Getting Started With Crypto Twitter (2024)

The crypto community on Twitter is a constantly evolving repository of questions, answers, explanations and speculations from every corner of the crypto community. It is one of the key platforms where ideas get exchanged: people and projects announce milestones in their progress, issue reassurances when things go wrong and share their personal thoughts.

If you’re new to it, here are some ideas about where to start.

Crypto personalities and people to follow

Your first step to joining Crypto Twitter (#cryptotwitter) is to start following some key accounts on Twitter, but with the noise and volume of a subject like crypto, it can be hard to know where to begin.

To collect a healthy stock of voices on your feed, a useful approach may be to break down the crypto crowd into categories such as developers, writers, investors and so on. Perhaps you want to focus on one category. Or you might want to pick a few big names from each to get started.

Crypto founders and visionaries

To begin with, there are the movers and shakers of the crypto world, the people who have personally developed or managed major crypto entities. The team who founded Ethereum are some of the leaders in this field. Their accounts will keep you up to date with the layer 1 blockchain, as well as developments in the wide range of projects they now work on.

Vitalik Buterin is perhaps the best-known of Ethereum’s founders. He wrote the white paper when he was just 19 years old. These days, he tweets a mixture of running commentary on the latest crypto debates and thought-provoking philosophical comments. A good deal of his posts are not about crypto at all, but wider political or moral questions. He asks his followers challenging questions as often as he states his own views.

Fellow Ethereum founder Gavin Wood has since co-founded Polkadot, one of Ethereum’s largest competitors. His posts are usually concise, crypto-focused and technical. He retweets a lot of crypto commentary from other voices too. And Joseph Lubin founded ConsenSys, the Ethereum-application incubator, after playing his part in founding Ethereum itself.

Bitcoin’s founder is a little trickier to follow on Twitter: nobody knows who they are. But if you’re especially interested in Bitcoin, there are a number of accounts dedicated entirely to sharing news about the original cryptocurrency. Two useful ones to start with are @DocumentingBTC and @BTC_Archive.

The founders of the major crypto exchanges are worth following too. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, tweets views and updates about his own company and the wider space almost every day. Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong is also very active on Twitter, sharing frequent news and insights about crypto regulation, among other areas.

Crypto writers and content creators

After you’ve hit "follow" on a few of crypto’s early visionaries, you might look at the people who have made names and even careers writing about the subject. As well as popular authors, some specialist academics and researchers are active on Twitter too. In this category, you will probably want to zero in on the level of technical detail that suits your own background.

Andreas Antonopoulos is a famous name in this area. He is a consultant, podcaster and author who has also created a deep catalog of YouTube content to help people understand crypto. His tweets often offer pithy explanations of crypto concepts or take a stance on a hot topic. If your goal is to educate yourself about crypto, but you don’t have much in the way of a technical background, you might appreciate his work. Podcaster and author Laura Shin also posts a lot of video content, interviews, news from third parties and other content designed to keep you up to date with the conversation.

If you want to balance your feed, you may be interested in adding some Web3 skeptics to your list such as Wikipedia editor Molly White’s Web3 is going just great account or Jackson Palmer, the founder of dogecoin who has since become an ardent crypto critic.

Crypto investors and funds

A third important category of crypto character is investors. Some of these people are responsible for moving so much money around that it is probably worth listening to their thoughts, even when you don’t agree with them. Prominent examples would be Ari David Paul, founder of BlockTower Capital, or Cathie Wood, CEO and founder of Ark Invest.

If you particularly want to follow famous investors, simply look up the biggest crypto investment funds and then search for their managers’ names on Twitter. They may not be sharing their strategies, but you might learn something all the same.

Twitter threads, retweets and lists

Once you’ve found someone you like or find interesting, you can quickly find more by looking at whom they are retweeting as well as the people they are interacting with. Check out the "Tweets & Replies" tab on any profile to see not only the threads they start, but also the people they are replying to. You can trace a path this way through an online community. If in doubt, follow: You can always unfollow later.

Another good hack that Twitter has hidden a bit is to find someone you like and see if they've curated any of their own Twitter lists. For example, Taylor Monahan, who has a great pinned thread of resources for beginners on her profile, also has curated lists that she has created or found and followed herself:

To see if someone has any lists, just add /lists to the end of their profile URL, for example: https://twitter.com/tayvano_/lists will get you to the lists above. You can follow lists other people create wholesale or use them to just add individuals from any list who pique your crypto curiosity.

The quirks of crypto Twitter profiles: NFTs and .eth names

Even if you’re already an avid Twitter user, you still might be confused by some of the things crypto people put on their profiles.

Some members of the crypto community like to display their crypto assets visually to their digital audience. This is how "profile picture (PFP) NFTs" came about. Some NFT holders like to make the relevant artwork their profile picture, proclaiming themselves proud owners and often signaling their passion about crypto in general.

Twitter itself has acknowledged and actually encouraged the practice, by offering to verify whether users owned the NFTs associated with their profile pictures. As of January 2022, you could set your Twitter profile picture to your NFT and get a special hexagonal border to show its authenticity. Someone else could copy and paste the image if they wanted, but they would not get the border.

Crypto people sometimes put their .eth name on their profile too. This is basically a way of collecting all of that person’s crypto wallets and websites under one link, instead of giving a list of URLs and wallet addresses. The bulk of a crypto enthusiast’s digital life can be gathered, as it were, in one place. For example, Vitalik Buterin has made his Twitter username vitalik.eth.

As with all social media, the trick to getting the most out of crypto Twitter is to find the part that adds the most to your life, avoid the parts that don’t and try not to spend all day on it.