In the drive toward energy crisis, direct ethylene glycol cells have received a great deal of attention, but its commercial development has been greatly restricted due to the lack of cost-effective anodic catalysts. Therefore, it is essential to design a suitable catalyst with excellent performance. To this end, we herein report a facile one-pot tactic for successfully synthesizing the pompon-like PtAg nanocrystals (NCs) with marvelous electrocatalytic activity and amazing long-term stability. More specifically, the results have proved that the pompon-like PtAg possessed the superior mass activity of 5042.9 mA mg(-1) towards ethylene glycol oxidation reaction (EGOR) under the alkaline condition, 5.4-fold enhancements than that of commercial Pt/C. Upon the basis of our investigation, we attributed the better catalytic activity to abundant available surface active sites and synergistic effect, as well as the brushy hairs on the surface of PtAg NCs. There is no doubt that the as-obtained nanocatalysts show a great prospect for serving as excellent anode catalyst in fuel cells and beyond. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.