our thesis was to build the piping and the infrastructure, so it enables the trillion dollars of issuances. We built the foundation of the house, then the scaffolding, then the furniture last, he explains.
Tokenization has since become one of the most exciting areas, with top VCs talking about it in their LP letters and interest from institutions on Wall Street. Polymath is in the process of going public.
Polymath supports tokenization on Ethereum as well as its regulatory-compliant security token chain, Polymath.
Robinhood and Kraken also made moves into RWAs with tokenized stocks this year, which Koverko is a big fan of, but expects significant pushback. There's a lot of special interests that want the status quo. You have a blockchain to do all the settlement and transferring. It's a superior experience that's better for everybody and it's more transparent. I always use the Uber example. Make it so good that if you cut it off, people will get pissed.
While it's an exciting time for Polymath, Koverko is also keen to try something new to play a different position on a team.
Having grown up alongside crypto, he had no shortage of curiosities and connections. It just so happens that Toronto was an early hub for AI as well. Geoffrey Hinton's lab was there, where a lot of the co-founders of OpenAI spent time.
The Big Pivot from Crypto to AI: It’s All Web3
Koverko became interested in the data component of AI. All of these models are being trained on the same data. All the open internet has been fully crawled and trained on. For these models to keep getting better, they have to find new sources of data, either from existing repositories of private data or new sources of data, he explains.
Excited about the problem, he brought in Rowan Stone, the co-founder of Coinbase's Base, to build Sapien, a data marketplace leveraging mobile gaming to enhance AI model performance.
One of the reasons OpenAI is where it is today is that they were best at getting really large numbers of humans to produce data and structure existing data for use in AI. I realized we need to go bootstrap a network of humans to do it. I thought it could be the new form of gig work.
AI companies get access to the world's largest and most diverse network of human data labelers. Individuals get to play games and earn cash while training AI. It pays around $5 an hour, which is a living wage in many parts of the world that still remain unbanked.
Maybe, for the first time ever, as long as you have an Android phone and internet connection, there's no poverty. Latent talent breaks my heart, he said.
Koverko uses the analogy of how many Africans leapfrogged over landlines going straight from no phones to cell phones, because cell towers and WiFi are easier to install than copper wiring for landlines. He believes it's the same with crypto. Maybe they can skip our crappy banking systems and go straight to web3 stuff.
An added advantage is that enabling people from more diverse backgrounds to contribute to data labeling helps mitigate hidden biases. Koverko said it's not just the type of people doing it, but the quantity and breadth of people. If you just have a few people producing data, you get biases, slants, and homogenous data that isn't very dynamic.
If we make it more distributed, just like a blockchain, with nodes of folks all over the world producing data, we can take the output of that data and get better results when we sell it or train on it, he added.
Not the Stereotypical Crypto Bro
There's a charitable, humanitarian nature to Koverko's career. He's also invested in projects that reduce single-use microplastics, increase access to cannabis for therapeutic purposes, enhance fertility and IVF outcomes, increase the productivity of the food supply, and protect the environment. He also invests in charities, including those that support survivors of brain injury.
Koverko is all about leading with, and leaning into, your authenticity and pouring gasoline on your natural essence. He's naturally a positive, open, and trusting guy, and believes his opportunities have come from owning that. This is the one thing you can control. It's been one of my secret weapons to get through some of the tough times.
Startups are a lot like sports teams. You have to have a common vision that transcends your individual needs. You play for the crest on the front of your jersey, not the name on the back.