In brief

  • Crypto Twitter has no bearing on coin price, finds report.
  • The report from BDCenter found that the tweets track the price, rather than cause it.
  • It found that Anthony Pompliano had the greatest engagement.

Everyone in crypto has an opinion. Cryptocurrency itself, in fact, arguably is an opinion: a hedge against the traditional economy, central banks, and the way most of the world now thinks of money.

But do those who shout from the loudest rooftops—the tallest poppies—actually have any impact on the market? Put another way: Do Crypto Twitter Influencers… influence the price of Bitcoin?

Nope! Not even a little bit, says a study by digital marketing and consultancy firm BDCenter. In fact, crypto influencers may not be doing much influencing of any kind at all. “Influencers follow the news, not create it,” say the researchers, who analyzed 1.1 million tweets by over a hundred English-language crypto influencers between 2018 and June 2020. (The study’s findings fly in the face of the countless “Crypto Twitter reacts,” er, “news” stories Decrypt and others have churned out during this same period.)

“When they start tweeting about a certain coin more often, it's because its price has changed—not vice versa,” said the report.

“All the charts demonstrate more or less the same thing: the ‘mentions’ curve follows the price curve. When the price fluctuates strongly, influencers tend to write about the coin more.”

XRP price correlation with XRP mentions. Image: BDCenter

“They,” in this context, refers to Twitter accounts with over 10,000 followers who tweet about “the industry as a whole rather than a certain blockchain or project,” at least one tweet a day; are “knowledgeable about crypto and value their reputation;” and have an “active, engaged following.”

Nikita Kuznetsov, one of the researchers who produced the study.

BDCenter ended up with 123 accounts with over 30 million followers among them. Decrypt’s UK News Editor, Tim Copeland, was inexplicably and shamefully excluded, despite his active Twitter account with 14,000 followers.

The major coins in its survey were mentioned 138,000 times. Just 30 influencers account for 70% of these mentions. Tiffany Hayden and Francis Pouliot mentioned crypto the most, and Anthony Pompliano had the most engagement. But to what end?