Forbes Cryptocurrency Awards 2020: The $3 Trillion Bitcoin Marketing Campaign

^For the first time ever, we are publishing the Forbes Crypto Awards. Not everyone will be happy they’re on the list. Fed chairman Jerome Powell takes the honors as our person of the year: In a pandemic year when the Fed printed so much stimulus money that the central bank saw its balance sheet nearly double in size, our Forbes Awards judge Anthony Pompliano of Morgan Creek Digital credits Powell with running a “$3 trillion marketing campaign for bitcoin.”

Here are our picks for the best products, the most intriguing people and the most interesting trends in crypto this year.

Our inaugural Forbes Crypto Awards were selected in consultation with Anthony Pompliano, who helps manage two crypto funds at New York City-based Morgan Creek, which has $1.5 billion in assets under management, as well as his own recently launched endeavor, Pomp Investments.

The Forbes Person Of The Year In Crypto: Jerome Powell

In an attempt to prevent the U.S. economy from collapsing under pandemic pressure, Powell had the U.S. Federal Reserve buy up a record amount of treasuries, effectively printing more than $3 trillion in new money and nearly doubling the central bank’s balance sheet. Venture firm Pantera Capital called the infusion “two centuries of debt in one month,” creating an environment in which previously skeptical investors including Wall Street whales like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller started taking cryptocurrency seriously. “I think Jerome Powell did the things that he and his colleagues believed were the best things to do in the short term to mitigate pain from the pandemic and economic crisis,” says Pompliano. “But in the pursuit of mitigating short-term pain, they were highlighting for everyone, from retail investors to the largest institutions in the world, what was going to happen over the next decade or two.”

Best Product: Square’s Cash App

In August 2018, Jack Dorsey’s payments giant Square, now valued at $96 billion, was among the first mainstream enterprises to allow bitcoin purchases in all 50 states. Bitcoin has proved a real boon to the company, which generated $1.6 billion in revenue from the asset in the third quarter, an 11-fold increase year over year. “I tend to think that new users give a good signal for something that is usable,” says Pompliano. “Not just by the crypto enthusiasts but by the everyday person, the mainstream.”

Most Intriguing Newcomer: Michael Saylor

Among a slew of names that bought bitcoin for the first time this year, perhaps none were more surprising, or made a bigger impact, than the CEO of struggling MicroStrategy, a Tysons Corner, Virginia-based business software firm. Over the course of five months starting in August, Saylor revealed that his smallish outfit, which competes against giants like Oracle and SAP in data analytics, had bought $475 million worth of bitcoin. That made bitcoin the publicly traded company’s biggest treasury asset. While Citi recently…