How Twitter Acts as the Town Hall for Crypto

Twitter is different for crypto than it is for other areas of interest. To some extent, the discussion of the industry on Twitter is not About the industry — it is the industry.

Why it’s important: Twitter is (for now) indispensable to follow blockchain technology. What may appear to outsiders as idle badgering and joking is actually the process of people forming allegiances and making agreements.

• Crypto Twitter is the discourse layer that sits on top of all the various blockchains, where people collectively decide what is and isn’t important from one moment to the next.

Zoom out: If you’re not on Twitter, it’s a text-dominated platform that basically shows posts from the last things back. It thrives on people liking, commenting and reposting these text posts.

• “Crypto Twitter” or “CT,” refers to all the people who tweet about various blockchain projects throughout the day.
• They don’t necessarily follow or interact with each other, just as everyone in a city doesn’t necessarily know everyone else, but a city still has its own character and so does CT.

What they say: “Crypto is 24/7/365, and it needs a medium to match that pace,” says Variant Fund Spencer dinner Axios reports.

Zoom in: Prominent sources on Crypto Twitter generally feel that Twitter has been a useful space for the crypto industry, but not without caveats. Several say that it is the key to staying up to date on what is hot right now.

• Business is also done there. “I think it has a lot less noise/direct business marketing than LinkedIn and kind of leads to more personal interaction with people,” Hailey Lennonsays a crypto-focused attorney at Brown Rudnick.
• “It’s a great ‘warm intro factory,'” Castle Island Ventures Nic Carter says, although relationships must be cemented personally, just as always.

How it works: “Twitter is kind of the ‘Great Equalizer,’ where broadcasting continues to be a good way for newcomers to build a brand,” says the Archetype VC. Katherine Wu Axios reports.

The best use of Twitter depends on whether you’re a trader, investor, content creator or founder, but many of our sources pointed to Twitter’s power as a place for discourse.

• “For me, the most important thing is the dialogue,” said Adamant Research Good luck Demeester so.
• “Sometimes I like to just throw ideas around to immediately connect with those who share similar interests and want to brainstorm,” Linda Xie from Scalar Capital said.

Yes, but: “Crypto Twitter” isn’t really one thing. It’s an amalgamation of many different groups (mostly defined by allegiance to tokens or coins) that mostly talk to each other, but also bleed over, largely through the leading influencers who like to spar with each other publicly.

• “It basically pushes you inexorably in the direction of just broadcasting messages that will be positively received to your group,” says Carter.

Everyone who starts in a subset of Twitter (perhaps focused on Ethereum or Bitcoin or trading or startups) will eventually be surprised by all the antagonism out there across groups.

• “I’ve found that it can be a huge waste of time to discuss with someone if it’s clear they’re not in good faith,” says Xie.

Threat level: It can be a bit much. More brain buzz than actionable information. “It’s good servant, bad master,” says Demeester.

• Or as the DeFi governance gadabout, PaperImperiumsaid it, “It gives me that gross ‘I just smoked a cigarette’ feeling.”
• “It can reap great rewards, especially if you’re in the content creation business, but it takes about as much as it gives,” warns Carter.

Of the note: Wu, who became known for small but informative lawyer content, now says she prefers the industry’s newer ecosystem of high-quality newsletters. “I probably spend 20 minutes or less per day scanning my feed to make sure I’m not falling behind,” she says.

Details: Here are some great moments in CT.

Worth knowing: In 2020, cybercriminals got into Twitter’s admin tools and used it to promote a bitcoin scam across many of CT’s best-known accounts.

Be smart: It takes some time to get the hang of CT. There are many inside jokes and in group language that take time to learn. As Carter put it, these obstacles act as filters to ensure that people in the conversation know something about what they are discussing.

• “It’s like a bonding mechanism in the group,” Matt of Zee Prime Capital says. “You feel rewarded for being an insider if you get something, and then comes the sweet release of dopamine.”

Bottom line: Don’t let it be too intimidating. If you don’t get it, you’re more likely to just be ignored than mocked. “My advice to people just starting out is simple: don’t hold back,” says Noon.