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In its newly launched Fortune Crypto 40 benchmark, the media firm ranked the top 5 firms in each of eight categories in the crypto space.
Categories include centralized finance (CeFi), traditional finance (TradFi), venture capital, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), data, infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi) and protocols.
To find the top 40 companies, Fortune used a variety of empirical metrics, including a survey of more than 200 financial executives conducted by Researchscape. Fortune claims the results are “unbiased and rigorous”.
Top 40 Crypto Firms by Category
The benchmark ranked Ethereum Foundation as the top protocol, followed by Bitcoin. Polygon Labs, which develops Ethereum scaling solutions, and the Solana Foundation, a non-profit responsible for developing the Solana ecosystem, ranked third and fourth, respectively. Offchain Labs, the company behind Ethereum scaling solution provider Arbitrum, took fifth place in the protocol category.
Coinbase tops the CeFi category, followed by Binance and Kraken. Mike Novogratz-led Galaxy Digital and USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin issuers Circle took the fourth and fifth positions in the benchmark.
PayPal’s integration with MetaMask puts it at the top of the TradFi category, which ranks the top 5 firms innovating in blockchain technology. Stock trading platform Robinhood, which enables crypto trading, came in second, followed by JPMorgan Chase, which launched its own blockchain Onyx.
Fidelity, which has received criticism for allowing pensioners to invest part of their retirement funds in bitcoin, is in fourth place, while Visa is fifth.
Polychain Capital was first in the VC category, followed by Animoca Brands and Andreessen Horowitz. The last two spots in the category went to Pantera Capital and Blockchain Capital.
As the largest NFT marketplace, OpenC holds the top spot in the NFT category. Yuga Labs, which launched some of the top NFT collections including Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, came second.
Sky Mavis, creator of the popular NFT game Axi Infinity, and generative art NFT platform ArtBlock ranked third and fourth respectively. RTFKT, which Nike acquired in 2021, is the fifth NFT firm in the benchmark.
In the data category, Chainanalysis took first place, followed by CoinMetrics and The Graph. Dunn and Messery secured the other two spots.
The Fortune Benchmark also includes crypto companies that provide infrastructure for the industry. The non-custodial wallet provider leads the ledger category. Bitcoin mining giant Genesis Digital Assets, not to be confused with the digital currency group lender that filed for bankruptcy, secured second place.
Bitcoin mining chip developer Bitmain ranked third, followed by Alchemy, which offers plug-and-play tools to build products and services on the blockchain. Crypto payment solution MoonPay ranked fifth in the infrastructure category.
DeFi is all about Ethereum
Fortune lists Uniswap Labs, Lido, MakerDAO, Aave, and Curve as the top five competitors in the DeFi category. It is worth noting that all DeFi applications are built on Ethereum.
In fact, according to DefiLlama data, it is the top five DeFi applications in terms of total value locked (TVL). According to DefiLlama, five DeFi applications have more than $31 billion in TVL at the time of writing.
Furthermore, there are a large number of Ethereum-based applications in the Fortune benchmark, not to mention that two of the top five protocols are Ethereum scaling services.
But the focus on Ethereum may be due to the fact that Ethereum controls about 70% of all DeFi activity.
