By Axon Trade’s CEO Serg Gulko

With FTX collapse, you might notice a growing number of voices that DEFI is a solution. It is not. You’ll replace one risk with another.

A balanced approach – that’s the answer.

• Never put all eggs into a single basket.
• Rule of thumb on reducing risks with crypto – check for interconnections. By trading on FTX using the money you borrow on BlockFi you expose yourself to potential chain effects.
• If you don’t have the time/money/willpower to do proper due diligence, one of the solutions is to use brokers (I never thought I’d say something like that…) instead of direct market access. 
• But if you do have time, resources, and willpower to invest in robust trading infrastructure that helps you to diversify and manage risks – consider using Axon Trade OEMS.

Do not lock yourself with other FTXs.

Cryptocurrency exchanges occupy a precarious position in a unique field of technology. Despite their undisputed role as fiat-to-crypto gateways that are beneficial to many people across the world, they face endemic hacking problems and distrust by core cryptocurrency proponents. Inevitably, this draws from a balancing act between conventional finance and a disruptive market — attempting to capture as much value as possible. 

But cryptocurrency exchanges aren’t going anywhere soon. 

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) continue to tarry behind in user-friendliness and liquidity, while institutions and regulators are assuredly looking for more familiar structures like centralized exchanges to service retail clients — at least compared to their decentralized counterparts. 

With global regulatory regimes fragmented on their cryptocurrency positions, the onus has largely fallen on exchanges to take the initiative themselves to fix problems facing the industry. From South Korea to Japan, we are beginning to see the cooperation between exchanges necessary to convert regulators to the view that crypto markets can adequately mature. The result, hopefully, should be more standardization of practices, less market manipulation, and the facilitation of both liquidity and technological advances. 

Crypto exchanges are a pivotal component of pushing mainstream cryptocurrency adoption forward. And here are 5 reasons why we need more interconnected crypto exchanges. 

Compliance/Wash Trading/TransFee Mining Management 

According to Bitwise’s report on cryptocurrency trading from earlier this year, roughly 95 percent of crypto exchange volumes are fake, expounding many criticisms of the relationship between exchanges, token issuers (i.e., ICOs and IEOs), and coin rankings sites. Many smaller, obscure exchanges directly engage in wash trading and trans-fee mining to achieve a perceived increased liquidity, which ostensibly attracts projects to list more tokens, and traders to gravitate to their platform. 

Dubbed the “Dark Underbelly of Cryptocurrency Markets” by Nic Carter, such practices have not dissipated. 

Cryptocurrency markets are esoteric to the mainstream and regulators, and until exchanges take action amongst themselves, regulators are unlikely to be swayed on their legitimacy until they can prove the market is not rife with manipulation. 

Non-Custodial Assets Swaps 

Amongst the more promising developments concerning the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies is trust-minimized asset swaps, without intermediaries. Commonly referred to as “atomic swaps,” these transfers of tokens can take place seamlessly via standardized protocols intra-network (i.e., Cosmos) and inter-network with some advances such as submarine swaps with the Lightning Network. 

For exchanges, the path towards more non-custodial asset swaps is inevitable. Decentralized exchanges offer much better security because there is no inherent third-party risk, which has repeatedly made large custodial exchanges honeypot targets for hackers. 

And we are already seeing some innovation in non-custodial swaps of exchanges. 

For example, Binance’s DEX is rapidly gaining traction, and from a broader perspective, it is reflective of the sentiment that centralized exchanges need to keep pace (and capture value) from the DEX market. Additionally, firms like Ernst & Young are pioneering privacy-oriented asset swaps with protocols like Nightfall, which are enticing to major financial institutions.

Minimizing custodial risk is paramount for exchanges to remain relevant as DEX’s grow in popularity, and therefore, exchanges working on standardized, non-custodial protocol swaps should help bolster innovation in the field. 

Self-Regulation 

More of a regulatory relationship than technical interconnection, self-regulatory initiatives for exchanges are a necessity. The lack of a transparent regulatory framework in many regions of the world is hindering the development of standardized security and other practices. 

Under scrutiny from regulators, several exchanges in South Korea and Japan have proposed and worked towards self-regulatory organizations amongst themselves — cracking down on market manipulation. 

Similarly, many prominent exchanges have joined CoinMarketCap’s (CMC) DATA Alliance, which was created to define stricter order book reporting guidelines, diminishing the ability of smaller exchanges to inflate their trading numbers if they want to remain listed on CMC’s rankings site. Many smaller initiatives, like the Blockchain Transparency Institute, also help to expose market manipulation via inflated order book numbers, adding pressure to exchanges. 

With regulation highly fragmented currently, self-regulation among exchanges could also provide the spark that ignites regulators to make more definitive guidelines. Similarly, their purview of crypto may become more friendly as they view self-regulation as a maturity marker for the broader industry. 

Facilitate DeFi & Institutional Entrance 

One of the emergent trends in crypto of 2019 is DeFi, and its broader implications on the financial sector. Exchanges have significant potential to play a pivotal role in the development of DeFi, and subsequently, institutional entrance into the market. 

For example, Coinbase is already offering Staking-as-a-Service to clients, and many smaller firms are originating out of a demand for DeFi services. BitMEX, the leading Bitcoin perp swap platform, is even planning on rolling out fixed income products for its users. 

Should larger institutions take favorable stances on the push by exchanges to incorporate DeFi services, albeit more hybrid versions than something like MakerDAO, funds could pour into the sector. There are already numerous DeFi startups spearheading some cool technology, but institutional funding would light the sector into a full-blown hotbed of technological incubation. 

Better Liquidity 

Liquidity is the ultimate goal of any exchange, and interoperability among exchanges would only serve to fuel better liquidity, which begets more liquidity. Combined with standardized, non-custodial asset swaps, and the complete entrance of institutions would likely be preceded by a confluence of self-organized and interoperable exchanges. 

But advantages wouldn’t be strictly relegated to institutions either. 

Better liquidity across a multitude of exchanges would ensure much wider access to crypto assets by the public, including in many developed parts of the world. Bitcoin’s accessibility is currently one of its weakest assurances, largely because of the inability of many people in more oppressive political and economic arenas to gain access to the legacy cryptocurrency. 

Conclusion 

Interconnected exchanges are paramount for a swath of intercorrelated reasons. The crypto market desperately needs to mature if it wants regulators and institutions to take it more seriously. Blending self-regulation, asset swaps, reduced market manipulation, DeFi products, and better liquidity is an optimal path to reach that end. 

2019 has marked the entrance of institutional investors in cryptocurrency. Fidelity Digital Assets launched in May and several banks have announced plans to get involved in the space.

However, many institutions continue to wait on the sidelines. Why would they do this? 

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Bitcoin has been the best-performing asset class in the world for the majority of its existence. So why the hesitation from the traditional investment community?

Here are six factors affecting the appetite of institutional investors in cryptocurrency.

Custody Concerns

Anyone following cryptocurrency markets have seen the headlines about the latest exchange hack. At some point in the future, there will certainly be a bigger hack than the one the industry just experienced. What this leads to is a confidence crisis, especially amongst the uninformed. ‘This must mean all digital assets are insecure,’ they might reason.

Cybersecurity is an issue that’s not unique to the crypto asset class by any means. But it does have an extra sense of importance in the space because people have a hard time trusting something they don’t understand. 

While some companies have made progress toward a solution, figuring out a way to securely hold digital assets remains a primary concern among institutional investors in cryptocurrency. 

High Volatility

In general, volatility has an inverse relationship with security. Volatile assets are seen as high-risk while stable ones are seen as low-risk. Newer, small-cap stocks tend to be volatile while government bonds tend to be more stable, for example.

While exceptions do exist, this is one of those tried-and-true principles of investing that many people can’t seem to get out of their heads. Just because an asset is volatile doesn’t make it higher risk than less volatile assets, although as a general rule volatility is a good way to assess risk. 

Fiat currencies like the Turkish Lira, Argentinian Peso, and Venezuelan Bolivar were all stable for long periods of time before entering free fall. But most big investors would still rather risk losses in an asset class they know than take a stab at an asset class they don’t. 

Basic Lack of Awareness

Digital assets as a class has only existed for little more than ten years. Many have yet to see its full potential realized.

It can be difficult to comprehend the total paradigm shift that has occurred with the invention of blockchain. The implications are vast, and often overwhelming for even seasoned traders. 

This explains why a handful of the biggest traditional investors in the world are hesitant to go ‘all-in’ with cryptocurrency, for now. Some big names have been very vocal with their criticisms of Bitcoin, often relating it to some of the financial mechanics that started the 2008 financial crisis. These criticisms often demonstrate a fundamental ignorance about the technology upon which cryptocurrency is predicated – distributed ledger technology, or blockchain.

Immaturity of the Industry

Let’s face it. Trusting an asset class that’s only a decade old isn’t easy. The space has been plagued by bad actors and mishaps. And the industry as a whole has a branding problem, with negative misconceptions abounding. 

These misconceptions might be the least tangible of the six factors but also the most difficult to overcome. The problem is purely cognitive in nature. As more traditional financial players continue to educate themselves with regard to blockchain, however, this should change. 

Technological Know-How

Some traditional financial institutions have struggled to keep up with the fast-moving blockchain industry. With the smartest talent garnering an extremely high level of competition, the barrier to entry is enormous, to say the least. Some companies even attempt to circumvent the head hunting process by attempting to train their staff to learn crypto, which hasn’t proven successful for many companies. 

Most people at financial institutions probably don’t know what the term “cold storage” means, for example, and much less how to implement it. This knowledge barrier creates an inconvenience for organizations which can be intimidating, leading to further segmentation of opinions about the industry. 

Regulatory Uncertainty

The majority of the world’s most important international regulators have been more than vague in their guidance toward the crypto asset class. Some say cryptocurrency is an asset in the same way that property is, others say some coins are securities, while others claim digital assets are commodities. 

This is a nightmare scenario for institutional investors in cryptocurrency. It’s even a headache for small retail investors. 

To be fair, regulators have begun clarifying their stance toward crypto, as the industry continues to mature and increase in adoption globally. However, due to the fast evolving nature of the industry, this factor will continue to impede adoption by legacy financial investors. 

Institutional Investors in Cryptocurrency are Still Learning

What we have seen this year continues the movement towards mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain. One day, market participants will look back on 2019 as the year it all began for institutional investors in cryptocurrency. The entrance of a few big players in the space will likely precede a gold rush to the gates. 

Axon Trade’s commitment to bringing many of the traditional financial instruments to the world of crypto will prove instrumental in luring in many of the legacy investment institutions to this industry. XTRD’s creation of familiar products like a FIX protocol for crypto and a Single Point of Access for traders have already attracted many hawkish investors to the market. The XTRD model will bring higher liquidity, lower fees, and combine platforms, in an effort to increase returns for traders. 

Factors like custody management, regulatory uncertainty, and cybersecurity are slowly becoming less and less of a concern. Through the new crypto instruments that Axon Trade is bringing to market, these apprehensions are becoming irrelevant. Given the pace of developments in the space, who can say how fast those obstacles might be overcome? 

Unfortunately, although many cryptocurrency exchanges have designed extremely simple tools for onboarding retail customers, the services they provide for enterprise and institutional customers is often lacking. 

At Axon Trade, we design solutions for high volume cryptocurrency traders, helping those with advanced trading needs to access global crypto markets with improved security, reduced latency, and increased efficiency. 

Here, we will take a run-through of the major challenges facing advanced traders today, while looking at how some of Axon Trade’s upcoming products can help banks, hedge funds, and large institutional traders improve their access to crypto markets. 

More Opportunities

Since the cryptocurrency markets are notoriously volatile, and substantial price movements can occur within just seconds, it is important to employ a solution that can minimize latency in order to quickly execute orders at the desired price. 

By trading through an API, traders can minimize their security risks by limiting access permissions to exchanges, while also benefiting from improved order execution speeds—something much needed for high volume traders. 

However, with each exchange having a unique API, integration costs can become burdensome, which leads many institutional traders to integrate with only a select few cryptocurrency exchange platforms.

With the advent of FIX APIs, these issues have become a thing of the past, giving institutional and professional traders a standardized way to communicate with any compatible exchange. This also has the benefit of providing complete privacy to FIX API users as channels are typically private and secure, ensuring sensitive data is never exposed to commercial platforms. 

Axon Trade’s FIX API is one such product, providing one of the world’s first standard API which can be used for order execution at all crypto exchanges, giving major institutions, hedge funds, and algorithmic traders the opportunity to easily access liquidity across different exchanges. 

By using the FIX API, trading institutions of all sizes can improve the liquidity of any cryptocurrency holdings, allowing much larger orders to be executed without risking price slippage. As a result, integration costs will be significantly lower, since traders will only need to integrate the single FIX API with their existing systems to enable API trading on all supported exchange platforms. 

Reduced Risk

One of the major challenges faced by advanced traders is the inefficiency of the web interface provided by most exchange platforms. With clunky, slow, and often buggy tools slowing down the rate of order execution, and potential outages causing trading clients to miss potentially profitable opportunities, there is a great need for a robust standalone trading solution.

Thankfully, several companies have designed aggregator platforms to help institutional clients maximize their exposure to multiple exchanges without compromising on features. An example of this is the forthcoming Axon Trade, a client-side interface that was designed to provide professional traders with robust access to crypto exchanges via XTRD’s FIX API serving as the back end.

By maintaining unfettered access to all major exchange platforms, traders will be able to capitalize on more opportunities than previously possible, all from a single streamlined user interface. 

Within Axon Trade PRO, users will be able to manage trades from all of their cryptocurrency exchange accounts from a single downloadable application. By massively improving efficiency and fill rates, Axon Trade users benefit from faster trades and greater profits. 

A Final Word on Latency

Arguably, the major issue faced by high-frequency and algorithmic traders is the delay between order submission and order execution on the receiving platform—known as latency. If high enough, this latency can severely disrupt the profitability of a trade.

Not only does low latency lead to fewer failed trades, but it also ensures that traders benefit from the best rates, considering the volatility of crypto markets. Because of this, securing extremely low latency access to cryptocurrency exchanges should give high-speed traders a significant trading advantage, allowing them to execute trades based on momentary changes in market dynamics.

To address this concern, Axon Trade will soon begin offering colocation services, providing latency-dependent traders a VPS solution that cuts latency from an average of 150 milliseconds (1 second contains 1000 milliseconds), down to a potential 1.5 milliseconds. Combined with Axon Trade’s FIX API, this can yield a significant performance increase over handling cryptocurrency trading manually with connections over the internet, which are typically slow and not secure.

To keep up to date with our latest announcements, join our Telegram community and follow us on Twitter. 

Alexander Kravets, CEO of Axon Trade, took part in an institutional crypto trading panel in Moscow hosted by multinational telecom provider Avelacom, an Axon Trade Partner – alongside representatives from CBOE, RJ O’Brien, Exante, Finam, and the Moscow Derivatives Exchange. He shared his thoughts on crypto industry general trends and market landscape. Here are some highlights.

For how long have you been on the crypto market? What are the differences between the time you started and now?

We began working with cryptocurrency about two years ago. We started with creating a few trading strategies for ourselves, but encountered a massive amount of technological and jurisdictional issues, from which we decided to build a business to solve these problems.

At that time a few Javascript programmers could slap together a basic trading platform, call themselves an exchange, and become millionaires 6 months later. The problem was that they had almost no knowledge of how the financial industry actually works. As a result, hundreds of exchanges were created, most of which suffered from technological problems (like a matching engine capacity of 10 orders per second max) and unable to solve basic business issues like accepting fiat to trade on their exchange.

That was combined with a bunch of odd characters promising the dawning of a new blockchain age and you get the picture.

Half of these companies already disappeared, another quarter will be gone in the next year or two. This is actually quite healthy and is in line with business Darwinism.

At this time we see increased interest in digital assets from traditional financial companies, who are beginning to “feel out” the market. The products that are being launched are more mature, and remind us of traditional equity and FX technologies. They are also supported by larger, mainstream companies like Fidelity, ICE, and in many cases have traditional VC backing. Financial incumbents are betting on the future of blockchain and digital assets.

How did these changes impact your current activity or your plans?

We are intensively working to expand our product offering as we want to establish a market niche for Axon Trade. Pretty soon we’ll be working Chinese hours 9-9-6 (nine to nine, 6 days a week).

Axon Trade provides a range of offerings for access to various crypto exchanges via FIX API, that we have built from scratch. Our server infrastructure is located in Equinix NY4 and we work closely with Avelacom in order to provide our clients the fastest, safest, and high-quality access to various digital asset liquidity points around the world.

The reality is that this turbulent formation period will come to an end sooner or later, there will be greater regulatory clarity and more defined asset classes. Our aim is to help build this ecosystem.

For example, just two years ago no one was considering centralized clearing, and today we, along with multiple other organizations, are evangelists for this idea, lobbying exchanges to join.

Is crypto market really that specific or the borders between cryptocurrency and the traditional financial instruments are fading away after the players from the traditional financial sphere came to the market?

At this time there is a difference, and it’s substantial. The digital asset space is strongly reminiscent of the FX industry and its’ initial formation. If we are talking about crypto exchanges, these are disparate points of liquidity, floating in space, that don’t really communicate with one another. They have severe infrastructure issues, such as uptime, slow matching engines, bad support, lack of safety of funds, difficulty with fiat, etc.

Luckily, the situation is gradually improving, as existing players begin to understand that they cannot continue to operate or they will not survive. Consider the “new kids on the block” for exchanges – these aren’t Javascript programmers anymore – instead, they’re generally financial technologist behind whom stand traditional financial companies. The traditional players, in turn, want to trade in the way they are used to. This means centralized clearing, FIX API, cross connection, and some kind of common ruleset.

However, we shouldn’t think that if traditional financial companies enter the digital asset space, they change it exactly to their spec. They also have to adapt. For example, clearing with stable coins and smart contracts will allow clearing to occur instantly and minimize credit risk, so that could potentially eliminate T+1 or longer settlement.

DLT [digital ledger technology] is excellent technology. It may not be the next Twitter killer, but it’s quite applicable in the financial space.

The idea of decentralization: does it play any kind of key role in further industry development?

This doesn’t really apply. To be honest, the concept of decentralization is very far removed from reality. It sounds great on paper and in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work.

Think about it – if everyone has to take custody of their own wallet, no one is really responsible on a larger scale. If you have problems, you’re on your own.

People may dislike banks and exchanges for a range of reasons, but the reality is that the services they provide have a separate value. They may be expensive now, but advances technology will lower those barriers. Competition will also play a role in lowering prices.

Do you expect the rise of new players that might be able to influence the landscape of the market?

Fidelity for custody, a 2.3 B asset manager.

Bakkt for retail participation via b/d model and clearing at Bakkt (if CFTC approval).

We see many companies that focus on lending like lending club/prosper model – Celcius, Blockfi, and some institutional ones like Seabury. This speaks to the fact that institutional appetite is to short crypto and also retail HOLDers who don’t want to sell betting against them, probably a losing battle.

New modern exchanges that are much stronger in terms of tech and compliance that will likely corner the market vs incumbents because they are supported by traditional financial players (Seed CX, an Axon Trade partner).

What can you recommend to the companies that are planning to try crypto trading?

We like to advise on a practical approach – try a bit and go from there.

The rules of the game in digital assets and FX differ and it’s better to discover those for yourself, using smaller sums.

The technological “backwardness” of this market is actually an advantage – the barrier of entry is low, you don’t need to spend lots of money on infrastructure to start in production – most data is publicly accessible and free, you can connect over Internet, even on wifi from your balcony.

In digital asset trading, you’ll spend a lot of time to solve problems that in theory should not exist – connection to exchanges, APIs, a bunch of varying and exchange specific formats and protocols. You can try to solve this in house – belive me, it’s a major headache to have to code for data and execution in a different spec for each individual exchange – or utilize the services of companies like ours.

If you are conducting latency arbitrage, you have a year, maybe two. Even now the top of book is generally quite thin. Exchanges are already beginning to function as LPs and aggregate liquidity, consolidate order books – this limits arbitrage opportunities between exchanges and since many people are doing latency arb, this is competitive. The fees are also still high, taker fees can be as much as 30 basis points per execution.

Next step is bigger exchanges consolidating liquidity and adding datacenter presences, creating traditional HFT arbitrage scenarios we see in equities and FX.

If you have a stable business in FX or equities, hold on to it, but don’t be afraid to experiment with these new asset classes!

By Axon Trade CTO Serg Gulko

First of all, I don’t want to start yet another holy war of what is good and bad. Everything below is my personal opinion. If, for some reason, you disagree with it — feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll be happy to continue the dialogue.

Our company, Axon Trade, provides unified FIX API to trade across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges. Since we started our journey, we’ve had a chance to work with many different APIs — REST-only, REST and Web Sockets, sometimes even FIX. Today I want to explain why I think that REST and Web Sockets isn’t the best choice for trading (with some exceptions).

Don’t get me wrong, we also use REST API in our products — this is one of the best possible ways to communicate with remote systems. Whoever used CORBA or SOAP will definitely understand me. Request and response sequences allow you to create many things. But at the same time, request and response have limits. Trading is more asynchronous than many people think. It’s not only about matching buyers with sellers, but it could also be order re-routing around the entire planet.

Taking into account complex processes, trading activities should be performed in an asynchronous fashion — send and switch to another operation — the counterparty will notify you once order changes its’ state. Therefore, the pure REST “request and response” model is not very useful. You either wait for a server response until success (or failure) or start polling (constantly ask for your order status in a loop). I’m confident that 80% of the load on cryptocurrency exchanges that have REST-only API is caused by this polling. No wonder why everything is so slow…

To solve this problem at least somehow, many exchanges started to offer notification mechanisms over Web Sockets. This is a big step forward. Instead of “destroying” exchanges with repeating “what is my order status” requests, we can simply sit and wait. Unfortunately, not all is sunny here. We discovered several things which can easily add more “fun” into trading systems developer’s lives:

• Sometimes notifications through Web Sockets come prior to the initial REST API call being finalized. Why? REST API and Web Sockets are totally different and independent communication channels. This is similar to situation when you picked up a phone to order some food delivery, you just dialed in, took a deep breath to make an order but suddenly someone (delivery guy) knocked into your door. He probably brought what you were about to order but the cause/effect relationship is broken, which is difficult in a programmatic setting.
• Many exchanges do not allow to assign own IDs to outgoing orders. For those who are not trading it might not sound like a big deal. But compare it for a moment with sending packages without a tracking number and with partially obscured recipient addresses. There is only one way to match your order with exchange’s response — wait for the REST API call to complete. So the counterparty is waiting (and blocking resources) while exchange come up with a response. What a waste of resources…

Mixology is good in bars but attempts to use different contexts simultaneously like REST and Web Sockets is bad by design. Luckily, certain exchanges are providing the ability to trade through Web Sockets as well as receive notifications. For example, you can do it on HitBTC (their API is so perfectly designed so I can’t imagine any better) or CEX.IO.

What does this have to with FIX? FIX is a protocol, created to do only several things in a most efficient way — to trade and to transmit financial data. Of course, with some portion of ingenuity, you could customize it to send things like images… It’s like a jet — it can drive and even float with some extent but its main purpose is to fly. Period.

FIX is asynchronous by design, with relatively strict semantics and workflow but it’s the same workflow for almost every financial institution. If you are capable to trade on LMAX or CME, then you can easily connect to Gemini or Axon Trade (Axon Trade is not an exchange, but a routing mechanism).

Despite the fact that the Axon Trade FIX API is running on top of the native and sometimes (… ok, many times) wonky exchanges APIs, we successfully solved the problems mentioned above. Lock-free algorithms, advanced multi-threading, and 12 years of experience plus some black magic — and our customers can enjoy a standard, familiar workflow.

FIX has a higher learning curve comparable to REST or Web Sockets but all depends on what your end goals are.

Twitter is a great source of information, especially if you deal with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies — it helps to stay up to date and have your finger on the pulse of the market not only by reading the news but also by watching the influencers.

The Axon Trade team has compiled a list of Twitter accounts you probably would be interested in following if you work in blockchain & crypto related fields. Of course, there are hundreds of them, but we decided to select the one hundred most popular people in crypto space, based on relevance and the number of followers.

Note: Axon Trade does not endorse any of these sources or endorse any of their opinions, and we encourage you to consume all publicly disseminated information with a few grains of salt.

Ready?

Ranked by follower count:

1. John McAfee

Followers: 844000

John McAfee is a British-American computer programmer, businessman, and cryptocurrency enthusiast. Founder of McAfee.

2. Vitalik Buterin

Followers: 814000

Russian-Canadian programmer and writer, primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine.

3. Charlie Lee

Followers: 759000

Cryptocurrency enthusiast and creator of Litecoin. Ex-Director of Engineering at Coinbase and Managing Director of the Litecoin Foundation.

4. Marc Andreessen

Followers: 705000

American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. Serves on the board of Facebook, eBay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Kno, Stanford Hospital, Bump Technologies, Anki, Oculus VR, Dialpad, and TinyCo. A proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

5. Roger Ver

Followers: 552000

Bitcoin Evangelist and Angel Investor. Founding Member and Board Advisor at Bitcoin Foundation. Early investor in such Bitcoin startups as Bitcoin.com, Blockchain.com, Z.cash, BitPay, Kraken, Purse.io.

6. Andreas Antonopoulos

Followers: 452000

Entrepreneur and coder, Bitcoin & open blockchain expert, speaker. Author of Mastering Bitcoin, The Internet of Money, Mastering Ethereum.

7. Erik Voorhees

Followers: 310000

CEO of the instant Bitcoin and altcoin exchange ShapeShift.io.

8. Nick Szabo

Followers: 221000

Computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” was developed by this guy. Also designed Bit Gold, which many consider the precursor to Bitcoin.

9. CryptoYoda

Followers: 217000

Cryptoenthusiast and technical analyst.

10. Brad Garlinghouse

Followers: 192000

CEO at Ripple.

11. Jameson Lopp

Followers: 178000

Creator of Statoshi and Infrastructure Engineer at Casa. At the moment, he’s most interested in opportunities within the Bitcoin and crypto asset ecosystem.

12. Barry Silbert

Followers: 171000

Founder and CEO at Digital Currency Group, parent of Grayscale, Genesis Global Trading, CoinDesk & investor in 100+ coins, BTC, ETC, ZEC, MANA, ZEN, etc.

13. Tone Vays

Followers: 166000

Derivatives trader, analyst & content creator in the realm of economics, finance, blockchain & Bitcoin. Host of CrytpoScam Podcast.

14. Vinny Lingham

Followers: 164000

CEO of Civic, building global blockchain ID platform. General Partner at Multicoin Capital.

15. Pomp

Followers: 161000

Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital. Writes a daily email newsletter analyzing crypto news for institutional investors.

16. Charlie Shrem

Followers: 155000

Bitcoin pioneer, Founder of The Bitcoin Foundation, Chief Visionary Officer at Crypto.IQ, speaker and writer.

17. Gavin Andresen

Followers: 148000

Software developer best known for his involvement with Bitcoin. In 2012 founded the Bitcoin Foundation to support and nurture the development of the bitcoin currency, and by 2014 left his software development role to concentrate on his work with the Foundation.

18. CRYPTO CO฿AIN

Followers: 146000

Crypto trader.

19. Cameron Winklevoss

Followers: 136000

Co-Founder & President at Gemini. Principal at Winklevoss Capital.

20. Mahesh Sashital

Followers: 133000

Entrepreneur and developer, co-founder of Smartereum.

21. Jimmy Song

Followers: 132000

Bitcoin educator, developer and entrepreneur.

22. Simon Cocking

Followers: 119000

Senior editor Irish Tech News, editor in chief at Crypto Coin News.

23. ฿TF%$D!

Followers: 114000

According to his Twitter bio, “semi-retired crypto trader”.

24. Don Tapscott

Followers: 111000

Media theorist. author, adjunct professor, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute.

25. David Schwartz

Followers: 109000

CTO at Ripple and one of the original architects of the XRP network.

26. Tim Draper

Followers: 105000

American venture capital investor, founder of DFJ Venture Capital, Draper Associates, Draper University, and Innovate Your State.

27. Squeeze

Followers: 104000

Crypto trader, investor and venture capitalist since 2013. Featured in Cointelegraph and HuffPost.

28. Laura Shin

Followers: 101000

Crypto & blockchain journalist. Host of Unchainedpodcast.co & Unconfirmedpodcast.com

29. The Crypto Dog

Followers: 94500

Crypto trader, started mining Bitcoin in 2011, full-time blockchain investor and market commentator.

30. Balaji S. Srinivasan

Followers: 94000

CTO of Coinbase and co-founder of Counsyl, Earn, Teleport, and Coin Center.

31. Spencer Bogart

Followers: 90300

Partner at Blockchain Capital. Former Bitcoin analyst and VP at Needham & Company.

32. Joseph Young

Followers: 87000

Analyst and investor, focusing on finance, cryptocurrency, blockchain, fintech. Contributing to Forbes, Binary District, Cointelegraph, CryptoSlate.

33. ฿ITLORD

Followers: 83500

Crypto trader.

34. Giacomo Zucco

Followers: 75400

Supremo at BHB Network and Bitcoin maximalist.

35. Willy Woo

Followers: 75200

Crypto writer. Does some data-driven research on cryptocurrency as an investment and has publications on Forbes, CoinDesk and BraveNewCoin.

36. ParabolicTrav

Followers: 72200

Crypto trader.

37. Emin Gün Sirer

Followers: 71200

Professor at Cornell University, co-director at Initc3.org, system builder. Passionate about Dist Sys, OSes, Blockchains, NoSQL, and Bitcoin.

38. Meltem Demirors

Followers: 70800

Builds products at CoinShares. Teaches at MIT and Oxford University. Investor and advisor.

39. Tiffany Hayden

Followers: 70000

Independent advisor, supporter of Bitcoin, XRP, Codius, Coil and Interledger.

40. DonAlt

Followers: 65900

Teacher, investor and cryptocurrency trader.

41. Michael Fisher

Followers: 65000

Analyst, tech evangelist. Cybersecurity, IoT, Fintech, DataScience & VR influencer at DZone & onalytica.

42. Jon Matonis

Followers: 64400

Monetary economist, Founding Director at Bitcoin Foundation, CEO of Hushmail, Startup Team at RSA’s VeriSign, Chief Currency Dealer at VISA.

43. Stephan Tual

Followers: 63600

Founder of Atlas Neue, former CCO of Ethereum.

44. Parabolic Beastlorion

Followers: 53000

Crypto trader.

45. Jackson Palmer

Followers: 47200

Group Product Manager at Adobe. Created Dogecoin.

46. Bruce Fenton

Followers: 45700

Founder of Atlantic Financial, host of Satoshi Roundtable, Board Member at Bitcoin Foundation.

47. Dr. Craig S Wright

Followers: 45100

Chief Scientist at nChain.

48. Da Hongfei

Followers: 44200

Founder of NEO, CEO at Onchain.

49. Kyle Torpey

Followers: 43300

Full-time Bitcoin writer since 2014. Contributor at Forbes and BitcoinMagazine. Featured on Nasdaq, Business Insider and Motherboard.

50. Tuur Demeester

Followers: 43100

Founder of Adamant Capital.

51. Matt Corallo

Followers: 40000

Bitcoin developer. Full-time on open source Bitcoin projects at Chaincode Labs.

52. slush

Followers: 40000

CEO & IT Architect at SatoshiLabs. Founder of world’s first Bitcoin pool Slush Pool and the first Bitcoin hardware wallet Trezor.

53. Pierre Rochard

Followers: 39000

Software engineer, running Bitcoin Advisory.

54. Francis Pouliot

Followers: 38600

CEO of Satoshi Portal. Blockchain researcher and analyst. Former public policy analyst and free-market economist.

55. Arianna Simpson

Followers: 38400

Venture capitalist. Before she started investing, Arianna was a PM at BitGo, where she was the third employee. Prior to BitGo, she worked at Facebook in Global Marketing Solutions and at Y Combinator-backed Shoptiques, where she ran sales.

56. A v B

Followers: 37900

Canadian crypto expert.

57. Luke Dashjr

Followers: 37400

Bitcoin Core developer, known in the Bitcoin world as Luke-Jr. Founder of Eligius mining pool. He has made over 200 contributions to Bitcoin Core, and maintains the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals section on GitHub.

58. Stefan Thomas

Followers: 35800

Open-source developer and distributed systems advocate. Co-creator of Interledger and Founder at Coil.

59. Nathaniel Popper

Followers: 34400

Nathaniel writes about technology and finance for New York Times. Author of Digital Gold, a history of Bitcoin.

60. Daniel Larimer

Followers: 33700

Software developer and cryptocurrency serial entrepreneur. Created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares, was a co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit, and is CTO of EOS, with the company block.one. Creator of the DPOS consensus algorithm and Graphene technology.

61. Preston Byrne

Followers: 33200

Blockchain technologist, independent consultant, lawyer. Founder and former COO of Monax, a company that created the first open-source permissioned blockchain client in 2014. Advocates for civil liberties, digital rights, due process rights, free markets, and sensible regulation of cryptography.

62. Saifedean Ammous

Followers: 33100

Bitcoin economist. Author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking.

63. The Crypto Monk

Followers: 32100

Crypto trader.

64. Muneeb Ali

Followers: 32100

Blockchain entrepreneur and co-founder of Blockstack, a network for decentralized applications. Princeton Ph.D.

65. Aaron van Wirdum

Followers: 31500

Technical editor at Bitcoin Magazine.

66. Anthony Di Iorio

Followers: 31000

CEO & Founder of Decentral & Jaxx, Co-Founder of Ethereum.

67. Jonas Schnelli

Followers: 30800

Bitcoin Core developer and maintainer, co-founder of Digitalbitbox.com. Author of libbtc. C, C++, Obj-C Pro.

68. Alan Silbert

Followers: 30100

Executive managing director at INX. Bitcoin evangelist. Formerly founder and CEO of BitPremier. 20+ years in commercial banking.

69. Michael Parsons

Followers: 28400

Blockchain & Bitcoin advisor. Chairman at Cardano Foundation.

70. Alex Sunnarborg

Followers: 28200

Founder of Tetras Capital and Lawnmower.

71. Jeremy Gardner

Followers: 25200

Co-founder & Managing Partner at Ausum Ventures. Founded Blockchain Education Network and co-founded SAAVHA.

72. Chris Larsen‎

Followers: 25100

Co-founder & Executive Chairman of Ripple.

73. Michael Goldstein

Followers: 24500

President of Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and co-host at Noded Bitcoin Podcast.

74. Peter Van Valkenburgh

Followers: 24200

Cryptolawyer, Director of Research at CoinCenter, Board Member at Zcash Foundation, Juris Doctor at NYU Law.

75. Jed McCaleb

Followers: 22700

Co-Founder of Stellar Development Foundation.

76. Alex Van De Sande

Followers: 22100

UX Designer at Ethereum.

77. Nik Bougalis

Followers: 21800

Cryptographer & Software Engineer leading the C++ team at Ripple. Entrepreneur, consultant.

78. Adam Ludwin

Followers: 21400

CEO at Interstellar.

79. Oleg Andreev

Followers: 20200

Protocol architect at Interstellar. Author of Gitbox, CoreBitcoin and BTCRuby.

80. Jill Carlson

Followers: 20000

Cryptocurrency consultant. Jill has done academic research on blockchain and built enterprise products with banks. Right now, she mostly works on cryptocurrency and token projects.

81. Ben Davenport

Followers: 19000

CTO and Co-Founder of BitGo. Previously, Ben co-founded Beluga, which was acquired by Facebook, and became the basis for Facebook Messenger.

82. Jack Mallers

Followers: 17600

Developer and designer. Built ZeroHouseEdge, JacksChess, LanternHQ and RollWithMe. Currently, Jack is crafting consumer experiences at VC-backed startup Label Insight.

83. Dennis Parker

Followers: 17600

Bitcoin maximalist specialized in Bitcoin politics and game theory.

84. CryptoTrooper

Followers: 17300

Crypto trader and technical analyst.

85. Tim Swanson

Followers: 16500

Founder of PostOakLabs. Advisor at clearmatics, BlockSeer, ELM Labs. Formerly Director of Market Research at R3.

86. Alex Bosworth

Followers: 16000

Infrastructure Lead at Lightning.

87. Sergio Demian Lerner

Followers: 14800

Cryptocurrency security consultant.

88. Matthew Roszak

Followers: 14100

Co-Founder at Bloq and Founding Partner at Tally Capital.

89. Caitlin Long

Followers: 12800

Blockchain & Bitcoin enthusiast, chairman & president of Symbiont. 22 years of corporate finance experience (Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Salomon Brothers).

90. Donald McIntyre

Followers: 12800

Founder of Etherplan. Creates articles and videos with research and reviews of the best blockchains, sidechains, and decentralized apps.

91. Daniel “Buddha of Tulips” Jeffries

Followers: 12700

Blockchain & cryptocurrency expert.

92. Alyse Killeen

Followers: 12100

Author, advisor and early blockchain investor. Founding Partner at StillMark Co, Founder and Executive Director of City Fellows Consortium and Women in Venture.

93. Mike Belshe

Followers: 12100

CEO at BitGo, Inventor of SPDY (now HTTP/2.0), Google Chrome engineer, Co-Founder of Lookout Software.

94. Daniel Krawisz

Followers: 11600

Director of Research at Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. Writes articles about the economics and technology of Bitcoin.

95. Connie Gallippi

Followers: 11000

Founder and Executive Director at BitGiveOrg.

96. Christian Decker

Followers: 9800

Bitcoin researcher.

97. Min Kim

Followers: 9100

Founder of ICON Project, Council Member at ICON Foundation.

98. Jamie Redman

Followers: 8600

Bitcoin trader and enthusiast, graphic designer and writer/journalist at Bitcoin.com.

99. Lawrence Nahum

Followers: 7800

Bitcoin entrepreneur, open source enthusiast, Founder and CEO at GreenAddress, Senior Architect at Blockstream.

100. Sarah Hody

Followers: 5900

Attorney at Perkins Coie. Advises entrepreneurs, fintech companies, investors, and innovators in the blockchain space. Previously Regulatory Counsel at Coinbase.

Please let us know if you think that there anyone that should be included in this list or excluded from it, and share your ideas about any other similar overviews.

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