It’s a dirty secret in the media industry that “best of” lists are popular, but also, in most cases, totally subjective. It’s not hard to sit around with a few work buddies to come up with some names, and then present it to the world as an authoritative ranking—and pick up some clicks in the process. Fortune lists aren’t like that—and the inaugural FORTUNE CRYPTO 40 definitely isn’t like that.
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.
