It would be an understatement to say that Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) was one of the hottest story angles for cryptocurrency a few years ago. It seemed every week that a new coin was being introduced to repair some major flaw in the established coins.<\/p>\n
A few have stuck around, but the vast majority either\u00a0failed\u00a0or were pure\u00a0frauds. It would be a difficult sell now to get a major publication to cover an ICO that didn\u2019t truly alter cryptocurrency fundamentally. That\u2019s actually likely a good thing, because the frauds did not help the overall crypto public opinion.<\/p>\n
Put bluntly, the best angle right now is to address the critics of crypto directly and answer their concerns. For example, one of the issues often taken with crypto wallets is the challenges of their use. It\u2019s not exactly easy to type out a long string of random characters and not make a mistake.<\/p>\n
QR codes have been used to solve this, but not every use case has a camera handy. Coinbase Wallet introduced usernames to make transferring crypto far more like a PayPal or Venmo transaction than a traditional crypto transfer. It\u2019s a simple innovation that could help the masses use the product far more easily. These are the things that a\u00a0good PR firm versed in crypto\u00a0can\u00a0help promote<\/p>\n
It\u2019s important to remember that crypto isn\u2019t fully accepted yet. It has use cases, but for it to achieve its full potential it needs mass adoption. In the parlance of Clay Christensen, it needs to cross the chasm from the early adopters to the majority. Participating in crypto echo chambers is never going to help this, nor is it shouting down \u201cnocoiners\u201d that point out some of the current flaws in the crypto ecosystem. If anything, that\u2019s counterproductive to appealing to the masses.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still interest in crypto if search is any indication. At the time of writing, there\u2019s been an uptick in interest around Bitcoin. It\u2019s not what it was at the end of 2017, but it\u2019s a promising trend for those working in the space.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the visual image that\u2019s often used to portray assets like Bitcoin, there\u2019s actually a decent number of people that think BitCoin is a literal coin that\u2019s worth thousands. Remember that next time you start arguing about the merits of SHA-256 encryption.<\/p>\n
It also doesn\u2019t help when massive price changes happen in the crypto markets and there isn\u2019t a good reason for the change. A few days ago bitcoin fell by more than 10% in a few hours. Even crypto blogs didn\u2019t have a demonstrable idea behind the massive change. Stocks that change like that must have missed earnings, while commodities must have had significant supply or demand changes like regulation or alternatives. Having an answer for such drastic swings is something the media wants to know. We should have answers if we\u2019re going to be the experts.<\/p>\n
There are still innovations happening in the space. In particular, I\u2019m excited about the notion of using crypto to facilitate cross border payments that avoid the very expensive and inefficient systems that currently exist. There\u2019s no telling, yet, if the winner in this space will be a stablecoin, centralized crypto, or one of the classic coins like Bitcoin. The market will figure that out. A big part of the excitement here is realizing that a lot can change here and make the system better.<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that the media is done caring about the technology that underpins cryptocurrency. The Lambos bought with Bitcoin during the peak aren\u2019t exactly engendering excitement either. For media to cover anything, it has to matter to their viewership. Those viewers aren\u2019t early-adopting crypto maximalists, they\u2019re people with normal jobs. Esoteric and economic arguments aren\u2019t what matters here, application and utility do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It would be an understatement to say that Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) was one of the hottest story angles for … <\/p>\n