Molly White

Why Molly is the canonical Curator / Aggregator

Molly White grew up editing Wikipedia from age thirteen, accumulating more than 100,000 edits under the username GorillaWarfare, serving three terms on the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, and eventually proposing — and winning — the Wikimedia Foundation’s ban on accepting cryptocurrency donations in May 2022. Those two decades of work established the core habit of the Curator: maintaining a structured, impartially sourced record over time, even when the subject matter is contested and the incentive to look away is strong.

In December 2021, while still a software engineer at HubSpot, White launched Web3 Is Going Just Great — a chronological database of crypto failures, frauds, rug pulls, and exploits, each entry timestamped, linked to primary sources, and accompanied by a running dollar-loss counter. The project did not produce original investigative reporting; it aggregated what was already happening in public, applied consistent sourcing discipline, and made the cumulative pattern legible. By the end of 2022 the site drew between 60,000 and 100,000 monthly visitors. The Verge described its tone as “dryly funny, almost clinical” — a register that only works when the underlying database is trusted. White later expanded the format with Citation Needed, a newsletter covering crypto, AI, and tech policy, and with Follow the Crypto (2024), which tracked the political donation footprint of the crypto industry and led to an FEC complaint against Coinbase co-filed with Public Citizen.

The Curator’s defining claim is that value accumulates in the database itself — in the update discipline, the consistent sourcing standard, and the impartiality that allows the record to be cited by people with opposing views. White’s trajectory makes this concrete: she was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022, became an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, advised Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on crypto legislation, and in 2026 launched Tech Influence Watch to extend the same curatorial method to AI super-PAC political spending. The category she tracks tends to define her credibility; her credibility, in turn, makes the category legible.

The Curator / Aggregator filters and structures information flow — databases and leaderboards. See the Curator / Aggregator role → · Read the full Curator / Aggregator deep-dive →

Same role, different wave