Presenting CoinDesk's Most Influential 2022

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2022/12/05/coindesks-most-influential-2022/

The year 2022 has been like no other in crypto history.

Each December since 2014, CoinDesk has taken stock of the year to date to find the themes, stories and people that made the biggest impact on crypto, blockchain and Web3. This gives us a chance to recognize the good as well as the bad.

Though it may seem like the cryptoverse suffered an entire year of calamity and failures, it has been only a tumultuous six months. Most of the first half of 2022 was pretty stable – for crypto – still buoyed by a strong 2021, growing mainstream interest and optimism.

As the collapse of the FTX empire is still fresh and unraveling, the failures and likely crimes exposed this year are what we will likely remember most. The crypto industry has lost $2 trillion in value – including countless people’s savings – since the price of bitcoin peaked just over one year ago.

Nonetheless, long-term positive trends continued: the tide of mainstream interests is still moving into the cryptosphere; regulatory efforts have gained momentum and urgency; and creators are still seeking and finding their way on-chain and virtually, experimenting with non-fungible tokens, the metaverse and Web3.

For the past several weeks, the CoinDesk staff has been taking in the fullness of the year’s events and debating the emerging themes and impacts. In October, we asked for the public’s input on our preliminary thoughts and sought nominations. These ideas and names informed our final selection.

To be clear, the Most Influential 2022 is a list, not a ranking. While we acknowledge some of our influencers had an outsize impact this year – and give them more prominence on the list – at some point ranking achievements is unrealistic. And inevitably, not everyone will agree with our choices. Many of our influencers – as befits the crypto bear market we’re in – are bad actors (but influential nonetheless). We make no claim that this is a list of the most admirable or admired.

Whatever you feel about our Most Influential 2022 choices, please do admire the outstanding portraits we commissioned of them. For the fourth consecutive year, CoinDesk worked with artists to make portraits and interpret the impact of our 50 influencers. Taking this one step further, this year we collaborated with Coinbase NFT to mint and auction 14 of the Most Influential 2022 portraits as NFTs, which allowed us to add a utility layer to include valuable perks to winning bidders including tickets to Consensus 2023. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to One Earth, a nonprofit combating climate change.

And now....

CoinDesk's Most Influential 2022

1) Changpeng “CZ”: For vanquishing a “$40 billion” rival with a single tweet

2) ZachXBT: For leaving crypto scammers no place to hide

3) Ryan Wyatt: For brokering more high-profile Web3 partnerships than anyone

4) Zooko Wilcox: For leading the “privacy is normal” campaign

5) Molly White and the Skeptics: For being more right than wrong in 2022

6) Rishi Sunak: For acquiring the power to make the U.K.’s crypto dreams come true

7) Balaji Srinivasan: For putting “Network States” on the map

8) Yat Siu: For investing billions in WEeb3 gaming

9) Nirmala Sitharaman: For taxing and hobbling India’s crypto trading industry

10) Punk6529: For championing an open metaverse

11) Jerome Powell: For undermining Bitcoin’s “safe haven” narrative

12) Alexey Pertsev: For serving jail time for the “crime” of writing open-source software

13) Mu Changchun: For guiding the Chinese CBDC the world admires and fears

14) Brantly Millegan: For showing crypto is no refuge from the culture war

15) Miladys NFT Community: For being the counterculture to cancel culture

16) Maxine Waters and Patrick McHenry: For getting the ball rolling on a U.S. stablecoin bill

17) Mairead McGuiness: For selling a standard for global crypto regulation

18) Ian and Dylan Macalinao: For showing how divorced from the truth “total value locked” can be

19) Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan and Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein: For creating enough drama for two crypto true-crime biopics

20) Tamara Lich: For showing Canadians that private citizens can petition to freeze someone’s crypto

21) Victor Langlois aka FEWOCiOUS: For showing a 19-year-old artist can sell an NFT art collection for $20 million

22) Bobby Kim aka Bobby Hundreds: For taking a principled stand for creators and their royalties

23) Kanav Kariya: For betting on a decentralised, cross-chain future in a year of crypto reckoning

24) Carole House: For advising President Biden on a coordinated federal approach to crypto

25) Hodlonaut v. Craig Wright: For establishing a legal precedent to say Wright is not Satoshi

26) Tyler Hobbs: For keeping art NFTs hot in Crypto Winter

27) Arthur Hayes: For speeding through crypto’s redemption arc, becoming a blogging Virgil

28) Amir Haleem: For inflating Helium’s 5G dreams that reality popped

29) Chandler Guo: For fighting on behalf of Ethereum miners left behind by the Merge

30) Keith Grossman: For pushing the quintessential legacy brand Time into Web3

31) Martin Glen: For taking a crash course in crypto bankruptcy

32) Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand: For writing a bipartisan bill for comprehensive U.S. crypto regulation

33) Jordan Fish aka Cobie: For revealing (in tweets) insider trading at Coinbase

34) Larry Fink: For changing his mind about crypto and onboarding green-minded investors

35) Mykhailo Fedorov: For raising many millions in crypto to defend Ukraine

36) FatManTerra: For being the Cassandra of the Terra collapse

37) Chris Dixon: For continuing to bankroll the industry during Crypto Winter

38) Matt Damon: For epitomising peak crypto cringe

39) Four Horsemen of the Cryptocalypse ─ Do Kwon, Alex Mashinsky, Su Zhu, Steph Ehrlich

40) Nic Carter: For taking stand against toxic Bitcoin maximalism

41) Erick Calderon aka Snowfro: For reimaging generative art for the NFT era

42) Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum developers: For pulling off the most consequential upgrade in crypto history while keeping the network running

43) Adam Brotman: For blending Starbucks’ 60-million-member loyalty program with Web3

44) Pali Bhat: For knocking Reddit’s NFT marketplace out of the park

45) Eva Beylin: For being the doxed face of a pseudonymous investment project

46) Rostin Behnam and Gary Gensler: For fighting a turf war over whose U.S. agency will regulate crypto

47) Sam Bankman-Fried: For putting the hyphens in crypto-saviour-turned-market-wrecking-ball

48) Wylie Aronow, Nicole Muniz and Greg Solano: For building a wildly successful community of Ape lovers

49) Avery Akkineni and Gary Vaynerchuck: For chartering a mainstream party boat to the island of Web3

50) @BowTiedBull: For converting TradFi toffs into bow-tied crypto bros