Elon Musk's blue checks have divided Crypto Twitter into the haves and the have nots

Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced this morning that “Verified accounts are now prioritised”. The tweet appears to indicate that accounts with blue checks will now feature more prominently in users’ Twitter feeds — and thus likely gain more followers and engagement than those without.

Musk’s program — in which people who pay $8 per month a rewarded with a blue check next to their name on Twitter — is controversial. The blue check previously indicated that Twitter had independently verified a users’ identity and that the user had some experience or authority in their field or profession. Under Musk’s new plan, anyone can buy one.

In addition, Musk appears to have given out some blue checks for free to celebrity accounts or handles with large followings even if they did not want it.

So, how does this rearrange Crypto Twitter? Put simply, there are now two classes of people: those with blue checks and those without.

And it appears that many of the most-followed accounts have received a blue check while some of the smaller, but often equally interesting, voices on Twitter are checkless. Crypto Twitter might see a bias toward blue-check voices from now, in other words.

The Block took a random sampling of well-followed accounts to see who got the blue carpet treatment and who is now standing outside the velvet rope.

Blue checks on Crypto Twitter

Vitalik Buterin — cofounder of Ethereum and subject of many crypto memes.

CZ — founder of Binance, prolific tweeter, and target of U.S.-based anti-crypto enforcement actions.

Brian Armstrong — CEO of Coinbase, the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange, and more recently a vocal antagonist of the SEC.

ZachXBT — “The Sherlock Holmes of crypto,” as he was once called by CoinTelegraph, is famous for his investigation of scams.

Sandeep Nailwal — co-founder of Polygon and founder of Crypto Relief, an India-based charity created during the Covid epidemic.

Tree of Alpha — white-hat hacker who once found a “potentially market-nuking” exploit on Coinbase.

db — prolific tweeter of crypto news.

Ryan Selkis — of Messari, the crypto research outlet.

FatMan — whose research did so much to expose the luna/Terra stablecoin scam, leading to its ultimate collapse.

Sam Bankman-Fried — the founder of the FTX exchange who is currently awaiting trial on criminal charges related to its collapse has had his access to the internet severely curtailed by a judge. And yet he has a blue tick, somehow.

Ben Armstrong — aka Bitboy Crypto, a crypto YouTuber known for his aggressive approach to his critics.

No-checks on Crypto Twitter

Jordan Fish (“Cobie”) — host of the “Up Only” podcast and famous for calling out low-quality projects.

Molly White — the writer behind Web 3 Is Going Just Great, a crypto-skeptic site that curates digital asset disasters.

Rektdiomedes — “Curatoor” of The Daily Degen, a substack newsletter for DeFi news.