In 2010, “crypto” consisted of the Bitcoin blockchain and a motley group of visionaries, builders, and outlaws. Today, crypto is a multi-trillion-dollar industry whose reach spans from humble villages to the biggest banks on Wall Street. This evolution reflects the tireless work of thousands of entrepreneurs who have built a global technology stack, often in the face of hostile governments and media contempt. In order to recognize their work, we are publishing the Fortune Crypto 100—the latest addition to Fortune‘s iconic company rankings.
Glance at the list and you will see early crypto pioneers like Coinbase and Kraken, and also cutting edge up-and-comers like Hyperliquid and Ondo, which have only emerged in the last five years. Most striking is the number of companies—including Robinhood, Nasdaq, and Franklin Templeton—that made their name in other realms of finance. There are also firms built around tokenizing stocks or selling ETF shares—businesses that would have seemed unimaginable in the early days of Bitcoin.
In order to account for the growing breadth of the industry, the Fortune Crypto 100 is divided into 10 categories, each with internal rankings. The categories include venture capital and stablecoins, where Andreessen Horowitz and Tether took the No. 1 slots respectively, and the highly competitive field of crypto services, where you will find names like analytics firm Chainalysis (No. 1) and payments firm MoonPay (No. 3). Bitcoin (No. 1 on blockchains & protocols) began as an alternative financial system and, notwithstanding the industry’s short-lived foray into Web3, it is clear today that finance is crypto’s killer app. This is reflected in Fortune Crypto 100 categories for centralized crypto finance (CeFi), fintech, DeFi, and TradFi (traditional finance).
In ranking the winners, Fortune‘s editorial team relied heavily on our partner, Inca Digital, whose data wizards helped us find the right empirical metrics for each category. For certain categories, we augmented Inca’s data with a survey of over 200 crypto experts hand-picked by Fortune‘s editorial team. Their responses supplied a peer-informed perspective on more subjective factors like trust and reputation—qualities that matter a lot in an industry too often prone to fraud and scandal.
In striving to make the Fortune Crypto 100 as objective as possible, we encountered practical challenges that required editorial discretion. That included the process for choosing categories in the first place. To this end, we eliminated categories we have recognized in the past—notably NFTs—and added new ones, including DATs and ETFs. The final list also reflects an oversight in our failure to include the crypto market makers that make up an important cornerstone of the industry; they will be there next time. You can read a full overview of the methodology here.
Overall, we are confident the Fortune Crypto 100 is the most objective and authoritative list of its kind, and one that recognizes the many examples of excellence in the maturing blockchain industry. The publication of this list also coincides with the passing of an era—one that was defined by overnight riches and larger-than-life characters. Today, blockchain is moving to the background as AI becomes the dominant story in finance, but that does not mean it is losing relevance. The likes of Stripe and Mastercard (No. 2 and No. 5 in fintech) are relying on crypto rails to power the coming era of agentic commerce, while Robinhood (No. 1 in Fintech) and Binance (No. 2 in CeFi) are embarking on ambitious plans to tokenize the global equities market.
We are not at the end of crypto, but rather at the start of a new beginning. And even as the industry moves into its suit-and-tie era, the culture of banger memes that defined it for so long is still going strong. Congratulations to all the winners.
