Paradoxical enough, however, the frontman’s name is sometimes more essential for a crypto project than the technology or core concepts behind it — and here we’re talking about an industry that considers decentralization and a trustless system its main agenda.
Society still tends to trust a “talking head” more than a “white paper” with a detailed description of a project’s fundamental values, its concept, and its development roadmap. Even if we look at the genesis of it all, people are more interested in the personality of Satoshi Nakamoto, than their ideas: who’s behind this pseudonym, and will they eventually activate their incredible Bitcoin reserves? Eventually, cryptocurrency lashed out of the small world of cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists dreaming of private money, anonymity, and human-trustless tech solutions. All these concepts assimilated with the global system of how society works. Yes, it is customary to listen to the “talking heads” in our world.
The year 2022 clearly showed the vulnerability of this system and punished crypto investors for their choice of the good old-fashioned centralized structure, where power is concentrated in the hands of one or a couple of “managers,” widely known to the public. This fact is confirmed by the rating of the most popular persons in the crypto industry for 2022, based on an algorithmic analysis of the media space during the past year — made by Cryptonews.net.
Rating of Crypto Persons: the People we Should Have Known Better
Cryptonews.net is the platform with the most popular news aggregator application, which collected and published 90,689 crypto-related posts in 2022. A team of specialists analyzed the headlines and content of all published crypto-related news with references to various persons. Based on this analysis, the project team assessed the media weight of each person over the past year and compiled the final rating. It is worth noting that the team made a test analysis of the year 2021, however, it was not published and kept for inner use. The results for 2022 showed changes in positions in the ranking compared to 2021, which is depicted in this report.
The analysis comprised several thousand people, however, the final list included 54 persons only. The rating is impartial and reflects real quantitative indicators, with no subjective opinions — the more often a person appears in the headlines and texts of news, the more popular this person is.
However, if you look at the results from a helicopter view, it becomes quite embarrassing for the state of the industry in general. A remarkable list of people whose positions grew due to an increase in the number of mentions in 2022 can eventually be called “failed persons” — having discredited themselves in the eyes of the crypto community.
Sam Bankman-Fried, Do Kwon, Alex Mashinsky, Su Zhu — the result of these guys’ actions strongly relates to the state the cryptocurrency industry is in at the start of 2023. More than that, every one of them follows the same pattern:
- Appear in the media space;
- Grow awareness and citation due to loud statements and promises — hype;
- Disturbing news emerges, with further explosive growth in popularity due to negative events.
There’s nothing new in this “roadmap”, though there’s one important “but” — this constantly happens in the industry, the purpose of which was to achieve decentralization, including the one where the role of one person is severely diminished.
Also, do not be surprised by the fact that the top “crypto persons of the year” includes Kim Kardashian. Celebrities have been promoting various kinds of crypto projects, including dubious ones, for quite some time. A decent promo budget makes them turn a blind eye to both reputational and even direct losses, such as fines and bad investments. An illustrative example is the case of football superstar, Tom Brady, and his ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen. According to rumors, both of them suffered huge losses from promoting and investing in FTX, receiving a lot of negative feedback from bankrupt investors. Some say that this case, among other things, could be the reason for their divorce.
But even these scandalous events do not discourage show business and sports stars from “shilling” crypto projects and drawing their audience into the industry. One can only hope that in the future their vast teams of lawyers, financiers, and PR managers do their due diligence and weed out frauds on the way.
Politicians Are Now “Crypto Persons” Too
The crypto industry has come to the point where authorities of various levels get in the spotlight even more often than the founders and developers of crypto projects. This is not surprising, since regulative initiatives for digital assets are getting more intensive. It becomes obvious from the rating that the voices of US officials such as Gary Gensler and Jerome Powell sound the loudest. In fact, the future of the crypto industry in the United States — and therefore in most other countries — largely depends on these people and their think tanks.
The growing influence of politicians on the crypto market may sound like a disturbing factor for projects that are now under intense pressure from all sides. On the one hand, the trust of the audience is disrupted as a result of the events of 2022. On the other hand, authorities increase their pressure with bills, restrictions, investigations, and lawsuits.
So, the topic of the importance of a person in the crypto industry leads us to an unpleasant but logical question: “Is there a guarantee that the rest of the top leaders can be reliable?” This question hangs in the air as the audience watches every step of Changpeng Zhao, Michael Saylor, Brian Armstrong, and others more closely than ever. This is an awkward situation: results of personal PR maxing are contradictory for the crypto industry leaders. Fame can be a burden, and there’s nowhere to go from the public attention now — you need to play the leading role right to the end. The stakes are too high, and the future of the whole cryptocurrency market now depends on the actions of these people.
