The State of Crypto Media
For years, crypto media gave us the luxury of assumed context. The “why” was relatively implicit to our native audience. Now we won’t have that luxury anymore.
Written by Anastasia, VP of Communications at Hype
It’s been an unnerving time for crypto publications, reporters, and in-turn, crypto comms people over the last several months.
One by one, many of the top-tier publications that championed our niche have either shut down the presses or pivoted into new offerings.
Last October we saw Blockworks shut down its news division and pivot into data/analytics. We also watched from the sidelines as Cointelegraph was de-indexed from Google that same month, losing around 90% of readers and virtually all searchability online. They’ve since appeared to have deleted published articles prior to January 2026, which has brought even more backlash against the outlet.
It kept going. DL News announced it was shutting down all operations at the end of this month. Then came the Bankless announcement that they too were laying off a portion of their news team. David Hoffman went so far as to sell all of his ETH.
Morale is pretty low right now. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
This honestly feels like the end of an era and in many ways it kind of is. But this doesn’t mean crypto media is dying. I think it’s more of a sign that we’re moving in the direction we’d always dreamed of. Mainstream.
I’ve been noticing the shift for a while. Three years ago it was a rare (and exhilarating) experience to hop into the back of an Uber and be able to talk about crypto with the driver. Now it’s the norm. While I can’t necessarily equate conversations with Uber drivers to adoption trends, there’s something to be said about how much the conversation has changed over the years. It very quickly went from explaining what Bitcoin is to chatting about the opportunities (and ethics) with prediction markets.
As the conversation changes and the exclusivity of our industry dissolves, we’re going to see a dissolution of many of the niche spaces we’ve held near and dear for years.
The shift’s been happening subtly with the big-name pubs too. In 2023, Forbes launched “Forbes Web3” as an offshoot news arm that was specifically for crypto. At the time, we saw it as an unspoken reality that we’d (finally) picked up the coveted institutional interest. But Forbes has since quietly retired Forbes Web3 and all crypto news has now been filtered into the “Fintech” section on the site.
It’s not “crypto” or “web3” news anymore. It’s just “news” now. We’re upgrading to having a seat at the big kids’ table, even though it might feel like we’re struggling to see over the edge of it.
We’ve been talking about “onboarding the next billion users” for years. It’s almost become cliché at this point. But I don’t think we fully considered the growing pains we’d have to go through to get there.
Onboarding the next billion users means our stories will inherently be interesting to people outside of our circle. And while mainstream media is making more room for our news, they’re simultaneously scooping up our native audiences. That transition isn’t going to be easy for everyone.
I had a chat with a couple of my favorites in the industry -@Timccopeland, who recently left his position at The Block to “detox from crypto,” and @whosknave, who now reports on crypto at Fortune as a Fellow after the Blockworks restructuring. It’s been a pretty transformative time for both of them, albeit in different ways.
“I’m just taking a break generally, pretty tired from being on the crypto rollercoaster for the last nine years,” Copeland told me. “It’s definitely a challenging time for crypto media, with lower retail interest in crypto. We’ve seen quite a few layoffs and outlets shutting down. Ultimately reinforces the point of having a sustainable business model and the ones that figure that out will survive. Potentially it’s time for a paywalled outlet, if there are enough people willing to fund it.”
There’s a prickly truth to this transition: crypto media is being forced to prove its business model at the same time that crypto itself is becoming less niche. But our stories aren’t disappearing from the conversation, they’re just being redistributed into more mainstream media outlets. And the barrier to entry is higher.
“Can’t sugarcoat it - the crypto reporting landscape has been tough the past few years,” Kubinec told me. “There just isn’t much of an audience for incremental DeFi stories or brand partnership announcements anymore. I think the winners in crypto media going forward will be the tier 1 publications who cover the space regularly (Fortune, WSJ, Bloomberg) and niche venues that own a subtopic within crypto really well (research newsletters, X pages, podcasts).”
For years, crypto media gave us the luxury of assumed context. The “why” was relatively implicit to our native audience. Now we won’t have that luxury anymore. The “why” will have to be abundantly clear…moreso than ever…if it’s going to resonate with the masses.
The stories will have to be better than ever if they’re going to make it into tier 1 publications. Mainstream audiences aren’t going to care if your bridge is faster or if your L2 is cheaper or if your wallet is non-custodial or if your protocol is announcing a strategic partnership that’s going to change the world. The questions they’re asking revolve less around “how does it work/what does it do?” and way more around “why is this important to me/why do I need it?”
That means we’re going to have to tap heavily into the human element. We’ll have to get better at taking the weird, technical, crypto-native concept and turning it into a story that a Fortune reader, a Bloomberg editor, a policy reporter, or someone’s dad can understand without watering it down into oblivion.
Instead of the story being “you can send cross-border payments on a chain that offers virtually instant settling with 1m TPS” it needs to be “you’re 2 clicks and 3 seconds away from sending your overseas loved one their mortgage payment. Oh, and it’s cheaper.”
Crypto is less siloed than it used to be. It’s become inherently entangled with finance, politics, culture, AI, entertainment, the future of the internet – the list goes on. The story belongs everywhere now. What used to take six months to build credibility in trade publications can now be done in half the time through mainstream outlets.
The catch, of course, is that the story has to be great. And so does the product.
I think what we’re witnessing is the messy, painful middle ground of crypto truly moving mainstream. And if we really meant what we said about bringing this tech to the next billion users, then this was always part of the deal.
This article was first published on X. If you enjoyed reading this, follow Anastasia on X for more on crypto media, communications, and PR.