Five stages of the path from a post that «woke up famous» to an influential crypto media outlet. Each stage is backed by numbers from the channel's own data.
Sergey Mendeleev starts the channel after his post about a banker went viral to 5M views. «Woke up famous» — and decides to run his own «stream of consciousness about crypto and politics». The audience is tiny, reactions are single-digit.
The core becomes his investigation into the embezzlement of the WEX exchange and the Alexey Bilyuchenko case. After every high-profile post the channel is attacked by bots — which the author always documents. Audience and reactions slowly grow.
Mendeleev goes public as an industry figure: executive director of InDeFi SmartBank, founder of Garantex (under OFAC sanctions since 2022), author of the «crypto-ruble» project. The channel becomes a platform for promoting legal crypto circulation in Russia. Reactions now number in the tens.
The ABCEX exchange launches as the «crypto-ruble» venue. Average reactions double, Telegram paid stars appear — readers' real money. The loudest post of the year is not about crypto but about school exams (9,648 reactions). In autumn — a spike of anger.
Crypto deflates as a topic; instead the forward share doubles: the channel increasingly relays others rather than writing itself. Reactions and stars peak, the record being a post about yet another bot attack (10,212 reactions). From a personal diary the channel becomes a media outlet.