| When we set out, the plan was to replicate the Fortune 500—our flagship list that ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue. It quickly became clear that this would be impractical, since few big players in crypto are public companies, and, of those that are, few break out their crypto-specific revenue. We also discovered that it’s not viable to compare the crypto achievements of Fidelity (which ranks No. 4 in the TradFi category) to Chainalysis (No. 1, Data) to a decentralized platform like Curve (No. 5, DeFi). And so we set out to create distinct categories that would permit apples-to-apples comparisons, and a methodology for each. Hundreds of hours later, the list is now live, and I’m proud to say it’s the first of its kind.
In some cases, this resulted in predictable outcomes—few people will be surprised to see Uniswap (No. 1, DeFi) and OpenSea (No. 1, NFTs) leading their respective categories—but also some notable omissions. Ripple and MasterCard got edged out, while financial troubles at other big players like DCG and Gemini resulted in reputational hits that kept them off this year’s list. There are also some controversial names on the list, most notably Binance (No. 2, CeFi), which fared poorly in the survey but whose other metrics were dominating, as well as JPMorgan Chase (No. 3, TradFi), whose CEO professes a hatred of crypto but has also overseen some truly innovative blockchain projects. |
