Brooks did not respond to requests for further comment. A spokesperson for Binance declined to comment.
On Thursday, Brooks made the announcement in a statement describing his new employer as an established leader in the digital asset industry, renowned for its sustained research and development efforts and best-in-class proprietary technologies.

Subscriber growth is harder to track than the other metrics. Only the current subscriber count is displayed for a particular subreddit, and historical data cannot be rebuilt retrospectively as subscribers do not have a visible historical imprint. A third-party website, RedditMetrics (http://redditmetrics.com/), has been retrieving and storing real-time subscriber counts; however their data on the particular subreddits of interest only reaches back to 2012 so the subscriber growth analysis can only start at this point. Fig 2 shows the three social media metric time series for each cryptocurrency; note that subscriber growth is the only metric that can have negative associated values, caused by more users unsubscribing than subscribing on a particular day.
More importantly, we find that the ACP and ANET factors can price cryptocurrency returns. In particular, all of our five cryptocurrencies have positive and significant exposures to the fundamental factors. The explanatory power of ACP and ANET is over and above any effects related to the Bitcoin and momentum factors. This finding is non-trivial given that the five cryptocurrencies in our sample have consistently accounted for between 80% to 95% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalisation. Furthermore, we extend our factor analysis to an out-of-sample set of 33 cryptocurrencies obtained from the Bittrex exchange. We find that the aggregate computing power and network factors also price cryptocurrencies in this large out-of-sample data set.