Chainlink guru Zach Rynes only doxed himself as the man behind the six-year-old pseudonymous account “ChainLinkGod” a month ago. But he can’t stress enough the perks of starting out in crypto anonymously.
“You should probably be anon first unless you have a good reason to be doxed because you can always go doxed from being anon, but you can’t go the other way around,” he tells Hall of Flame.
Beginning incognito also offers you the flexibility to step back without embarrassment if your account is a flop within the community.
When Rynes started posting on X, he was just a kid.
“I joined crypto in early 2018. I was a high school student. I wasn’t even actually old enough to open a Coinbase account at the time.”
He started ChainLinkGod the following year aged 18. Raised in the Southwest United States, Rynes’ favorite subjects in school were history and computer programming. Apart from crypto, the now 24-year-old these days enjoys hiking, off-roading and heading down to the shooting range to engage a different part of his brain.
Despite starting out young, he was smart enough to understand the significance of Chainlink.
“I knew there was a problem with smart contracts where they can’t connect to anything in the external world. How useful could they be really at scale? And from there, I stumbled upon Chainlink,” he explains.
Back in those days, most people in the Chainlink community were members of the frog army.
“I think it’s more like every community has its own memetic energy to it. The Chainlink community was frogs and cubes and hexagons, and everybody was like a frog identity at the time,” he adds.
Rynes’ educational threads about Chainlink ended up being a hit with the Chainlink community, garnering him 171,800 X followers.
“I saw that there was this information gap where people didn’t really understand oracles, and I wanted to step in and be that liaison,” he says.
But it’s been difficult for ChainLinkGod to speak at crypto conferences or spread the word about LINK in real life due to the account’s anon nature, which helped prompt his decision to unmask himself.
“So really it was just joining the community camaraderie, but I figured over time it made more sense to go doxed.”
How did ChainLinkGod get Twitter Fame?
Rynes has been grinding away for six years, posting long educational threads on Chainlink, which fans have been accessing over time, resulting in a steady uptick in followers.
“When I started doing these educational tweet threads, like these technical deep dives, I think that really helped serve as an accelerant,” he says.
Rynes explains that the growing Chainlink community is a “very tight-knit community” and he was lucky to get in early and nab the SEO-friendly X username “Chainlink God.”
“If you look up Chainlink, my account is one the first ones that pops up because it is ChainLinkGod. The SEO port worked in my favor a little bit.”
It was in DeFi summer in 2020 and the “craze of yield farming” that Rynes began noticing a massive spike in followers, possibly because a “fair amount of protocols that were enabled by Chainlink launched for the first time.”
“I think I pulled a lot of people into the channel and then helped them along their Chain journey during that time period,” Rynes adds.
What type of content does ChainLinkGod like?
Rynes mainly follows “thought leaders in the space” for the long-form content they publish on social media.
In particular, he enjoys ShapeShift CEO Eric Vorhees’ content, a non-maximalist Bitcoin OG with over 640,000 X followers.
Rynes explains that Vorhees’ thoughts on Bitcoin are always just “very well informed,” and he has learned a lot through his posts.
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He is also a fan of both Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes for their “ridiculous amount of blog content.”
“That is because whether they end up being right or wrong, I like seeing what people’s thought processes are,” he explains.
Every now and then, you can even catch him having a good old chat with Buterin on X.
For a laugh, he also enjoys popular pseudonymous crypto troll Gwart and “their content and deadpan sarcasm.”
What type of content does ChainLinkGod do?
“I’m predominantly focused on Chainlink, so if you want to learn anything and everything about Chainlink oracles and adaptability, then I’m definitely the person for that,” he declares.
“In general, I tweet about what I see are the major megatrends happening, such as tokenized assets and DeFi as a whole.”
You’ll also catch Rynes chiming in whenever there is a proper circus happening in the crypto industry.
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“I also just enjoy tweeting about the things that I find interesting about the industry, which can include calling out the shenanigans as I saw them in 2022,” he says.
In fact, his most popular post on X was him making a sly dig toward the crypto exchange FTX following its collapse in November 2022.
He’s also expanded out from just social media.
“I’ve done a whole lot of different types of content. I write tweet threads and blogs. I’ve done podcasts. People always love podcasts,” he says.
ChainLinkGod’s price predictions?
Unfortunately, we didn’t get any price predictions from Rynes. Not everyone’s as open as Tim Draper with his $250,000 Bitcoin forecast.
“A lot of cryptos are just tied to what’s happening macro wise, and so macro wise interest rates drop that could be very good for the industry. But there’s so many different factors that are hard to account for so I’m always cautiously optimistic when it comes to crypto.”
Never mind. Whether the price of Chainlink crashes or goes through the roof, Rynes will keep churning out his educational content and probably hold onto any Chainlink he owns forever.
“I’m in it for the long run so they can go up, down or in circles, and I’m still going to be here,” he laughs.
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Ciaran Lyons
Ciaran Lyons is an Australian crypto journalist. He’s also a standup comedian and has been a radio and TV presenter on Triple J, SBS and The Project.
