Data and research on crypto
Original measurement, stated methodology, named bylines. No press releases, no affiliate rankings.
Explainers
Cloud mining and mobile mining apps: what the claims rest on
Renting hashrate you cannot see, or tapping a button said to mine on a phone, both rest on an economic claim. The arithmetic, and how each model fails.
The index
Which crypto brands do AI assistants actually name?
Every week we put the questions crypto buyers ask to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces, and record which brands come back. Published monthly, every edition kept live.
See what is measured- 18brands tracked
- 100buyer questions
- 5answer surfaces
Data
The sector's figures, dated and explained
Reserve, supply and value-locked tables for 388 exchanges, stablecoins, chains and protocols, and a classified record of 1,293 hacks. Every page says what its number measures and what it leaves out. Snapshot from DefiLlama, data as of 3 October 2026.
Browse the data- Exchange reserves 36
- Stablecoins 48
- Chains 79
- DeFi protocols 225
- Hacks 1,293
More from Cryptonist
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Explainers
Can governments track crypto? What the chain shows and what KYC adds
Public ledgers are pseudonymous, not anonymous. Clustering, exchange KYC, the Travel Rule and tax reporting close most of the gap. How each one works.
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Markets
What trading indicators measure, and what they cannot
Moving averages, RSI and volume indicators are arithmetic over past trades, useful for exactly that. The crypto market corrupts the one input they all share.
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Exchanges
What exchange reserve data shows, and what it hides
Attributed exchange reserves are real, useful and one-sided. What the on-chain figure contains, what it cannot, and how to read a sudden change in it.
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Research
How crypto gets hacked: the incidents, classified
Every recorded crypto hack, read as one dataset: which failures recur, which cost most, where they happen, and what the record misses. From a dated snapshot.
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DeFi
Where crypto yield comes from
Staking, lending, liquidity provision, airdrops and points each pay for something different. Who pays, for what, and what can go wrong with each of them.
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Data
What protocol fees and revenue tell you
Fees are the top line, revenue what the protocol kept, holder revenue what reached the token. Three different numbers that the word revenue can blur.
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Markets
What Pi Network is, and what is still unverified about it
What the Pi app does, what mining means here, what has and has not been verified on its ledger, and why a price is the wrong question to ask of it.
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Data
What TVL measures, and what it does not
Total value locked is deposits at today's prices, counted again at every layer. What moves it, what it double-counts, and the one comparison it is good for.
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Explainers
Where stablecoin supply lives: by mechanism and by chain
Every stablecoin above $100M read as one table: how concentrated supply is, how much is fiat-backed, which chains carry it, and what moved in the last month.
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Explainers
Tokenomics: what a supply schedule actually commits to
Caps, emissions and unlock schedules are promises with different enforcement. What each one binds, where to verify it, and what deflationary hides.
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Exchanges
What a first crypto purchase actually involves
The app matters less than the four decisions inside it — which surface you buy on, which rail you fund with, where it settles, and what you record.
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Exchanges
The fees you actually pay on a crypto exchange
A headline trading rate is one of at least five costs in a round trip. The spread is usually the largest, and it is the one no fee page shows you.
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Exchanges
Exchange or self-custody: what you are trading
Not safe against unsafe. The real trade is recourse against control, and the failure modes on each side are shaped completely differently.
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Markets
Why crypto brands cannot buy their way to visibility
A MiCA licence passports across the EEA. Google's advertising permission does not — and comparison destinations cannot advertise at all, licence or no licence.
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Exchanges
Deep liquidity and a long coin list pull against each other
Liquidity is order-book depth at the size you trade, not reported volume. Why breadth costs depth, and why staking yields are a credit product.
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Wallets
Hot wallet, cold wallet, and the line between them
A hardware wallet does not hide your key better. It moves the signing off a connected computer — which defeats one attack completely and another not at all.
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Exchanges
What to compare when choosing between crypto exchanges
Five questions in the order that matters, a leaving test worth running before you need it, and why expert recommendations are the weakest signal available.
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Wallets
What actually separates one crypto wallet from another
There is no best crypto wallet, but there is a right list of things to compare — and most of the differences people weigh are not on it.
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Wallets
How crypto wallets actually fail
Asking which wallets have been hacked assumes the software is what breaks. Usually it is not — here are the failure modes that actually cost people money.
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Explainers
Pepe coin, and what a meme coin actually is
PEPE says outright that it has no intrinsic value or expectation of return. What that leaves holding the price up, and what the 2023 multisig theft showed.
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Wallets
What a MetaMask recovery phrase actually controls
It is not a password, and it does not back up everything you can see in the extension. What it covers, what it misses, and what to do if it leaks.
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Exchanges
What a regulated crypto exchange is regulated for
In most countries it means registered for anti-money-laundering supervision — a rule that protects the financial system from you, not you from the exchange.
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Exchanges
What proof of reserves actually proves
A Merkle-tree attestation shows assets at a moment. Without liabilities it says nothing about solvency — and most of them stop at assets.
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Wallets
Seed phrases, private keys and passwords are not the same
Three different things, routinely treated as one. The confusion is not academic — it is how people lose funds they believed were protected.
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Wallets
What you are agreeing to when a wallet connects to a site
Connecting reveals an address. Approving grants spending power that outlives the visit. The difference is where most self-custody losses actually happen.
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Markets
What wash trading is, and why volume can be invented
Exchange volume is self-reported. In 2019 Bitwise judged real only $273m of ~$6bn a day in bitcoin traded against fiat or stablecoins. The incentive persists.
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Exchanges
What happens to your crypto when an exchange fails
Insurance covers theft, and a company failing is not a theft. What segregation, deposit insurance and a public listing actually get you, and what they do not.
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Wallets
Why a wallet works on one chain and not another
One seed phrase can hold keys on every chain at once. What stops a wallet supporting them all is signatures, account models and address formats.
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Wallets
Your first crypto wallet, and what it is actually for
The first wallet is a training instrument, not a vault. Why they are all free, why that matters, and the three setup decisions that are hard to undo.
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Explainers
What is a stablecoin, and what holds the peg
A stablecoin targets a value rather than guaranteeing one. What holds each kind of peg, what a depeg is, and who EU rules bar from paying interest on one.