Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto – Media dropping crypto ball

“The mainstream media is really bad when it comes to crypto. CNBC, for instance, sensationalises things in an attempt to draw eyeballs. There are really good journalists in this space, doing good work, but there is also a lot of garbage.”

So said Nick Tomaino, Founder of 1confirmation, at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit: Crypto event, which took place yesterday. Tomaino was joined by Dan Held, Co-founder of Interchange, in a discussion focusing on the role of the media and how tough it is to craft a simple narrative around this space.

It has been something of a “frothy month of news”, the host commented. He flagged up the example of the CEO of Kik, a Canadian chat app which greenlit an ICO for a token called Kin and raised more than $100 million. He was then quoted as saying blockchain isn’t for everybody. Cue large numbers of crypto enthusiasts taking to social media to vent spleen.

Tomaino said: “As far as I understand, the comments were taken out of context and it became a headline that people got excited about. But the reality is that most of the ICOs we’ve seen over the past year and a half have been for fund raising and that was probably the reason for the Kik ICO as well. So, I see why people piled in and got angry. A lot of projects are masking a fund raising process with technology.”

Held added: “This is a whole new world, but human incentives don’t change; if you give people a few hundred million before they build something, they might not be incentivised to go and build it. However, the structure of and the way these companies are built is changing and we need to be open to that.”

He then gave the thumbs up to a recent skit on the HBO show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which stated, crypto is everything you don’t know about money, combined with everything you don’t know about computers. “I’m pretty sure that’s how most people feel when they first hear about it. I’ve seen people’s eyes glaze over when I’ve mentioned encryption. It’s tough to create a simple narrative around it,” Held concluded.