The Fortune Crypto 100 required a methodology built for an industry that doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. Here’s how Fortune and Inca Digital developed it.
In late 2025, Fortune set out to create a first-of-its-kind list that would rely on empirical data to recognize the top 100 companies in the digital asset industry. In doing so, an obvious challenge became apparent: The industry has a richness of deserving companies, but these firms have achieved excellence for very different reasons.
How do you create an apples-to-apples comparison between a leading centralized exchange, a top wallet provider, a mining operation, and a lab tied to a popular DeFi protocol? The answer is you can’t. The solution was to rank companies and projects within their distinct peer groups, and to design distinct sets of criteria that would recognize excellence in each field.
To this end, Fortune partnered with Inca Digital, a digital asset intelligence firm, to use hard data to analyze more than 3,000 companies and sort them into 10 distinct categories. To ensure that each entity appeared only once on the final list, companies and their associated projects could only rank in one category. If a company qualified for multiple, Fortune and Inca Digital placed it where it ranked the highest.
For each category, Fortune and Inca Digital relied primarily on hard data related to blockchain activity and corporate financials to inform the final selection. The process, however, also recognized that trust, security, reputation, and public perception matter considerably in crypto, even more so than in most industries.
This is why the Crypto 100 relied not only on a company or protocol’s size but also its security infrastructure, regulatory track record, and global media footprint. The Fortune Crypto team also relied on their expertise gleaned from more than a decade of reporting on the industry to assign relative weights to the different metrics. Fortune and Inca Digital aren’t disclosing the weights for competitive reasons, but to demonstrate the methodology’s rigor, here are some of the techniques used to evaluate companies and projects.
About Inca Digital
Founded in 2019, Inca Digital is a digital asset intelligence firm serving financial institutions, asset managers, and government agencies. Inca conducts advanced blockchain forensics, data synthesis, and geopolitical risk analysis to translate complex on-chain and off-chain data into actionable, high-fidelity intelligence.
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