Follower counts in crypto are a purchasable commodity, and the people selling promotion know exactly which numbers buyers look at. Vetting is the process of looking at the numbers they cannot buy cheaply, and it takes about twenty minutes per account once you know where to look.
These are the seven checks we run before an account enters a campaign, in the order that eliminates the most candidates fastest.
1. Read the median, not the best post
Take the last twenty posts and find the middle value for views and replies. One viral post distorts an average badly, and the pitch deck you were sent was built around exactly that post.
The median tells you what a typical post from this account does, which is what you are buying. A large gap between the best post and the median means the account has occasional reach it does not control.
2. Compare paid posts against organic ones
Find their previous promotional posts and compare the engagement to their normal content. A steep drop on sponsored content means their audience recognises and ignores paid placement, and your post will perform like their other paid posts, not like their best organic one.
This single comparison is the most predictive check available and almost nobody runs it, because it requires reading their feed rather than a media kit.
3. Read the replies
Open the replies on three or four recent posts. Real audiences argue, ask specific questions and reference earlier posts. Purchased engagement is short, generic, positive and often from accounts created in the same period.
Click through to a handful of the repliers. Accounts with no history, a default avatar and a following list full of other promoters are the signature, and once you have seen one such reply section you recognise the next one in seconds.
4. Check the growth curve
Follower growth from real content is uneven, with steps around notable posts. Purchased growth appears as a smooth ramp or a vertical jump with no corresponding rise in engagement.
An account that gained a large block of followers in a week and whose median engagement did not move bought them. The follower count is now permanently misleading and the engagement rate is the honest number.
5. Look at what they promoted before
Scroll back six months and list the projects they posted about. If most of them failed quickly, their audience has learned what a promotion from this account means, and that learning applies to your campaign too.
Frequency matters as much as outcome. An account promoting something new every few days has an audience that has stopped reading promotions, whatever the engagement numbers say.
6. Confirm the audience is the one you need
A large account whose audience trades memecoins is close to useless for an infrastructure product, and the reverse is equally true. Read what their audience actually discusses in the replies rather than what the account’s own bio claims.
Language and region matter here more than most buyers expect. An account with strong engagement in one regional market may deliver almost nothing in another, and both facts are visible in the replies.
7. Cross-check against an independent tool
Several services score crypto accounts on audience authenticity and historical performance. None of them is authoritative alone, and each has known failure modes, but a serious disagreement between two of them and the media kit is worth investigating.
Use them as a filter that flags accounts for closer reading, never as the decision itself. The manual checks above are what actually decide, and the tools only tell you where to spend that time.
What passing looks like in practice
The accounts that survive this process are usually smaller than the ones initially proposed. Our active X roster for quote-retweet work runs to 87 verified accounts with a combined reach of 9.6 million and an average engagement rate of 1.70 percent, and assembling it meant rejecting the large majority of accounts that applied.
That ratio is normal. A vetting process that approves most candidates is not a vetting process, and the accounts with the most impressive follower counts fail these checks more often than they pass them.
Once an account passes, the next problem is the brief, covered in how to brief a crypto KOL. Screening, negotiation and reporting as a service are on our crypto influencer marketing page.