Fortune Crypto 40 picks Ethereum as top protocol, Bitcoin ranks second

In its recently launched Fortune Crypto 40 benchmark, the media firm ranked the top 5 firms in the crypto space in each of the eight categories.

The categories include centralized finance (CeFi), traditional finance (TradFi), venture capital, non-fungible tokens (NFT), data, infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi) and protocols.

To find the top 40 companies, Fortune used various empirical metrics along with surveys of over 200 financial executives conducted by Researchscape. Fortune claims the results are “unbiased and rigorous.”

Top 40 Crypto Firms by Category

The benchmark ranked the Ethereum Foundation as the top protocol, followed by Bitcoin. Polygon Labs, which develops Ethereum scaling solutions, and the Solana Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for developing the Solana ecosystem, ranked third and fourth, respectively. Offchain Labs, the firm behind Ethereum scaling solutions provider Arbitrum, secured the fifth position in the Protocols category.

Coinbase topped the CeFi category, followed by Binance and Kraken. Mike Novogratz-led Galaxy Digital and USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin issuer Circle took the fourth and fifth positions in the benchmark index.

PayPal’s integration with MetaMask placed it at the top of the TradFi category, which ranked the top 5 firms innovating with blockchain technology. Stock trading platform Robinhood, which enables crypto trading, came second, followed by JP Morgan Chase, which launched its own blockchain Onyx.

Fidelity, which received flak for allowing retirees to invest part of their retirement funds in Bitcoin, came in fourth, while Visa secured fifth place.

Polychain Capital ranked first in the VC category, followed by Animoca Brands and Andreessen Horowitz. The last two places in the category went to Pantera Capital and Blockchain Capital.

As the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea secured the top spot in the NFT category. Yuga Labs, which launched some of the best NFT collections including Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, came in second.

Sky Mavis, creator of the popular NFT game Axie Infinity, and generative NFT platform Art Blocks ranked third and fourth respectively. RTFKT, which Nike acquired in 2021, is the fifth NFT firm in the benchmark.

In the data category, Chainalysis ranked first, followed by Coin Metrics and The Graph. Dune and Messari secured the other two places.

The Fortune benchmark also included crypto firms that provide infrastructure for the industry. Non-custodial wallet provider Ledger topped the category. Bitcoin mining giant Genesis Digital Assets, not to be confused with lender Digital Currency Group that filed for bankruptcy, secured the second spot.

Bitcoin mining chip developer Bitmain ranked third, followed by Alchemy, which offers plug-and-play tools for building products and services on blockchains. Crypto payment solution MoonPay ranked fifth in the infrastructure category.

DeFi is all about Ethereum

Fortune listed Uniswap Labs, Lido, MakerDAO, Aave and Curve as the top five in the DeFi category. It is worth noting that all the DeFi applications are built on Ethereum.

In fact, according to DefiLlama data, these are the top five DeFi applications in terms of total value locked (TVL). The five DeFi applications have over $31 billion in TVL at the time of writing, according to DefiLlama.

Furthermore, the Fortune benchmark includes a high number of Ethereum-based applications, not to mention that two of the top five protocols are Ethereum scaling services.

But the focus on Ethereum may have been a result of Ethereum controlling nearly 70% of all DeFi activity.