Now crypto media is in the firing line

By Ian Silvera

Boom, bust, boom, boom, bust. Just another day in crypto land, where now even blockchain-focused media is facing its own existential crisis as regulators continue to tighten their rules around the industry. The Editor-in-Chief of CoinDesk rival Decrypt, Dan Roberts, woke up the other day to find that the outlet’s newsletters had gone down. 

For those new to modern publishing, these editorial products provide a key link to readers, creating crucial revenue streams in the process. In other words, it's no small fry when this happens. The outlet declared a “War on Crypto”, but newsletter provider MailChimp countered that the move, which impacted other crypto-related companies, was down to “recent attacks targeting Mailchimp’s crypto-related uses”. 

“We’ve taken proactive measures to temporarily suspend account access for accounts where we detected suspicious activity while we investigate the incident further,” a spokesperson for the company stressed. 

“We took this action to protect our users’ data, and then acted quickly to notify all primary contacts of impacted accounts and implement an additional set of enhanced security measures.” 

They went on to say that MailChimp did not suspend accounts based on their industry. “We realize this may have caused uncertainty for our crypto-related users and their customers and apologize for the disruption. We are continuing our investigation and proactively providing impacted users with timely and accurate information throughout the process,” they added. 

No doubt this will strengthen calls for more decentralised projects in the media. Incidentally enough, Decrypt has supported the so-called pubDAO, an experiment into Web3 media and social media. Elsewhere, established media powerhouses which have backed an expansion into crypto seem to be sticking with it. 

Bloomberg in particular is pumping out content around the industry, despite the bear market. ‘Stick with it’ seems to be the mantra. The rewards down the road could – could - be great.