Connect with us
  • tg

Cryptocurrency

Blockworks’ Jason Yanowitz On Building ‘The Largest Research And Analytics Platform’ In Crypto

letizo News

Published

on

Last month, Blockworks announced a $12 million fundraise, putting its valuation at $135 million. Coverage of the event said the brand would use new funds to expand globally and build a research and data offering.Benzinga caught up with co-founder Jason Yanowitz to discuss the event in detail, as well as what he sees for the future of crypto.The following conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.Q: Hello Jason, it is nice to meet you. Care to start with an introduction, mentioning some of the early motivations for embarking on the Blockworks journey?Jason Yanowitz: While visiting Hungary in 2015, I heard about Bitcoin BTC/USD. Having learned about how people grew up in the region during the 1950s and ‘60s, the idea of self-sovereign money and breaking free from tyranny was enticing.In 2017, I was introduced to Ethereum ETH/USD and realized there were only a few good sources of information. Information asymmetries shaped the original thesis for the Blockworks business.Talk about Blockworks’ inception. How did you build this business, and how was it different from how other businesses in the space are built?When building media businesses, you start with the content. After you have an audience, you monetize through products such as newsletters and events.We built our media company backward. We started with conferences first. We hosted happy hours that brought together the institutional and crypto crowds.This eventually led to the creation of our very popular Digital Asset Summit, probably the only crypto event where people are still wearing suits and ties.Then, we added a podcast network, our first step into what I would call digital media.When the pandemic happened, we realized we needed to double down on the media side of the business to fill in some holes. We added reporters from Bloomberg, CNBC and the Wall Street Journal to help us create a world-class media company, launching a new media site in 2021.Talk about how the fundraising conversation looked like.2021 was a parabolic year for us. The newsletter business grew exponentially, and we added several podcasts, which are doing tens of millions of downloads, as well as a webinar business and conference in partnership with Bankless. It’s called Permissionless, a decentralized finance (DeFi) crypto-native event attended by the thousands.At the end of 2021, we started talking to our audience again, asking them what they needed. We learned they needed a professional platform through which they could get governance, protocol data, and information, as well as insights into on-chain activity. For instance, finding and comparing the user metrics of a Uniswap UNI/USD and Sushiswap SUSHI/USD, or finding what the revenue of an Aave AAVE/USD is compared to Compound COMP/USD.We hired a CTO, built an engineering and product team, and spent time building until we launched in May 2022. Within a year, we will have the largest research and analytics platform in all of crypto.What’s this current bear market doing for your business?If you look at traditional SaaS businesses, they usually raise a bunch of money, and most of this money goes to marketing and customer acquisition while the other half goes to product and engineering.For us, we have a profitable business, so we already spin off a lot of cash flow that gets reinvested in the product, and then we don’t have to spend any money on marketing because we have millions of people who read our media site.We drive those people down the funnel. We see this bear market as an opportunity to put some fuel behind the fire and accelerate growth, leapfrogging our competitors.Can you talk more about the details of the fundraising?We raised $12 million in funding at a $135 million valuation. 10T Holdings led the investment, Framework Ventures and Santiago Santos participated.People don’t realize there are many different types of VCs. The challenge for us was picking the right ones.Reasons we asked 10T to lead this round include the narrative they conveyed around profitability.The downfall over the last decade of technology investing comes from VCs who pushed their portfolio of companies to get on the VC hamster wheel. We wanted to keep building a profitable media and information business. We were looking to accelerate the growth while keeping the culture intact.Do you want to talk about your intentions to expand globally? What’s driving that?There’s never been more interest in Asia. Much of this interest is the result of regulatory regimes elsewhere. For example, look at how the regulators in the U.S. are treating brands like Coinbase Global Inc. It’s pushing a lot of the best entrepreneurs and investors overseas.China had a strict ban, but they’ve done a complete 180 largely because they see the potential capital flows. So, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong are our target areas where we’re actively looking to host some conferences.Who has all the capital?The U.S. has the capital. When you look at things like DeFi and trading, we’re still the most dominant. What we don’t have are the users, and that’s due to regulators making it very tough for them to use things like VPNs.London and the EU have taken a different, methodical approach. They just put in place a regulatory framework called MiCA, and that’s driving a lot of entrepreneurs there because they have a better idea of what the constraints are.Can you talk a little bit about Blockworks’ mission and operational alignment?Our mission is to drive forward the most important conversations in the industry. I don’t think talking about the price of a token is the most important conversation. Even if we have to sacrifice page views or attendance at a conference, we will always stand true to this view.Good content will win out in the long term. We’re playing a very long-term game.There are two ways to scale a crypto media company. You can go the angle of growing page view numbers. On the other hand, we go a completely other direction, which is very deep and niche.For example, we have one podcast called Bell Curve. We just finished a whole season on this thing called MEV or Maximal Extractable Value. There are probably less than 5,000 people in the world who care about MEV, but when MEV becomes a hot topic in the future, we’ll be seen as the definitive knowledge source.We don’t want 100 million people to read Blockworks. We want a million of the most powerful crypto executives and investors in the world to read us. Right now, those are the people that care about MEV.Notwithstanding the crypto winter narrative, what keeps you so optimistic and bullish, and what are some of the ways you’re playing this view beyond what we talked about?We launched Blockworks in December 2017. That was the top of the market, and we’ve basically been building for two and a half years straight into a bear market, now.We like bear markets a lot. It’s easier to think, breathe and build substantial products. Crypto will do the same thing for finance the Internet did for information; the Internet made it incredibly easy for information to flow in near real-time. It unlocked a ridiculous amount of capital and human talent, and there was no way to predict this would happen.Finance is very walled and grows slowly. If you want to send money to a friend in London, it may take days for it to get there. It is a very archaic system, and we believe there is a lot of good that will come to the world if you break the walled gardens of finance.What’s one tip you may have for people trying to grow their own startup?Running out of money kills companies. We got this advice a month two into the business from another founder. We were in a room and thinking through what products we should build. We had two people, and Coindesk had 150. We kept thinking about how we could do things better. This other founder looked at us. After building companies for 30 years, they said the best way was to survive the longest.If you look at a lot of other crypto media companies, they played some dirty tricks to grow fast. They won’t survive. I think you don’t need the best product across the board. Instead, you need to be slightly more cautious than people think they need to be.Odd question. Have you encountered imposter syndrome?We did. Nobody thought crypto would work back in 2018 or so. It was a dead industry. There’s a funny site showing how many times the media mentioned Bitcoin is dead. In 2019, it was like 300 times. My old company called me, offering me a job if I wanted it at the time.As a founder, it probably isn’t a healthy thing, but my identity is so tied up in the company’s success that it pushes me to keep going. We had to succeed because we had tied everything up, including our reputation, in the business. Founders can’t have alternative plans. Failure isn’t an option.Any parting words?I’m excited about our research and data platform. I am spending a lot of time there, and I think the exciting thing happening in digital media is the death of major brands that used venture money to buy trust. I think it was essential for us to bootstrap the business so that we didn’t try to use venture money to buy trust.If you look at the most successful media companies in the world, they all have a product at the bottom of the funnel. Bloomberg has the Terminal and Politico has Pro. You even have The Hustle, a newsletter acquired by Hubspot Inc HUBS. They wanted to put their products at the bottom of that media funnel. Infatuation got acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co JPM to drive users to their Sapphire Preferred. Barstool Sports got bought by PENN Entertainment Inc PENN and put a casino at the bottom of the funnel. That’s the future of media, and we’re excited about that.A decade from now, what do you see?Crypto will be the underlying technology of the entire financial market. Crypto as an asset class will be one of the largest in the entire world, and that will translate to Blockworks competing with brands like the Wall Street Journal.Photo: Courtesy Blockworks

Cryptocurrency

Key Metrics That Signal a Crypto Market Bottom, According to Santiment

letizo News

Published

on

As the crypto market continues to trade range-bound, the on-chain analytics firm Santiment has outlined key metrics that could help traders identify a market bottom. These indicators enable market participants to know when it is safe to inject more capital into their portfolio in anticipation of future rallies.

According to a Santiment report, the metrics include social trends, key stakeholder accumulation, a drop in Mean Dollar Invested Age, and social dominance fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) signals.

When Market Bottom?

The crypto community is constantly talking about coins and predicting which direction their prices are heading. Santiment said these social trends are significantly influenced by the momentum that markets have shown over a timeframe, so this makes traders’ decisions emotion-based on most occasions.

A slight drop in an asset’s price—bitcoin (BTC), for instance—could trigger a sudden bearish narrative, with social media posts depicting negative sentiment. The opposite is often seen after a sudden spike in a cryptocurrency’s value. Hence, traders can predict future price movements by paying attention to the vocal majority on social media.

While paying attention to social trends, the dominance of positive or negative commentaries could signal a good time to buy or sell. Santiment noted that a high level of fear or missing out (FOMO) would lead to prices topping soon; however, major FUD could lead to great bottoming opportunities.

As a result, projects with high levels of negative sentiment present good buying opportunities, as prices often move in the opposite direction of the crowd’s expectations.

Old Coins Returning to Circulation

As the crypto community often gets predictions wrong, whales move prices the way they fit due to their large capital, which controls the market. Santiment says traders should watch key stakeholders no matter what asset they are analyzing.

The best times to buy are when crypto prices drop, and whale wallets accumulate aggressively. When whales start accumulating, there is often a surge in transactions valued above $100,000 or $1 million, so Santiment insists a spike in large transaction volumes is often a bullish sign.

Finally, a decline in the Mean Dollar Invested Age also signals a market bottom. This metric tells the average of the dollars invested in an asset. When this indicator drops, it means that a healthy level of dormant tokens is returning to regular circulation, which could trigger a market rally.

Notably, the Mean Dollar Invested Age works in tandem with another metric, Age Consumed, which indicates the number of tokens changing addresses on a certain date multiplied by the last time they moved. A huge spike in Age Consumed helps predict market bottoms.

SPECIAL OFFER (Sponsored)
Binance Free $600 (CryptoPotato Exclusive): Use this link to register a new account and receive $600 exclusive welcome offer on Binance (full details).

LIMITED OFFER for CryptoPotato readers at Bybit: Use this link to register and open a $500 FREE position on any coin!

Continue Reading

Cryptocurrency

Arthur Hayes Confident in $250,000 Bitcoin Amid Fed’s Policy Pivot

letizo News

Published

on

Despite a minor recovery this week, Bitcoin’s price continues to struggle well below $90,000. The crypto asset has been under tremendous market stress as traders remained cautious due to economic uncertainties.

However, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes believes that Bitcoin could surge to $250,000 by the end of 2025.

Bitcoin’s Push to $250,000

In his latest blog post, Hayes made a bold prediction while analysing a crucial shift in US monetary policy, where he believes the Federal Reserve will eventually cave to pressure and resume quantitative easing (QE) due to political and economic pressures. He argued that Bitcoin’s price will rise dramatically as the Fed reintroduces liquidity into the system, driven by its need to support the US economy.

Hayes specifically pointed to the Federal Reserve’s recent shift in stance regarding the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) and the overall balance sheet policy. He predicts that the central bank will grant an exemption for banks on the SLR, which will effectively allow them to hold more Treasury bonds without facing stricter capital requirements.

This, according to Hayes, will act as a form of Treasury QE, which will flood the market with liquidity.

The former CEO of BitMEX went on to draw on comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who hinted at the possibility of stopping the roll-off of assets from the Fed’s balance sheet, as well as a recent statement from Bessent about the impact of removing the SLR, which could lower treasury bill yields and boost liquidity by tens of billions of dollars.

Hayes’s analysis also addresses the potential inflationary impacts of proposed tariffs. While Powell has maintained that any tariff-induced inflation would be “transitory,” he argued that the Fed’s commitment to easing will remain firm, even if inflation spikes.

This belief in “transitory” inflation allows the central bank to continue its policies of monetary expansion without fear of long-term consequences, making it less concerned about the inflationary effects of tariffs on goods or services.

Bitcoin: “Anti-Establishment” Asset?

Further elaborating on the liquidity dynamics, the 40-year-old American entrepreneur noted that the US Treasury has already reduced its pace of quantitative tightening (QT) from $25 billion per month to just $5 billion post-April 1, which has created an annualized liquidity boost of $240 billion. He predicts this number could rise to $420 billion as the year progresses, which could essentially mean a shift toward more aggressive easing.

For Hayes, these conditions mirror those of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), where gold and other commodities outperformed traditional assets as the Fed’s liquidity injections began. While Bitcoin did not exist during the GFC, he believes it now serves as the “anti-establishment” asset, set to benefit from the same liquidity-driven tailwinds that propelled gold during the last crisis.

Hayes also doubled down on his $250,000 Bitcoin prediction while arguing that the Fed’s eventual return to QE will drive the cryptocurrency higher, as it thrives in environments of fiat currency debasement. He believes Bitcoin’s technology and its positioning as a store of value make it the ideal asset to capitalize on the flood of liquidity that he expects to come.

Despite acknowledging market risks, Hayes remains confident that Bitcoin’s value will soar as the Fed’s monetary policies align with his outlook for a higher price in the coming months.

SPECIAL OFFER (Sponsored)
Binance Free $600 (CryptoPotato Exclusive): Use this link to register a new account and receive $600 exclusive welcome offer on Binance (full details).

LIMITED OFFER for CryptoPotato readers at Bybit: Use this link to register and open a $500 FREE position on any coin!

Continue Reading

Cryptocurrency

Why Is Pi Network’s PI Falling While the Entire Market Rallies?

letizo News

Published

on

TL;DR

  • The broader crypto market has posted impressive gains over the past 24 hours, led by bitcoin’s surge past $85,000.
  • However, PI continues to disappoint even in such more positive times, as its price is close to breaking below $0.7 after another minor daily decline.
PI Token Price. Source: CoinGecko
PI Token Price. Source: CoinGecko

As the graph above demonstrates, it has been nothing short but a volatile downfall for PI, which was released to the public and for global trading just over a month ago. The asset peaked in late February, but has dumped by more than 75% since the $3 all-time high.

Despite some promising developments on the Pi Network front, such as verification process updates, the native cryptocurrency has failed to recapture its momentum and is down by 3.5% in the past day.

This is particularly disappointing given the fact that almost all other crypto assets have marked gains within the same period. Bitcoin surpassed $85,000 for the first time since Friday, ETH is above $1,900, while DOGE and ADA have jumped by over 4% daily.

Nevertheless, Pi Network’s community, which has grown exponentially in the past several years when the project was still under development, remains bullish despite the negative price performance as of late.

Numerous X users predicted that its price could bounce-off the current $0.7 support and head toward $2 once “the market volume returns.” MOON JEFF was even more bullish for PI’s short-term price movements, indicating that it could go to $2.73 by the end of the month.

SPECIAL OFFER (Sponsored)
Binance Free $600 (CryptoPotato Exclusive): Use this link to register a new account and receive $600 exclusive welcome offer on Binance (full details).

LIMITED OFFER for CryptoPotato readers at Bybit: Use this link to register and open a $500 FREE position on any coin!

Continue Reading

Trending

©2021-2024 Letizo All Rights Reserved