20 Rising Crypto Twitter Stars - Unqualified Opinions

hive.one data highlights why CoinDesk should be scared

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Rising Crypto Twitter Stars

One thing I’ve come to rely on within crypto: whenever you identify a clear problem, someone usually shows up to fix it within months.

For most of 2017 and early 2018, one of the most annoying problems for me was parsing signal from noise on crypto twitter, a place I’d spent a ton of time learning and interacting with people since I entered the industry pseudonymously years ago.

Who was actually building amidst the euphoria? Who would be the next rising star analyst? Or more simply, who was making even somewhat intelligible comments?

It got harder and harder to get anything useful from twitter during ICO mania, but I discovered two amazing products late last summer that seemed positioned to finally help cut through the noise. Hive.one and Iconomist.com ranked crypto twitter users based on the strength and relevance of their followers (easier to do because CT tends to be an incestuous and single-issue group), vs. their headline follower/following stats.

Kinda like Google’s PageRank. But a “PeopleRank."

Well, it turns out that the top 20 rising accounts of 2018, and the fastest growing growing accounts so far in 2019 share something in common: most of them are also helping others cut through the crypto noise, and organize crypto information in new and interesting ways.

The top 20 growth accounts of 2018 look especially familiar:

Katherine Wu (#1), Qiao Wang (#5), Zack Voell (#13), and Eric Turner (#16 - via his control of the company twitter handle) all hail from Messari. :)

(We also made Q4’17 offers to Nic Carter (#2) founder of CoinMetrics, and Spencer Noon (#12), an investor and popular curator of "crypto fundamentals” data, but that’s another story entirely.)

The Block (#7) and founder Mike Dudas (#9) both show up in last year’s top 20 as they burst onto the scene in the fall. As do well-known independent analysts like Hasufl (#4), “MustStopMurad" Mahmudov (#6), Stop & Decrypt (#8), and email curators (and investors) Soona Ahmed (#18 - TokenDaily), and Eric Meltzer (#15 - Proof of Work / Primitive Ventures).

The first couple months of 2019 tell a similar story, with new The Block contributors Arjun Balaji (#1 - Shomei Capital), Larry Cermak (#8 - ex-Diar Research), and Frank Chaparro (#13 ex-Business Insider) catapulting up Hive’s momentum scoring system as well.

Other newer information curators like Nathaniel Whittemore (#2 - Long Reads Sunday), crypto legal ELI5 pundit Jake Chervinsky (#4), POMP! (#14 - Off the Chain newsletter & podcast), Ethhub founder Eric Connor (#19), and Breaker Magazine (#20) all joined the Hive 20 list and continue to grow their brands.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on where the puck (and conversation) is heading on crypto twitter, as it’s still the industry’s fastest and most reliable source of information. Old commentators (and publications) can lose their edge quickly.

For crypto power users, that has meant moving increasingly over to sites like Messari. CoinDesk should be scared. And we should stay paranoid. Because we’re only as good as our last audience impression.

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Iconomist today rebranded as Fifty.one, and tells a similar story, but with advanced filters for brands, token projects, and people.

I’m thrilled to see that Messari, in its first year, carved out a top five brand in research and news (with no editorial desk, mind you), and two of the top three brands in crypto data and analytics, including our OnChainFx cryptoasset metrics dashboard.

https://fifty.one/

News & Research

Data & Analytics

Thanks for following, reading, and supporting Messari.

Let’s keep the conversation going on twitter (of course).

-TBI

P.S. Share. Subscribe. Spread the (rational) crypto love. Tweet at me or Messari for requests, feedback, comments, or questions.

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Best of the Rest - What We Missed Last Week

Every weekend, we dig through the past week’s posts from crypto’s other great sources of content to see what we missed in our own weekend reads.

Here’s us curating the curators:

There's been a mysterious surge in $100 bills in circulation, possibly linked to global corruption - Kate Rooney (CNBC)
(h/t Circle Research )

The number of $100 bills has surged since the financial crisis, even exceeding circulation of $1 bills, according to Federal Reserve data. While circulation is a concrete fact the reason is not so clear.

Reasonings from economists and professionals land between hoarding high value U.S. cash as a way to stay outside the financial system (be it legitimate or not), to just trying to preserve wealth in a high inflationary economy. Rooney provides some must read insights into the reason we are seeing more C-Notes in circulation.

An overview of Athens, the first Tezos on-chain upgrade proposals - Jacob Arluck
(h/t @Melt_Dem)

Tezos ($XTZ) went through its first on-chain governance vote last week. The focus of the vote was to increase the gas limit, and to decrease the “roll” size (the amount of Tezos tokens required to stake), along with other small changes. The proposals were made by Nomadic Labs which demonstrated an example of the blockchain’s governance structure that includes on-chain voting and a payment to the developer that successfully integrates that upgrade. Nomadic Labs opted to choose a 100 XTZ invoice which was a token amount “enough to buy a round of drinks for the devs who worked on these proposals.”

The Best Time to Buy & Build Tokens - Chris Burniske
(h/t @NLW)

Chris Burniske takes a contrarian view on the current trend of VC style investing in crypto. Similar to how people regretted going all-in on tokens in 2017 they will regret ignoring them in the current market cycle. According to Burniske this will come as some blockchain protocols succeed and the opportunity dwarfs even the most successful companies in the space.

Did I miss something?

Send me the link, your twitter handle and your best imitation compression algorithm write up. If I like it, I’ll include your bit next issue (with attribution).

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