Inflated User Numbers in Crypto Press: What Reporters Check

Putting farmed wallets and points-season transaction counts into a press pitch backfires because crypto reporters can check them on-chain in minutes, and once one number looks inflated, every other claim in the pitch gets discounted with it. The number rarely makes the story. It just costs you the reporter's trust. Pitch fewer numbers, define each one precisely, and lead with the figures that would still hold if your incentives were switched off tomorrow.

I've spent six years pitching Web3 and AI founders to outlets like CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt and The Block, and the pattern I see most often isn't dishonesty. It's founders who believe their own dashboard. The chart went up during the points campaign, the team celebrated, and nobody asked what the chart was counting before it went into the press release. (I've written separately about why forced on-chain activity attracts farmers instead of users; this piece is about what happens when those numbers reach a journalist.)

Why do farmed numbers backfire with crypto reporters?

Crypto is one of the few beats where the reporter can audit your claim without asking you anything. Your contracts are public. Your token holders are public. Your daily activity is sitting on an explorer or in a community-built dashboard that someone on Crypto Twitter has probably already posted with a sarcastic caption.

So a claim like "1.2 million users" doesn't land as news. It lands as a question. A reporter who has covered a few airdrop seasons knows what a sudden wallet spike during a points program usually means, and they know their editor will ask.

There's a second problem that founders miss. A reporter answers to their readers, not to you.

While doing a PR activity, companies usually forget that the journalists are on the payrolls of the media, not theirs. Shilika Jain on X, 11 Aug 2022

If a reporter publishes your inflated number and a data account debunks it the next day, the correction lands on their byline. They remember that. The next time you pitch, your email gets read with suspicion, or not at all.

What does a reporter actually check before using your number?

Not every reporter runs a full analysis. But the ones covering DeFi, L2s and token launches have a fairly predictable set of instincts, and you should run the same checks on yourself before they do:

1. Timing against incentives. Did the number jump when a points season, quest or snapshot was announced? A spike that lines up with a reward calendar reads as farming.
2. Shape of the activity. Lots of wallets doing the minimum qualifying action, at the minimum size, looks scripted. Real usage is messy and uneven.
3. What happened after the snapshot. If daily active wallets fell off a cliff the week after eligibility closed, your "users" were participants in a campaign.
4. Definition. "Users" could mean unique addresses, signed-in accounts, people who completed a transaction, or people who connected a wallet once. A vague word is a red flag on its own.
5. Independent sources. Third-party dashboards, explorer data and what other projects in your category report. If your number is far above what similar protocols claim, expect a follow-up question.

None of this needs a data team. A reporter with an explorer tab and a decent memory of the last cycle can do it before lunch.

The re-run test: sorting every number in your pitch

Before any number goes into a pitch, a release or a founder interview, I put it through what I call the re-run test. The question is simple: if a sceptical reporter re-ran this number from public data, with the campaign period removed, would it still say roughly what we claim?

Every figure lands in one of three columns.

The middle column is where most founders get into trouble. Cumulative numbers only ever go up, which is exactly why they're comfortable to pitch and exactly why reporters discount them. If you use one, give the reporter the other half: "120,000 wallets have interacted with the protocol since launch; about a fifth of them were active in the last 30 days." That second clause is what turns a vanity stat into a fact a reporter can print.

I go into which specific metrics get discounted in vanity metrics crypto journalists see through. This post is about the honesty problem underneath them.

What to report instead of wallet and transaction totals

The swap I push for is from volume to evidence. Volume says a lot happened. Evidence says the right thing happened, for a reason other than the reward.

Numbers that tend to survive scrutiny:

• Revenue or fees paid by users, ideally over a period that doesn't overlap with a campaign. Money people paid to use the product is the hardest thing to farm.
• Retained activity after an incentive ended, stated as a count and a time window.
• Repeat usage: how many wallets came back for a second, third or tenth session.
• Integrations and partners by name, with what they actually use you for.
• Developer activity that isn't tied to a hackathon prize.
• Original research or survey data you can share in full. When Tangem's self-custody survey gave reporters a clear stat to lead with, it travelled across English, Korean, Japanese and Dutch outlets without a separate pitch per market. A defensible number does that kind of work for you.

There's also a quieter option most founders overlook: report no headline number at all. A clear product story with one or two well-defined figures often lands better than a pitch with six big numbers, because the reporter isn't spending their attention deciding which ones to trust. If you want to build stories from your data rather than lead with totals, my piece on on-chain data story hooks covers the angles that work.

Transparency is the key to successful web3 business Medias have emerged as the strongest source of truth this season Shilika Jain on X, 18 Nov 2022

I wrote that in the weeks after FTX, when crypto media were the ones doing the digging. That role hasn't gone away. The press is a verification layer for this industry, and pitching it a number you haven't verified yourself is asking it to do its job on you.

A worked example: rewriting one inflated pitch line

This is how I'd rework a typical line. The project and figures below are illustrative, not a client.

Original pitch line: "XYZ Protocol has onboarded over 800,000 users and processed 4 million transactions since its points program launched."

What a reporter will notice: the start date is the points program, so the whole figure sits inside an incentive window. "Users" is undefined. Transactions are counted, not value or fees. Nothing tells them how many of those wallets are still around.

Step 1: split the number at the incentive boundary. Pull activity from before the program, during it, and after the last snapshot. You'll usually find the "during" bucket is enormous and the "after" bucket is the honest one.

Step 2: define the unit. Decide whether you're counting addresses, verified accounts, or wallets that completed the core action. Write the definition down and use it every time.

Step 3: find the number that only real usage produces. Fees paid, repeat borrowers, liquidity that stayed after rewards stopped.

Rewritten line: "Since XYZ's points season ended in March, about 18,000 wallets have continued to borrow on the protocol each month, paying roughly $40,000 in fees, without any active reward program."

It's a smaller number. It's also a number that a reporter can check, that tells them something about product demand, and that gives them a real angle: what's keeping those 18,000 wallets there. That's a story. "800,000 users" is a press release nobody runs.

How should you handle a number that's already out there?

Sometimes the inflated figure is already on your website, your deck and three old articles. You can't un-publish it, but you can stop compounding it.

• Stop repeating it in new materials. Update the website and the press kit first, because reporters copy from there.
• Introduce the defined metric alongside it in your next update, with the methodology, so the new number has a public origin.
• If a reporter asks about the old figure, answer plainly: it counted every wallet that interacted during the campaign, and here's the retained figure now.
• Don't argue with data accounts who point out the farming. Acknowledge the definition, share the retained number, move on.

Your honesty might make you lose a client but will bring you a credible reputation forever 🤝 Shilika Jain on X, 4 Apr 2022

That cuts both ways. As a PR lead, I've had to tell founders their headline number won't go into a pitch with my name on it. Some don't love hearing it. The ones who listen tend to get a second and third story out of the same reporters, because those reporters learned their numbers hold.

When is a big number still fair to use?

I'm not against big numbers. There are cases where a large total is honest and newsworthy:

• Distribution events reported as distribution. "The airdrop reached 300,000 eligible wallets" is fine if you call it what it is: a distribution, not an active user base.
• Category-level stories. If you're the data source for a trend piece about a whole sector, cumulative figures can help a reporter size the market, provided they're labelled.
• Infrastructure throughput. For an RPC provider or a bridge, raw volume can be the honest measure of usage, as long as you aren't paying for it.

The trade-off is real. A team that refuses to publish its large numbers may look smaller than a competitor that inflates. In a hot cycle, the inflated competitor might even get the first headline. My experience is that the gap closes, usually at the worst possible time for them: after the token launches, when the data accounts and the reporters go back and check.

If you're unsure which column a number belongs in, that uncertainty is your answer. It goes in the caveat column until you can prove otherwise. This is a core part of how I build Web3 PR campaigns: numbers get audited before narratives get written.

FAQ

Should I disclose that some of my users were airdrop farmers?

You don't need to volunteer a confession, but you should never describe campaign participants as users. Give the defined, retained number and the methodology. If a reporter asks directly how much activity came from incentives, give them a straight estimate, because a dodge reads worse than the figure.

Do reporters at smaller crypto outlets check numbers too?

Less consistently, and some will print what you send. That isn't a reason to send inflated figures. Smaller outlets get syndicated and quoted, and a debunked number in one place follows you into the next pitch to a larger desk.

What if my investors want the big number in the announcement?

Show them the re-run test result and the likely reporter questions. Most investors care more about a funding or launch story that holds up than one that gets picked apart. If they still insist, keep the big number in the investor update, where context comes with it, and out of the press release.

Is TVL an inflated number too?

It can be, especially when it's driven by reward programs or a handful of large depositors. A TVL figure becomes more credible when you state how much of it stayed after rewards dropped and how concentrated it is.

Not sure which of your numbers would survive a reporter's check? Book a 30-minute teardown and we'll run your pitch through it together.