Crypto Twitter's most significant diatribe was probably AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant's "How to get rich (without getting lucky)" thread from May 2018, Brady writes.

• Tweets aren't usually thought of as "important," but Twitter is different for crypto than it is for other concerns. To a certain extent, the discussion of the industry on Twitter isn't about the industry — it is the industry.

Why it matters: Twitter is (for now) indispensable to following blockchain technology. What might look like idle badgering and joking to outsiders is in fact the process of people forming allegiances and making deals.

• Crypto Twitter is where people collectively decide what is and isn't important from one moment to the next.

Zoom out: If you aren't on Twitter, it's a text-dominated platform that basically goes from the most recent stuff back. It thrives on people liking, commenting and re-posting those text posts.

• "Crypto Twitter," or "CT," refers to all the people tweeting about various blockchain projects all day.
• "Crypto is 24/7/365, and it needs a medium that matches that pace," Variant Fund's Spencer Noon tells Axios.

Zoom in: Sources prominent on Crypto Twitter mostly feel that Twitter has been a useful space for the crypto industry, but not without caveats. Several say it's key to staying abreast of what's hot right now.

• Business also gets done there. "I find it has a lot less noise/direct business marketing than LinkedIn and in a way, leads to more personal interactions with people," Hailey Lennon, a crypto-focused attorney at Brown Rudnick, says.
• "It is a great 'warm intro factory'," Castle Island Ventures Nic Carter says, though relationships still need to be cemented in person.

How it works: "Twitter is kind of a 'Great Equalizer' of sorts where broadcasting continues to be a good way for newcomers to build a brand," Archetype VC's Katherine Wu tells Axios.

• The best use of Twitter depends on whether you're a trader, investor, content creator or founder, but lots of our sources pointed to Twitter's power as a place for discourse.

"To me what matters most is the dialogue," Adamant Research's Tuur Demeester said.

• "Sometimes I like to just throw ideas out there to immediately connect with those that share similar interests and want to brainstorm," Linda Xie of Scalar Capital said.

Yes, but: "Crypto Twitter" isn't really one thing. It's an amalgamation of lots of different groups (mostly defined by allegiances to tokens or coins) that mostly talk to each other but also bleed over, largely through the leading influencers who like to spar with each other in public.

• "It basically inexorably pushes you in the direction of broadcasting only messages that would be favorably received to your in-group," Carter said.

🤔 For more on the downsides of CT, go deeper.

Usually, Crypto Twitter is predictable. The activity follows price.

• Chatter increases as the market goes up and gets quiet as it goes down, Brady writes.

Of note: The Merge on Ethereum was different, though, as illuminated by data from The Tie, a data firm traders and investors use to get signal out of the market.

• One of the things they track is tweets tagged with ether "cashtags" (for example: tweets with $ETH).
• ETH price was all over the place before and after The Merge.

By the numbers: In late July, ETH was at $1,682. On Aug. 12, it hit $1,959. Then it dropped to $1,496 by Aug. 27. It rose again to $1,717 on Sept. 9, just before The Merge, but plopped back down to $1,324 on Sept. 20.

Despite that, tweet activity stayed relatively elevated all around the event (exploding as it happened and shortly thereafter as well).

Big things have actually happened on Crypto Twitter, Brady writes.

Why it matters: It's one thing to describe why CT has been important, but another thing to show moments where blockchain history really has been made on the micro-blogging site.

• This isn't an exhaustive or greatest hits list — just good examples.

👩‍🚀 Avatar protest. In 2019, lots of bitcoiners on Twitter changed their profile pictures to a drawing of a cat in a spacesuit, in solidarity with an anonymous personality named @hodlonaut in his campaign against Craig Wright.

• Craig Wright claims to be bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Their clash became a whole thing that continues to this day, in court.

🃏 A joke goes real. ConsenSys staffer Jordan Lyall tweeted a gag in the middle of DeFi Summer that turned into a real project, with a token called MEME.

• A few influencers ended up trying to imitate the success of MEME with a hustle around a token called FEW that wildly backfired.
• The MEME team released some cool NFTs in 2020 (before NFTs were huge) and then folded its work into a new startup called Nifty.

😡 A rival is born. One of the oldest bitcoin companies, Bitpay, inspired a rival service, BTCPay, with a tweet and blog post that that suggested there was only one side for people to take in the 2017 Blocksize War.

• There's a whole book about that battle.

✏️ #DeleteCoinbase. Coinbase announced acquiring Neutrino in 2019, a company that included staffers from Hacking Team, a group known for facilitating spying on behalf of less than democratic governments around the world.

• The hashtag #DeleteCoinbase trended, causing lots of users to look elsewhere for on-ramps and off-ramps to blockchain assets.

📰 Journalism controversy. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin called on the crypto community to boycott CoinDesk's Consensus conference in 2018 over its reporting during the initial coin offering boom.

• It didn't succeed. The 2018 conference ended up being the most chaotic Consensus of them all (I was there), but Vitalik's tweets generated a lot of discussion about the role of reporters in crypto.
• In 2020, investor Balaji Srinivasan would start calling on founders to bypass the press.

☠️ Monetizing fame. BitClout attempted to create a social media site that monetized people's notoriety with a token specific to the person.

• The project attempted to sew adherents by creating a token without asking some of the best known people on Crypto Twitter. Many of them hated that.
• The project's second act didn't go much better.

🚨 Insider trading called out. Early this year, one of the smartest guys on crypto Twitter, @Cobie, tweeted about some suspicious trades he spotted ahead of a Coinbase listing.

• His research would later show up in a Department of Justice case against a former Coinbase staffer and two associates.
• The insider trading case at OpenSea was similarly preceded by findings by Twitter detectives.

🌋 In 2020, cyber criminals got into Twitter's admin tools and used it to promote a bitcoin scam across many of CT's most famous accounts.

🤳 Kim Kardashian's Instagram posts supporting EthereumMax cost her $1.26 million to the SEC for failure to disclose paid promotion. (Axios)

🪣 The SEC has charged Arbitrade and Cryptobontix for an alleged "pump-and-dump" scheme. (SEC)

🚪 Inside the decision to back off acquiring Twitter by the founder of crypto exchange FTX. (Axios)

🤑 Celsius reportedly paid its founder, Alex Mashinsky, $10 million before filing for bankruptcy proceedings. (Financial Times)

Once you read the tweet treatise from Naval Ravikant mentioned above, the worldview of people on Crypto Twitter starts to make a lot more sense, Brady writes.

• It starts here. It ends here.

• He later expounded on each item in a series of podcasts.

Not everyone loves the thread or the whole guru-influencer thing, but on some level the industry remains in conversation with Naval's perspective.

• It's something of a manifesto for entrepreneurs in the space.

Twitter is ephemeral — mostly — but this thread is one of those things that resurfaces again and again.