Meet Bitcoin's Twitter King, Coin Center's Neeraj Agrawal

If you care about cryptocurrency, you know a lot of the action plays out on Twitter. And if you follow the Twitter happenings, you’ve probably come across Neeraj Agrawal—a one-man meme machine who acts as a court jester of sorts to the fractious crypto community.

Agrawal’s stock-in-trade is humor but he also shares real wisdom and policy points in his Twitter feed, and in his role as communications director for Coin Center, an advocacy group for cryptocurrency. His prodigious social media following also means he now frequently goes viral: Agrawal now has more than 51,000 Twitter followers, up from just 2,000 or so a year ago.

I caught up with Agrawal over lunch at the Crimson diner in Washington, D.C. where he dished on his unusual career and recent big news at Coin Center.

What follows is an edited version of our conversation, interspersed with some hallmark tweets from Agrawal.

How did you become a crypto communications guy in the first place?

I was interested in cryptocurrency and the media and comms and policy, but didn’t know how to combine those things. I was pretty green back then, and noticed the media was taking greater interest in this.

Then Coin Center started, and I volunteered for a month or so offering communications help. Then they offered me a job as director of comms even though I was very unqualified. My previous job was at Verisign (a domain name registry), where I did some blockchain research.

By age 35 you should have an undisclosed amount of gold and bitcoin buried in various locations around the country
— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) May 21, 2018

The crypto exchange Kraken just donated $1 million to Coin Center. What does that signify?

Part of being a non-profit is fundraising. This donation shows industry is seeing that our body of work speaks for itself.

We have two top agenda items right now. The first is fixing the licensing system for cryptocurrency, which is currently a patchwork of 53 state licenses that a money transmitter has to get. It’s slow and hugely expensive.

The other is obviously the securities issue. [Agrawal is referring to the regulatory uncertainty over whether and when a cryptocurrency must be registered as a security.]

People seem surprised when I tell them Kraken’s $1 million donation nearly doubles Coin Center’s annual budget.
They are matching up to another million in May. We can do a lot with that!
Donate here: https://t.co/9s931Oua0U
— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) May 21, 2018

What advice do you have for someone who wants to go into crypto communications?

Read the Bitcoin white paper first. Along with a sense of the cultural history of cryptocurrencies, a basic understanding of the technology is important to be effective. I am in no way an expert, but I know enough to filter signal from noise. It takes a lot more reading than the Bitcoin white paper to get there, but that is definitely the place to start.

From there, Twitter. Twitter is the place.

When I started, Jerry (Coin Center Director Jerry Brito) said he never saw me on the phone with journalists. But then I showed him all my DMs and he understood that’s where it goes down.

“This is public key and this is the private key. Remember, don’t show that second one to anybody!"
"…Okay now here’s how to trade weird alts on 100x margin"
— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) May 23, 2018

Where did you pick up your meme skills?

Just years of being an Internet kid, turning into an Internet person. I’ve been on forums for as long as I can remember. I guess my brain has been rewired to think in that way.

Reddit, random game forums, chat rooms. You name it I’ve been there. I was on Reddit in 2011—2011 was the big Reddit time for crypto. I was on Twitter back then but I was really bad at it.