Anonymous culture in crypto may be losing its relevance

Crypto has inherited many values that were popularized in the early days of the internet. 

Many participants in the crypto space have been anonymous since the beginning of Bitcoin (BTC), since using this digital money offers a certain degree of anonymity so long as nobody knows the public address of the user. The true identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains unknown to this day.

The most recent wave of innovation spearheaded by decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) projects have anonymous teams that maintain their general right to remain unknown.

The founder of DeFi analytics dashboard DefiLlama, anonymous person 0xngmi, released a bug bounty on his identity. Rather than giving out this quest to find vulnerabilities in the DefiLlama code, he offered 1 Ether (ETH) to whoever could reveal his identity with a detailed explanation of how they found out. No one has managed to reveal his identity at the time of writing.

0xngmi has also been educating people that would like to become anonymous with a guide on “How to stay anon,” which is a collaborative document that allows contributors to add and edit to improve it.

Navigating through Crypto Twitter, there are plenty of pseudonymous “celebrities” that, based solely on the reputations they have built, have a digital persona with a substantial amount of followers.

Another account that remains anonymous on Twitter, The DeFi Edge, tweeted the reasons why he has decided for the account to remain anonymous. The founder of the eponymous DeFi analysis site has no intention to reveal their identity for the time being, but has dropped some minor details:

Why I’ve chosen to remain anonymous for now, and why I might semi-doxxed myself later: pic.twitter.com/OGZLmU9Nte

— The DeFi Edge ️ (@thedefiedge) March 11, 2022

As the industry rebrands to Web3 and a wide array of talent is being lured into the ecosystem, a greater number of participants in the space have decided to take a different…