About Cryptonist
Cryptonist publishes original measurement of the crypto market and analysis built on it. Not news, not rankings written for commission — measurement, with the method stated and open to argument.
What we measure
The AI Citation Index records which crypto brands AI assistants actually name when someone asks them a buying question. 18 brands across two sectors, 100 fixed questions, five answer surfaces, run weekly and published monthly. Every edition stays live at its own permanent URL so the record can be compared over time rather than quietly revised.
The methodology is published alongside it, including the parts that weaken the findings: what the sampling cannot see, why the brand set is curated, and why a shift between editions might be a model update rather than a change in the market.
What we refuse to do
Three decisions made at the outset, recorded here so they are not quietly reversed later.
- No auto-generated news
- Every crypto outlet rewrites the same press release within the hour, so duplication is near-total and added value is near-zero. It is also YMYL-adjacent, where faceless bylines fare worst. We automate the data collection and write the prose.
- No paid links
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Selling dofollow placements is a link scheme, and the real risk lands on
the buyer rather than the seller. The compliant version — labelled and
rel="sponsored"— removes most of the revenue, because in crypto placements the money is the PageRank pass-through. That collapses the case for doing it at all. - No affiliate rankings
- Almost every "best exchange" table you have read was paid for by at least one entry in it. An index that ranks brands cannot also be paid by them and expect to be believed. There is a further irony we are happy to own: Google does not permit advertising for destinations that compare crypto issuers, so this publication could not buy a click to its own index if it wanted to.
Who writes it
Every article carries a named byline and a publish date, and pieces that have been checked since publication carry a review date too. There are currently 31 articles, all written or edited by Greg Lacan, who is also responsible for the index's methodology. A publication arguing that named authorship matters should be legible about its own.
Corrections
Figures here are dated because they go stale — policy changes, model versions change, and an index edition describes the month it measured and no other. Where something is wrong rather than merely old, the fix is a correction that says what changed, not a silent edit. Published editions are never rewritten: a correction ships as a new edition.