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Most Influential 40: President Xi Jinping
When the Chinese Communist Party banned mining, it only proved the resilience of Bitcoin’s distributed network.
By CoinDesk
Updated May 11, 2023, 6:26 p.m. Published Dec 9, 2021, 8:26 p.m.
This year Bitcoin took a serious hit to its hashrate, the measure of electricity going to secure the distributed network, when the Chinese Communist Party decided to ban cryptocurrency trading, mining and related activities. That had the immediate effect of cutting out about two-thirds of the machines making Bitcoin hum, but the network withstood the assault. Perhaps Chinese President Xi Jingping’s biggest influence on the crypto industry is showing how little sway a nation may have.
Xi is no ordinary CCP head. He has taken moves to distance China from the Western capitalistic enterprise, strengthen the nation’s economy and potentially install himself as a lifelong autocrat. While China has effectively banished a local crypto mining industry, the government has turned to blockchain as one prong of its digital “Belt and Road” global infrastructure endeavor. Further, its experimental digital yuan, a central bank digital currency is already a geopolitical force.
The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021
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What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
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