Crypto Twitter Battle: How Leaders of Top 20 Coins Rank
Although the classification of cryptocurrencies by their market capitalization is the simplest one (despite the fact that this metric has flaws,) you may have wondered how the cryptocurrencies would rank by the size of their respective communities on Twitter, especially when some of “crypto stars” are bragging about the number of their followers and buying ads to get more.
That’s why we made this handy list – the top 20 coins by market capitalization, but ranked by the amount of Twitter followers of either their leaders or their best-known proponents.
Some of the names we have chosen are obvious choices, while the community may disagree with us on others. Let us know what you think in the comments!
1. Tron: Justin Sun – 896,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 391,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 9
Taking their throne (pun intended) in the first place by the number of followers, the Tron project can mostly thank their CEO Justin Sun for what looks like a campaign that he embarked on to beat all potential competitors in the Twitter space. Interestingly, he paid to promote a tweet that says “Follow me to know more about us” – presumably to keep the first spot on lists such as these.
Earlier in February, Sun also took the time to take a jab at Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of competing smart contract platform Ethereum. “Now we are both [at] 832k [followers]. We started six year [sic] after you but we always know it is never too late.”
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2. Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin – 837,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 440,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 2
Although Ethereum is striving to be as decentralized as possible, its political centralization is a sticking point for many, and Vitalik is by far the most recognized person involved in the smart contract platform. He is also often considered one of the biggest authorities on all things blockchain – given that he started Ethereum at the age of 19, the community’s trust in him is hardly misplaced.
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3. Litecoin: Charlie Lee – 804,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 438,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 5
Litecoin’s founder and CEO Charlie Lee – or, as his Twitter handle says, Satoshi Lite – is another well-respected figure in the community. Although most people presumably follow him to keep up with any Litecoin-related news, his tweets often offer insights valuable even to non-LTC-hodlers.
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4. Bitcoin Cash: Roger Ver – 569,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: no official account available. However, BCH supporters are using @bitcoin account with 928,000 followers to promote BCH, also.
- Rank by market capitalization: 6
Bitcoin Cash is yet another of those projects that has no real leader figure, but when you mention the name Roger Ver, chances are most people will ask you “Is that the Bitcoin Cash guy?” Well-known for his unmoving belief that Bitcoin Cash is the real vision of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Ver’s opinions are often considered controversial – which is part of what makes him so popular.
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5. Bitcoin: Andreas M. Antonopoulos – 470,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: no official account available
- Rank by market capitalization: 1
Selecting one single person to represent Bitcoin is hard. Nobody knows (at least we don’t) who Satoshi Nakamoto is – so our choice was between Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Nick Szabo. Considering that the former is slightly more active and outspoken within the Bitcoin community, our choice fell on him. Best-known for his best-selling book Mastering Bitcoin, Antonopoulos is often the loudest voice in matters of decentralization.
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6. Binance Coin: Changpeng Zhao – 290,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 922,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 10
CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao is also behind the exchange’s native token, Binance Coin. Although he uses his Twitter account to share Binance-related news with his followers, he also often gets into debates about cryptocurrency philosophies and shares jokes.
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7. Ripple: Brad Garlinghouse – 209,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 913,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 3
Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse does not differ much from other crypto leaders on Twitter: he mostly shares relevant news, but also his own insights and essays on current topics. Also similarly to many other figures, he makes no bones about calling out what he considers misleading information.
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8. Cardano: Charles Hoskinson – 105,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 148,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 12
Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, the company behind Cardano, treats his Twitter account slightly less formally than most, sharing any and all tweets or links he finds interesting, regardless of whether they’re related to the industry or not. This includes photos from his holidays – a rare reminder that the people we follow are only human after all.
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9. Monero: Riccardo Spagni – 75,900 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 314,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 13
Monero is a tricky one – very few people from the cryptocurrency are in the eye of the public, probably as proof of their devotion to privacy, except for their core team member Riccardo Spagni, better known as Fluffypony. His account also updates on the current state of the project, as well as some personal beliefs.
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10. Bitcoin SV: Craig Wright – 69,900 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: there are two accounts that use Bitcoin SV name. One has 5,658 followers, while another – 107,000.
- Rank by market capitalization: 11
The controversial Bitcoin SV proponent Craig Wright, often called Faketoshi for his claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, loves to share his political, religious and various other beliefs on Twitter – no matter how his followers may react to it. He also often shares inspirational quotes, many of which are hard to understand – or simply make no sense at all.
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11. Zcash: Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn – 52,900 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 73,600
- Rank by market capitalization: 20
Zooko joins the club of leaders mostly sticking to sharing news of his project, but he also often interacts with the more tech-savvy side of the cryptoverse. Out of his non-crypto posts, however, many are intended to raise awareness about problems in the world and find ways to fix them.
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12. NEO: Da Hongfei – 45,500 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 317,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 17
Da Hongfei, NEO founder, also keeps his Twitter mostly clear of non-NEO things – the most he shares that is not necessarily related to the projects are sneak peeks into his daily life. Perhaps the fact that he steers clear from any controversial statements (or any that could be taken as such) is to blame for the fact that the official NEO Twitter account has almost seven times the number of followers that he has.
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13. IOTA: David Sønstebø – 41,400 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 116,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 14
Many would argue that it is unfair to choose David and not include the other IOTA co-founder, Dominik Schiener (38.9K of followers,) but there is also the fact that many other projects have more than one recognized face representing them and we settled for choosing only one. Sønstebø also keeps to retweeting news from the IOTA Foundation and anyone mentioning them.
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14. Stellar: Jed McCaleb – 25,300 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 263,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 8
Jed McCaleb is well-known from many projects, perhaps most notably from the fact that he is the creator of the infamous Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange. Now, one of the best-known names in the crypto community is barely active online, mostly retweeting news by Stellar and refraining from commenting, aside from a few dialogues with followers that pertain to his current project.
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15. EOS: Brendan Blumer – 15,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 192,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 4
Blumer is also in the “mostly news about my project” club, although he shares his political and philosophical ideologies as well, often getting into debates with his followers. These also include comments on current political events outside of the blockchain sphere.
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16. NEM: Alexandra Tinsman – 13,000 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 215,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 19
The new president of the NEM Foundation, Alexandra Tinsman, is the most visible NEM proponent at the moment, after the first president of the foundation, Lon Wong, left the project in 2018. He has 27,900 followers and still tweets NEM related news alongside announcements by his current project.
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17. Dash: Ryan Taylor – 5,660 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 320,000
- Rank by market capitalization: 15
As evidenced by the number of his followers (and also tweets, total: 332 as of the time of writing), Dash’s Ryan Taylor does not really use Twitter too much. When he does, he’s similar to most people in our list – news about the project and answering followers’ questions is what he mostly does.
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18. Maker: Rune Christensen – 2,204 followers
- Project’s official Twitter account followers: 21,900
- Rank by market capitalization: 16
Counting by far the least followers in the top 20 coins, Maker’s founder Rune Christensen very rarely uses Twitter – with his most notable pause being between May 2016 and November 2017. He has a total of 8 tweets throughout 2018, all retweets. Interestingly, the span between two tweets written by himself is between November 2011 and February 2018. You can’t blame him for not having a lot of followers, then.
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Projects Without Clear Leaders
Two of the top 20 projects simply have no leaders that are well-known in the community. Since it would be unfair to count the number of followers the project itself has (as that would shift our ranking significantly – as evidenced by the number of followers the other projects have), we’ve moved them to a separate section. Who could represent these two projects? Let us know in the comments.
19. Ethereum Classic: 226,000 followers
- Rank by market capitalization: 18
Ethereum Classic is the first of our projects that it seams that it does not really have a single person leading it. The official Twitter account of the project does not engage much with the community, instead opting for sharing relevant news.
20. Tether: 30,600 followers
- Rank by market capitalization: 7
Interestingly, Tether is the only other project on our list whose leaders are known, but have no Twitter accounts (except their general counsel Stuart Hoegner with multiple Twitter accounts with almost 9,000 followers in total.) The project itself only has around 30,600 followers, and serves to share news pertaining to the project with its community.
