Influencers and crypto

Crypto influencers want to make money and their listeners are the revenue model. They tout crypto and play on emotions, especially greed, and rely on people to conform to idols with status. A trader should actually do their own research so they don't need an influencer.

In this article, I explain how best to interact with influencers and how to assess which influencers are trustworthy. It's up to you to decide what to do with this.

• The purpose of influencers ranges from giving good information, selling smooth talk, getting more views, making more money, hyping coins to pure scams
• The EU is drafting all kinds of rules for finfluencers, the financial influencer, which includes crypto
• There are all kinds of influencers, such as the celebrity, Mr. Knowitall, the self-proclaimed expert, the strong personality, the social media guru, the technical expert and the professional
• If you start following influencers you expose yourself to all kinds of dangers, such as the pump and dump, the back pull and other scams, worthless advice and losses
• Influencers can be recognized by familiar practices, such as spamming, offering all kinds of expensive things, hiding self-interest and promoting the latest trends and hypes
• In this article, we showcase the most popular and best influencers, too many to name here
• Influencers move away from Satoshi Nakamoto's intent and bring back centrality and intermediaries in cryptocurrency and blockchain, in addition to pure commerce
• The best way to deal with influencers is to do your own research and pay no heed to influencers, so that any results you achieve are the outcome of your own labor and you gain experience that no one else can give you

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1. The purpose of crypto influencers
2. Rules for financial influencer
3. Influencers in practice
4. Danger following influencers
5. Known practices of influencers
6. Well-known influencers
7. Philosophy about influencers
8. How can you best deal with influencers?

The purpose of crypto influencers

There are multiple purposes crypto influencers can have. They rank from the best intentions to the least good intentions. It is important to recognize these goals so that you are aware of what you are reading.

Informational influencers

Let's start on a positive note. There are influencers among them who want to give the public all kinds of information, for no gain. This is by far the minority. People who have the least interests also tend to have the deepest pockets. After all, if you have enough money, you don't need to ask someone else for money.

A good example of this would be Vitalik Buterin. He more often gives all kinds of hints and updates about the crypto market and Ethereum of course, but he doesn't want to get you as a referral or a donation or anything like that. He is an independent influencer, kind of against his will, because he has so much fame and influence because of his role at Ethereum. When Vitalik speaks, others listen.

Famous influencers

There are also celebrities who tout all kinds of things, including cryptocurrencies, especially to young people. Sometimes these even then arrive with a coin of their own. Besides the fact that these famous names are often abused by smooth talkers in scams , these people often know nothing at all about cryptocurrency or blockchain af. Their goals are simple. Taking advantage of your notoriety to grab quick profits, usually at the expense of the listener.

Website influencers

The goal of websites about crypto is to get more views and rise in Google rankings. This can yield anything from more advertising revenue to more other income to more customers. Their goals certainly do not have to be of murky morality, but they most certainly can be. The less excitement and sensation a Web site exudes, the more reliable the information tends to be. After all, you don't want to end up with a click-bait article where the story is secondary to the form.

Individual influencers and crypto

The purpose of individual influencers who post all sorts of things on social media is very varied, from trying to create pure hype for their own gain to trying to provide the best information possible, with the revenue coming in nicely.

It's a small minority, but there are influencers who are open and honest about who their sponsors are if they have them, who really do research on what they are talking about and where after listening to them you have really learned something, without any attempt to foist something on you. This is so difficult because influencers also have to pay their bills. It is more common for influencers to become honest only when they have enough income.

Target social media influencers

The largest group of individual influencers consists of speakers on a variety of social media known for their hyping of all kinds of coins. They don't tell you who they are sponsored by, such as a website, network or cryptocurrency. They often have no idea if what they are telling you is true and are often totally unqualified. What they often do is tout a cryptocurrency that they themselves bought a lot of and then dump their entire bag on everyone who bought the coin after their story.

These folks have no scruples whatsoever and are effectively scammers. What these influencers almost all have in common is smooth talk and a pleasant social appearance. Those who listen to them are attracted by their excessive self-confidence and handy tricks. Sometimes they are even popular only because of their looks. Their goal is clear. To make as much money as possible by all means.

Rules for financial influencer

A finfluencer is a financial influencer. This includes influencers in crypto. To be allowed to do this work, you must abide by a set of rules from the Financial Markets Authority.

Laws are being put together in the EU whereby legal investment firms will be responsible for the content of finfluencers they work with. Furthermore, financial influencers will be prohibited from collaborating with illegal firms that do not have the necessary licenses.

For example, if celebrities spread misleading information or financial advice through advertising, the company touting them can be fined and authorities can demand that the advertising be stopped.

If finfluencers, including investment advisers, make misleading statements about a product then both the influencer and the owner of the product can be sued.

To protect investors in a financial product, additional measures are planned. For example, investors must be given better information about what they are investing in. The costs associated with their investments must become fully transparent. Deception and conflicts of interest must no longer occur. These recommendations are mainly about protecting the individual.

Oddly enough, this holdout is a plan by the EU to encourage more citizens to invest because, according to the EU, that makes our market stronger and grows our economy. EU citizens invest relatively little compared to Americans, for example.

Influencers in practice

In influencing their listeners, they employ a variety of different strategies tailored to their target audience. The people who follow influencers have certain prediction of them. As long as you as an influencer know what these are you can score well with them.

1. The celebrity. National or international stars who try to urge a follower to purchase certain financial products usually do not have a particularly moral agenda. They are often paid by the company they are urging or have bought a lot of coins, which they later tout so they can sell them for a profit. Sometimes these stars market another coin of their own to cash in big time. Followers often lose a lot of money, but at the same time they are back on top of the latest gossip about their ex!
2. Mr. Knowitall. Give this guy a chart and he'll tell you without blinking an eye if it's a descending triangle, what the indicators show and which way the price is headed in the short term. He gives you advice that makes so much sense appear That you must be stupid not to follow him. Often these guys are pricing lower-end coins that they have been buying for a while. Some days after the clip on social media, he dumps his bag on you and he's a bundle richer and you a bundle poorer, if you still have the coins. You can recognize these omnivores by their popular conversation techniques and touting of lower-end coins.
3. The self-proclaimed expert. These influencers step up their defense with words like "ten years of experience" and "very good proven results." All these things may be true, but that says nothing about the profitability if you were to follow his advice. Besides, if he were really that good, he wouldn't need you to buy his product anymore. He would be in the Bahamas with a flower girl next to him. Often you only get information after you have already purchased his product. Quite apart from the fact that this "expert" is self-proclaimed and no one can check if he ever made a penny investing.
4. The strong personality. Some people enter social media and immediately strike a chord for some reason. They are cool, funny, sexy, entertaining or cute, in short, people love to watch them. No matter what they are touting, because they manage to get so many followers behind them there are always plenty who will buy it, whether it is a pair of sunglasses, a bag or a cryptocurrency. A few of these may eventually break through as true experts, but most do linger in ego and vanity. That also produces plenty.
5. The salesman or social media guru. These are influencers who use all social media, so they try to garner money from every nook and cranny. They have their own website, a YouTube channel, a paid Discord group, a Telegram channel, a Facebook page, Instagram, TikTok, they are just everywhere! With every contact they urge you to become a member, sign up for their newsletter so they can spam you regularly to buy courses and the like, become a follower on social media so you'll look more often and they get advertising revenue, et cetera. This is nothing less than a marketing campaign to build a commercial empire. With any luck, they will also have something to say, but I wouldn't count on it. Most of these have few scruples and don't give a shit whether you get something out of it.
6. The technical expert. These are hard workers who turn over every stone to give information to their followers that really benefits them. They usually don't give advice, but make a study of something and produce the readable results of it. They use media where you can also go in depth, such as YouTube, a website or a podcast. They often have a loyal but smaller group of followers who have a strong connection to the influencer and also interact with them a lot. These experts are hard to find, though, because they don't tend to buy into it.
7. The professional. This is a very small group who have made cryptocurrency and blockchain their profession and are well-known enough to be influential. These people know almost everything about these topics and can be found, for example, at the top of well-known blockchains, such as Vitalik Buterin, Anatoly Yakovenko, Charles Hoskinson and other leaders of the crypto world. These people have a lot of influence when they speak, but no stake in the content of their words. They are long in and it is almost rare to find one who gives advice.

Danger following influencers

Followers of influencers often get into trouble or lose a lot of money. Influencers all want your attention and to tell you how to become rich(er), while their goal, of course, is to become rich themselves. Your and their interests are usually not intertwined.

There are a number of red flags to point out when following an influencer. Influencers should be seen as entertainment rather than a source of information. This change in expectations towards influencers will lead to more independence and autonomy in doing your own research. We will review a few warning signals.

• Many shady influencers disappear as quickly as they came. Those who provide information that serves only themselves quickly fall through the cracks. These one-hit wonders are soon back in the sky.
• Influencing is business. No matter how good an influencer is, his goal is to make more money. If you make more money by following someone like that, it doesn't actually matter to his goal.
• You are encouraged to buy a cryptocurrency that is low in CoinGecko. Most likely, the influencer has bought a lot of this coin and is preparing a pump and dump for.
• You are inundated with advertising of all kinds when you follow an influencer. This is a sign that the influencer needs the money and is probably after your money.
• As soon as an influencer comes up with obscure or unknown products, cryptocurrency or companies, beware. He is probably trying to lure you into something that will benefit him greatly himself.
• In fact, any kind of advice should be viewed with distrust. Research shows that the bulk of influencers do worse than the market if you follow the advice.
• An influencer touting their own coin may very well be a rug pull plan, dumping all his coins and leaving you with worthless coins.
• Promising quick money is an arsenal of red flags. No one can deliver that.
• An influencer's account is still very new. This means he has not yet made his mark. The older an account, the more reliable usually, because people have not run away from the influencer.
• The comments under a social media post are worthless, follower engagement is low and the number of views is disproportionate to the number of likes and comments.
• Opinions of an influencer without evidence have no value. There must be some background to his or her claims. For example, ten-second TikTok videos are, of course, completely worthless. A rule here is that the shorter the message, the less it means. If you follow an influencer, it's not a bad idea to Google him or her. Perhaps they have been involved in all sorts of fraudulent things in the past.

Known practices of influencers

• Their revenue sources consist mainly of ad revenue from social media, number of views and subscriptions. For this reason, they do have to work with all kinds of tricks, such as click-bait stories, visual tricks, playing the expert, in short anything for more views. This is usually at the expense of content.
• Offer paid courses. Often you can subscribe to a newsletter and then you are spammed every time to buy something anyway. They come up with new products all the time. The question is whether these courses and products are of any use to you.
• Influencers tend to hide their revenue sources, so you don't know if their advice is for your benefit. Referrals to websites that charge you a lot to become a member or buy something is just affiliate marketing with you as the order machine.
• They praise products or coins associated with new developments, such as AI now, where it is completely unclear whether this is a good investment.
• The better the stock prices, the more influencers there are.

Well-known influencers

There are influencers of all shapes and sizes. If you're going to look at influencers at all, it's not a bad idea to ask yourself what you want to focus on before you start following someone. Every trader is different, so an influencer should fit your goals.

The purpose of following an influencer

For example, if you are a day trader, you are better off with an influencer who shows all his day trades than with an expert who tells backgrounds about cryptocurrency and blockchain.

By the way, the number of followers or members of certain media does not guarantee good information. It just means that people like to read them. As always, we here at Anycoin Direct say that you should always do your own research and decide to invest when you know what your plan is. If you are that far along you are on your own. But if you know an influencer who always gets his predictions right we keep recommending you to get nice and rich together 😉.

The best influencers

The best influencers are those who have no vested interest in their message, because they have plenty of money, and are known as experts. We will name a few:

1. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum. With 4 million X followers, he must feel paranoid. Such numbers are not so strange because when he says something it makes an impression. Since he is a billionaire he probably won't try to get richer from his posts.
2. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano. Million followers on X who appreciate his amusing and informative tweets.

The most popular influencers

There are also influencers who are simply very well-known or popular, for various reasons:

1. Elon Musk, owner of a number of very important companies, such as Tesla, Space-X, Starlink and The Boring Company (he is known for his somewhat weird humor). He has 100 million followers on X and when he posts a positive tweet about a cryptocurrency, such as Dogecoin, the price almost always shoots up. He is one of the most influential people on earth and is loved and not so loved. The biggest stars simply cast the longest shadows. If a tweet from him can have that much influence you might be able to do something with this.
2. Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Knows a lot about future trends in emerging technologies, such as crypto and blockchain, which they are investing heavily in.
3. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. Investor and in-depth analyst of the cryptocurrency market.
4. Roger Ver, is known as Bitcoin Jesus. Promoter and investor in crypto startups such as Bitcoin, Ripple and Kraken. He is the founder of Bitcoin.com .
5. Michael Saylor, a crypto influencer with 2.4 million followers on X. He has 40 patents to his name and is CEO of MicroStrategy. Keeps promoting and buying Bitcoin.
6. Andreas M. Antonopoulos, author of a number of books on cryptocurrency. He is a lot less known to most readers, but he still has a million followers on X, a website and a YouTube channel. His main contribution is imparting knowledge about cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Highly influential websites

International English-language sites where millions of people are members:

1. Coin Bureau (Mike Jenkins).
2. Decrypt.
3. Brian Jung.

Platforms and forums with high influence

News platforms and forums on crypto:

• Cointelegraph. A library of information on a variety of crypto world topics since 2013.
• Cryptonews.com . This site reports on everything from the crypto world, from coins to blockchain to regulation.
• CoinDesk. One of the best known sites about crypto in the world with ten million visitors per month. They do analysis, news and information for beginners and experts. They employ the most independent journalists in the blockchain industry.

There are also all kinds of platforms where you can get information from the market, such as the article you are reading right now. Anycoin Direct is building its website daily to eventually cover the entire crypto market with the most reliable information possible in the form of coin discussions, blogs , news and a academy .

Philosophy about influencers

Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to develop decentralized finance to sideline middlemen and banks. Large centralized platforms and crypto projects collaborate on places like YouTube, Instagram and X to get as many influencers on their side as possible. Self-proclaimed gurus post all kinds of things here to make as much money as possible for themselves and these platforms.

Morals in influencer marketing

Many influencers show only their winning trades, putting trust in decentralized finance at risk. They also get paid by projects that have yet to break through, without mentioning that this is their sponsor. Research shows that following influencers when trading almost always ends up causing you to lose or do less well than the market average.

Everyone is familiar with Elon Musk's tweets. It would be pretty logical if he first bought a shitload of, say, Dogecoin and then sent a positive tweet about it, knowing that this could affect the price very much, after which he could dump his bag again for a higher price. Does he even do this? No one knows, of course.

Interests of influencers and central players

Influencers tend to meme coins and touting hypes. Why? That is where there is the most to be made for themselves. They tend to go for the short-term without paying attention to developments in cryptocurrencies and their techniques. As a result, following an influencer can degenerate into a volatile roller coaster without any foundation.

Social media platforms and influencers have entered into a symbiotic relationship where the interest of one has also become the interest of the other. The third, the follower of an influencer, has become a product from which money can be made. This no longer has anything to do with decentralization, blockchain and cryptocurrency. It is pure commerce.

How can you best deal with influencers?

It's best to do your own research. The tricky thing about influencers is that they put you on a certain track, taking you in a direction where you may not want to be. If there was an influencer who would always put people on the right track he would have billions of followers.

Information or influence?

There is a big difference between providing information and influencing. Information is neutral and meant to give you more content, while an influencer tries to get you to do something you wouldn't have done if you had never listened to the influencer.

Here again you see the importance of doing your own research. If the goal of influencing is to benefit yourself, why even start listening to an influencer? Therefore, the safest thing to do is to only follow influencers with no agenda of their own, if at all. And those are the ones who are long in and don't need a dime from anyone else. Who those are is not that hard to guess, but for form's sake I will give one: Vitalik Buterin, a billionaire.

The best influencer is yourself

Those who are doing their own research learn something very important, which is how you react to different market conditions. You cannot learn this from anyone but yourself. If you rely on others you will never stand on your own two feet.

So become your own influencer, then your results will skyrocket with leverage and also be all yours.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency are the future, but if we let this depend on influencers, it is far off rather than close.