ForkLog’s Person of the Year: seven Bitcoin luminaries, one antagonist and the king of dislikes

Chaincode Labs employee and author of the Segregated Witness protocol Peter Velle received 214 points. He is currently working on Bitcoin updates Schnorr and Taproot, which have already been included in the Bitcoin Core source code. Activation is expected to be the most significant event in the protocol’s development since the block-size wars and the implementation of SegWit.

Co-founder of TON Labs, Alexander Filatov, surged to the top of the rankings with 275 points. The launch of the Free TON mainnet based on the Telegram Open Network protocol became one of the most discussed — albeit controversial — events of the second quarter. Durov’s team was forced to abandon its own project following legal proceedings with the regulator in the United States.

CEO Binance Changpeng Zhao amassed 434 points. Zhao not only runs the largest exchange by trading volume but also actively participates in discussions on digital assets, making him a top newsmaker for industry media.

Barry Silbert, head of Grayscale Investments, received 160 points. Institutional investment in cryptocurrencies became a trend in 2020. Silbert’s Bitcoin Trust rode that wave, and by December assets under management were $13 billion.

Readers awarded the victory to Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, giving him 160 points. This year Uniswap became the first DEX to surpass Coinbase by daily trading volume. The project led the DeFi Pulse ranking for a long time and also conducted a notably successful airdrop of its native UNI tokens.

The Dutch institutional investor writing under the pseudonym Plan B received 238 points. The blogger created and promotes the Stock-to-Flow model for assessing scarcity or surplus of an asset.

With an undisputed lead in public opinion, Pavel Durov was recognised by readers with 327 points. The unsuccessful launch of the Telegram Open Network blockchain platform, the unlocking of the Telegram messenger in Russia, and the entrepreneur’s outspoken remarks about Apple all helped keep him in the spotlight.

The title went to 17-year-old Graham Clark, who hacked Twitter. He scored 64 points. As a result, the hacker’s actions compromised 45 accounts of well-known figures and stolen Bitcoin worth approximately $120,000. He faces up to 200 years in prison in the United States.

Despite grants to Bitcoin developers, the reputation of the BitMEX derivatives exchange and its former CEO Arthur Hayes suffered substantially this year. The cause: criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice, a lawsuit from the CFTC, and a series of civil suits overseen by attorney Pavel Pogodin.

Whether Hayes will resolve these issues remains to be seen in 2021; for now he sits at -89 points.