The lessons from covering crypto

Lauren Watson writes for Columbia Journalism Review how cryptocurrency coverage has evolved to where skepticism is not encouraged.

Watson reports, “It’s also crucial to be mindful of coverage as hype—as with vitriol or falsehoods that emanate from MAGA-land, providing a platform comes with risks, and even critical discourse can be exploited. ‘I sometimes worry that by covering certain things, you’re kind of giving more attention to these meme tokens that will result in more people investing in them and the price going up,’ Quinn said. ‘There’s so many influences in the information that’s put out by these companies trying to get people to invest, and it’s just nonsense.’

“That will only become easier as the SEC, under Trump, sets about dismantling its crypto investigations unit and halting legal action against exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, loosening restrictions. ‘Crypto feels very emboldened to build right now, without being prosecuted,’ Chow said. And yet, without oversight, more of ‘trad fi’ (traditional finance, in crypto parlance) is set to feel the impact when the next crash comes. Such was the case recently in Argentina, where President Javier Milei promoted, in an X post that he shortly deleted, a cryptocurrency called $LIBRA, whose value rapidly skyrocketed and then collapsed—a classic ‘rug pull’ (a crypto term for abandoning a project after raising funds, leaving participants with worthless tokens) that rattled the nation’s economy; Milei is now under investigation for fraud. Many Argentinians invest in cryptocurrency—which, in light of extreme inflation, they commonly view as safer than the peso. Comparisons to the United States, in the wake of Trump’s commitment to Bitcoin, abound.

“That story was covered by CoinDesk, including reactions from Bitcoin-adjacent executives—at least some of whom were underwhelmed. (Absent a buying plan, the founder of a crypto hedge fund posted on X, the strategy was ‘a pig in lipstick.’) Quinn and her ex-CoinDesk colleagues looked on as major outlets picked up on the reporting, much as they have on other crypto news; the drama of their exit seems not to have made a lasting impact. ‘This community has a five-second memory,’ she said. ‘There are cases of scammers that rug-pull, then a year later they are considered rehabilitated. People forgive very quickly, it seems—or forget.’ Her editors are now looking for work. She has followed this and other stories for her new Substack, Scamurai, focused on crypto scams. White welcomes the addition of an independent journalist to the scene. But as she told me, ‘It’s not lucrative to be a crypto skeptic.'”