“Oh fk off already. Lol.” this was the reaction of CEO of Binance when he saw Nouriel Roubini in Coindesk’s list of top crypto influencers. Well, the drama began when Coindesk shared ‘top Most Influential 2018 archive’ which was not well received by the crypto community as few influencers included in the list seem ‘new to many people’ or they didn’t “even hear anything about them’.

Well, considering the fact that I spend all day every day on CT, the "most influential" people in the space shouldn't be "new" to me. Do you know what influential means?

— BitcoinWTF (@BitcoinWTF) December 31, 2018

Coindesk’s Influencer List or a paid campaign?

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The event took a sharp turn when some crypto enthusiasts were not very happy over the selection of influencers by the coindesk team. Some of them even went to an extent calling these paid promotions and started asking some of the influencers included in the list whether they have paid coindesk for adding their names to the list.

A few enthusiasts responded to Nouriel Roubini’s featured Tweet (who is also under the list on the third spot) and kept on asking the amount he has paid to be on the list.

How much did you pay? They only put out paid adverts….

— Prabs (@daRealPrabs) December 31, 2018

Coindesk media responded to crypto peers who posted allegations like ‘How much did you pay? They only put out paid adverts’, and ‘it smells like a paid advertisement in disguise’, here is a response from the media.

We sold the cards for less than $1 to encourage people to test out NFTs. @CryptoKitties and @ChibiFighters made their art available for their games, proceeds going to a charity of the influencer’s choice. Simple.

— CoinDesk (@coindesk) December 31, 2018

Coindesk media’s response majorly reflects that the list of influencer was designed to ‘encourage peers to test’ the Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), namely Chibi Fighters and CryptoKitties.

No doubt, there were better options that coindesk should have included in their list. For now, we will leave this to you, here are the top 10 most influential 2018 peers listed by Coindesk. 

• Binance’s Changpeng Zhao as the first in the list which is followed by
• Elizabeth Stark, and CEO of Lightning Labs
• Nouriel Roubini, an American economist
• Admin wen airdrops, an online community
• Jed McCaleb, co-founder and the CTO of Stellar.org
• Glen Weyl crypto, co-author of Radical Markets book
• Tom Jessop, former managing director at Goldman Sachs
• Hester Peirce, Commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission
• Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder, and CEO
• Brenna Sparks, adult star and crypto evangelist

Let us know in our comments below, who you think is missed and should be a part of this list?

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About Author

Tabassum

Tabassum is a full-time content writer at Coingape. Her passion lies in writing and delivering apt information to users. Currently, she does not hold any form of cryptocurrencies. Follow her on Twitter at @Tabassumnaiz and reach out to her at Tabassum[at]coingape.com