Cointelegraph Top 100, 2023 edition: The toughest one yet to pick

A lot is riding on 2023 after such an eventful year for the cryptocurrency industry, and we look forward to seeing some vindication for the entire space. January may have given us a glimpse of hope, but more recently, with Kraken staking services and the Paxos-issued Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin taking a beating from ever-unpredictable regulators, the crypto space is seemingly being shown its place, and we are reminded that the worst may not be over even if we wish it to be.

But we have a few things going for us. We believe in decentralization, which has never let us down, and we have hope; hope that the global economy will eventually recover. With the Bitcoin (BTC) halving looming in the back of our minds, we look forward to discover new heroes and champions to take this vibrant space to new heights.

DISCOVER COINTELEGRAPH’S TOP 100 IN CRYPTO AND BLOCKCHAIN 2023

And that’s what this year’s Cointelegraph Top 100 list is all about. The editorial team attempted to highlight those who either made or will make a noticeable impact on the industry; in some cases, it could be both. The list represents a bit of everything. Members of our editorial team had a big say on those included, and we even opened up the list for the community to vote on via a separate landing page. Among all the bots that attempted to skew the results, there were some genuinely great suggestions that we considered. Thank you!

Related: Cointelegraph’s Top 10 in blockchain are here, but why should anyone care?

We thought it was important to mention the good contributions and the bad ones, hence the whole crypto heroes and villains narrative. Yes, it hurts, and some dreadful stories happened as a result of Terra and FTX, among others, going down. But as an industry, those failures allow us to learn and reevaluate how we approach growth and defend what we believe in. Hardly any rise of a prominent technology goes without hiccups. We tried to be open about embracing those failures and show how we can continue on our path to global adoption of blockchain and crypto tech.

Another issue of great importance to the wonderful visual department here at Cointelegraph was to make sure that this edition would not be like any other that came before. As a custom, a new theme was chosen for the individual profile pictures, but this time around, the team opted to go further and spend countless hours creating dynamic backgrounds for the profiles. Given the recent boom of artificial intelligence (AI) and its apparent potential to reshape the creation process, having dynamic pictures was our way of saying that humans can still do it better, at least for now.

Speaking of AI, did you see the Top 100 profile written by ChatGPT on what impact AI will have in 2023? And as a bonus, there was one other profile written up by the AI tool. Can you guess which one? Check back on our Twitter later on. We will reveal the results there.

We are coming up on the top third of the list, and with exactly one week to go until it is fully unveiled, everyone will soon find out who took the top spot. Stay tuned.