Is It Time For Crypto To Get Its Own Better Business Bureau?

When people talk about crypto being the “Wild West” of finance, they’re not kidding. The appeal  of “financial freedom” craters the moment someone falls victim to a rug pull or phishing scam, or simply invests their savings into a project that’s dead on arrival. It’s all too common, because crypto is full of so much noise that, for every major breakthrough, there are thousands of scammy or fruitless projects that never get off the ground.

Scams, in particular, are a plague on crypto. According to the FBI, crypto-related fraud drained more than $11.3 billion from Americans in 2025 alone, up 25% from the year before.

Crypto needs to shake off this albatross around its neck if it’s ever going to grow beyond the niche, and what better way would there be to do that than to create its own form of the Better Business Bureau?

Holding businesses accountable

For more than a century, the BBB has been the gold standard for consumer trust. Its goal is to reassure buyers that companies aren’t going to rip them off or give them the runaround. It does this by maintaining a public directory of consumer-facing businesses, with each one graded by real customers based on their reliability. It also provides consumers with a forum to air any grievances they may have against a business.

The BBB is all about making business more transparent. By highlighting “consumer-friendly” businesses and alerting people to those engaged in shady practices, it creates a kind of feedback loop that rewards ethical firms while punishing those who get up to no good. Consumers love it – according to CapitalOneShopping, almost 99% of them read online reviews before buying a product, and those reviews help to steer 93% of buying decisions. Because of the BBB, reputation is everything when it comes to winning consumer’s trust.

Could it work for crypto?

Crypto users could surely benefit from having some similar kind of entity that ranks projects based on their reputations, but the BBB’s model doesn’t really fit the peculiarities of the digital asset space. The challenge with crypto is that anonymity is pervasive, and users simply cannot be trusted – after all, the very ethos of crypto is one of “don’t trust, verify.”

Given this reality, what crypto needs is not another review site, but a structured system that’s able to prove certain projects are scams or fail to offer any real value. That means establishing a way to verify shady practices such as “pump-and-dump” schemes, wash trading and rug pull scams, plus other issues that might affect a project’s credibility.

Building a crypto-native BBB involves bridging the gap between social media sentiments and on-chain reality, and that’s not easy to do. Crypto needs a place where users can report suspicious activities – for instance, if a project suddenly changes its token vesting schedule, that’s rarely a good sign. It needs a platform for victims of scams to alert others, while filtering out false accusations. In other words, crypto requires an accountability layer that’s able to verify the conduct of projects and reassure investors they’re not just buying a lottery ticket, as is the case when buying random memecoins pushed out through Pump.Fun.

Enforcing the truth

Crypto is a realm that’s shrouded in mystery, where scammers hide behind anonymous handles only to vanish and reappear like shape-shifters with a new nom de guerre. That’s why KYC must be an essential element of crypto’s BBB.

SOSANA realizes this. It’s recently emerged on the crypto scene to build enforcement-based mechanisms that can help to accelerate the momentum of genuine crypto projects by establishing a verifiable reputation. One of its major initiatives is the “Better Token Bureau” or BTB, which is modeled on the BBB. It uses a deterministic system that helps legitimate projects turn community participation into real-world growth, helping them to rise above scams and less serious projects through a structured accountability and discovery layer.

In a nutshell, the BTB is like a public directory and review platform that allows projects to earn visibility as they develop and grow their communities and promote transparency. There’s no paid promotion, and no anonymity. It operates a gated community, where users must be KYC’d to do anything but observe and learn. Projects are ranked via an auditable nomination and voting engine, which makes sure scams cannot rise to the top. Participant’s behavior is governed via smart contracts, so that the signal always rises above the noise.

A Better Crypto Ecosystem

This is needed in crypto now more than ever before. The BTB is hosted on the Solana blockchain, which gave birth to a staggering 11.6 million tokens last year thanks to the rise of no-code token launch platforms. In other words, the network has been flooded with risky and non-serious projects, making it virtually impossible for the average investor to discover any new hidden gems. The BTB can provide a desperately needed filter, using deterministic on-chain governance to validate credible projects and propel them forward while pushing the scams back into the wilderness where they belong.