Fortune, the renowned American business magazine, has created the Crypto 40 rating to recognize the 40 companies that have made the most significant impact on the cryptocurrency industry.
These organizations have been divided into eight categories, including CeFi, TradFi, NFT, Infrastructure, Venture Capitalist, DeFi, Data, and Protocols.
Each category has a leader based on their market capitalization, impact, and other factors.
Coinbase leads the CeFi category, followed by Binance, which is the only non-US company in the top five.
PayPal emerged as the winner of the TradFi category, while OpenSea topped the NFT sector.
The Infrastructure category includes mining companies, hardware manufacturers, and software developers, with Ledger named as the category leader.
The Venture Capitalist category’s top three firms were Polychain Capital, Animoca Brands, and Andreessen Horowitz, with at least 35 crypto projects funded, including one unicorn.
Uniswap leads the DeFi rankings, while Chainalysis tops the data providers and blockchain analytics category.
Fortune’s experts have acknowledged the importance of decentralization in the protocol category, with Ethereum being recognized as the champion due to its network-related total revenue, volumes and activity, and security.
Two second-tier solutions for scaling the Ethereum blockchain, Polygon and Arbitrum, were also among the top five.
According to Fortune, the rankings were based on a set of empirical indicators combined with surveys of more than 200 financial executives conducted by the international research bureau Researchscape.
The decision to create eight separate categories was made to reflect the cryptocurrency industry’s diversity and the difficulty in generalizing the relative importance of a centralized cryptocurrency exchange compared to a traditional financial company or a DeFi project.
Fortune has previously published a study listing the top cryptocurrency projects that received the most funding in 2022.