TOKEN2049 - Keynote: David Wachsman

so for those of you at home my name is David Waxman and I'm the founder and CEO of Waxman as it says here on the screen and I founded Waxman in 2015 I'm gonna give you my origin story in a little bit but first on the topic itself so I want to talk a little bit about media's responsibility and role in the blockchain space I'm qualified to talk on the topic because I have by about four times the largest PR agency in the world focusing on the industry and I've been working in this space for five years now which is a very very long time in blockchain but Media has evolved in a different way and at a different pace than the actual industry itself so let's go with a short history in 2013 which as far back as I can personally vouch for Bitcoin magazine had already been founded by Vitalik coin desk already existed and this is before digital currency group had invested in it coin Telegraph existed as well although they went through several management changes since then and there were some trade publications that were focusing on the industry and those trade publications were full of real enthusiasts so these are people who just wanted it to succeed they were willing it to succeed and the role of media at the time were primarily only these trade publications who were essentially trying to promote a technology this is primarily a bit point there were very few other altcoins that existed and none of those at any real popularity there were mainstream reporters covering the space which was interesting the fact the New York Times would assign someone like Nathaniel popper to cover the space or the Wall Street Journal would have two of its top reporters Pallavi Nia and Michael Casey covering it was kind of fascinating because these people very early on understood there was a revolutionary technology and what's remarkable is that those same reporters some of event career changes have been some of the best people at covering the evolution of the industry in part because they've been along for the whole ride so that's 2013 in 2013 the beginning of the year for those of you who remember a bit claimed with $7 at the end of the year was $1,200 everyone on earth had heard of Bitcoin and they heard of it because Mount GOx a Japanese exchange supposedly Japanese crumbled out of absolutely mismanagement and potentially some criminality another theories and the Bitcoin was in the news was Bitcoin was being used as the transfer of value and the payment of services for something called the Silk Road which was an illicit marketplace for illicit services and products and people went to jail for that so Bitcoin at the end of 2013 is known as the coin that people lost money on this electronic digital currency a way to pay for drugs and even hitmen and this is the world that I personally entered when I started working in the Bitcoin space I had met the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange at a bar in New York and he was trying to help his his cryptocurrency exchange called coin Center stand out from the crowd what might be interesting to some of you who work in the exchange space is that in the same way today change they're trying to find a unique selling point that same thing was true back in 2014 but back then absolutely nobody in any trading volume the market leaders were tiny little changes nobody had raised any real money anyway Series A was about as big as anyone including coinbase had gotten and coinbase didn't even have an order book exchange at the time so what you had was these very amateur run exchanges that were trying to do something that is today much more heavily regulated trying to comply with laws that didn't exist yet for an asset class that was completely unclassified and the media landscape was as I said earlier a few beat reporters to top publications and these trade publications that were just trying to promote the space absolute amateurs almost nobody in the trade publication had ever gone to journalism school had ever worked at a real newspaper or magazine and consequently the quality of work wasn't that good with very few exception now what we've seen in the overall ecosystem is that there are some what I'll call Bitcoin OGIS who have evolved and become market leaders today and some of there are some of the most preeminent talents and icons in the industry those the people who were able to evolve at the pace of Bitcoin and crypto media is much the same and some of those leaders have turned it to coin desk and Pete Rizzo for instance is the editor in chief there was one of the first people to fully understand that you needed to actually do traditional type journalism even in an exotic space and so 2014 what we saw was a two-year bear market something which we may experience yet again now and in 2014 we only had VC money in the space and that money started to drip out by 2015 when I actually decided to found Waxman and I was just going on my own Bitcoin looked dead I showed up at the San Diego Bitcoin conference was called inside bitcoins and they had an exhibit hall that was probably larger than the exhibit hall here it was massive it was like literally an airport hangar and it had all these massive round tables or little chairs and there was a heck of a speaker list in fact Patrick Byrne at that conference announced that they were going to be with t0 able to trade shares equity shares on a blockchain and they've gotten tacit permission from the SEC to do so this was mind-blowing at the time and at that conference at Landmark Conference there were only three exhibitors and all you had to do was walk into there if you were a reporter with your camera phone which did exist at the time of 2015 and you could have said written an article and gotten tons of shares saying Bitcoin is dead and I've got the proof because it looked dead and then a very funny thing happened in early 2016 aetherium went from being an experiment something was hovering at about seven dollars per token and started a trend up altcoins like one called - I started working with MIT with mid year started actually becoming something that people cared about there was enough interest there have been enough time going by and media was actually able to report on this trend at the beginning of 2016 we saw I cos the first wave of what I call modern I SEOs with companies like Liske and digits they're able to raise a few million dollars primarily in Bitcoin because aetherium again wasn't all that valuable digits did raise in aetherium and they managed to essentially well kind of promote themselves through social media which was a dominant form of communicating on channels like Bitcoin talk again you saw these trade publications in fact some of them actually died in 2015 and then you had these beat reporters but B reporter started covering it more and more and as crypto grew in price and we saw in 2016 the market cap grew from about six billion dollars to 17 billion by the end in total market cap we started to see many more reporters covering the space Bloomberg assigned reporters Reuters had reporters who were covering it and we saw that demonstrated at conferences like consensus which were getting bigger and bigger and bigger every year in 2017 of course this is it was a landmark moment for the whole industry but specifically for the media space so in 2017 we saw a crypto starting at a 17 point 7 billion dollar market cap by the end of April we were hovering at around 28 billion dollars and on what I call graduation Day on May 1 over that weekend we saw crypto go from 27 billion to or 28 million to 38 about a 30% increase in market cap and then during the month of May we experienced in growth from 30 billion to 90 billion dollars in market cap this is all when I cos just started happening companies like Eragon raised 25 million dollars in two minutes but reporters didn't know how to cover that at the time so a company that raised 25 million dollars in two minutes led by a 21 year old CEO who Peter Thiel had essentially anointed as one of the leaders of the future who had been invested in by Tim Draper and every possible award this 21 year old genius with a company raising 25 million in two minutes TechCrunch wouldn't cover it that's how unsophisticated reporters were at the time I know unprepared they were for the ICL revolution and then in June company called Bank or raised 153 million dollars and suddenly everyone on earth took notice this was a kind of this was a really important moment when Bank Court happened when we had one of the architects of the Euro behind a cryptocurrency when we had enormous real money this was money that was more like Series D or Series II money covering the space that's when reporters are taking notice and it was then which was in summer of 2017 that we finally started seeing mainstream interest and my company which had been around now for about a year and a half to two years suddenly we went on overdrive we couldn't pick up the phone without getting five calls last year in 2018 we turned down 1,000 clients because that's what we started seeing on the excitement level but if I was seeing 1,000 companies coming to us that we had to turn down imagine being a reporter now imagine being a beat reporter and a main during publication with all these new companies trying to only get some of that Bank or money or something like it it became completely impossible and what we started to see is reporters who were just doing anything they could to find trusted resources and sources and there were if they were few and far between because every day from every continent there was some sort of new company promising a vision of the future solved with a brand new token and so reporters went from being reporters to due diligence officers and hedge funds they had to because you see they were massively influential at that point in time there was no tracking of even of the icos in fact there were these ICO listing sites which popped up and they were very incomplete but there was no information even in lists there was no information on lists there was only news sites there was no professional anything covering the industry with the exception of the trade publications and some of those beat reporters was stuck around for a while but now there was all this new money in the space everyone figured and by everyone I mean the media figured let's start investing in this too but as you've already heard media is very very slow they get their information and they should if they're professionals a little bit later and then their job is to vet that information and so may even started making decisions like some of the unfortunate hedge funds that popped up in January 2018 at the beginning of 2018 as we started to see his new news publications primarily trade appearing in 2018 many of which were already dead we also saw during the end of 2017 a meeting of 2018 some of those trade publications graduate themselves companies like coin desk started poaching top reporters from Maine Maine Maine top tier publications around the world and moving to the New York office setting up in London what we saw in 2018 is an evolution of some of the trade publications like crypto briefing or the block which were able to get real money behind them because they were going to be doing a different type of professional reporting in 2018 and again took a little bit of time we started to see is the news publications including TV channels covering Bitcoin covering crypto you could not go out watch Bloomberg Fox business or CNBC without seeing cardano's prices up 20% today around the bottom and people were talking about a commentators were going on on TV talking about these tokens as if they were equities being checked with with with full discovery and transparency there was there was none of that it was completely crazy but as the hype died down and as we saw the markets crumbled in 2018 and descend about 90% we saw TV channels stopped covering and almost entirely unless it was a negative story and what we started to see is the pendulum swung from crypto can solve everything to crypto can solve nothing and that brings us to near today does anyone here subscribe to Bloomberg magazine the actual print Bloomberg Businessweek anyone know okay that means you're probably in crypto so in January of this year Bloomberg published a cover story and it said rhymes with Bitcoin and the cover was all brown about the next week Forbes in print wrote a hit piece about one of the most famous entrepreneurs in our industry that was I thought pretty unfair and what we were seeing is a dejection of everything that the media had previously anointed as the future had been hyping up because they couldn't make sense they couldn't make heads or tails of what was actually happening but we've seen since then actually as I think a good thing there's been a bit of a pause and with the reduction and the noise we've seen a lot more signal the reporters who have lasted throughout this cycle are now extremely mature they know exactly what they're doing they know what's hype they know it's not and what they've begun demanding of me my staff and my colleagues in the industry is much more the standards have raised so for those of you who are entrepreneurs out there please know if you don't have something a real product that's really useful no one will care the fact that you've raised some money is no longer newsworthy companies have raised billions and billions of dollars in this industry that's not news enough if you brought on an advisor no one cares unless it's Barack Obama that might be newsworthy but with the exception of that no one's gonna care you have to have a real product it needs to actually have real market penetration and if it has those things I believe reporters will care and they'll about it we've seen some more revolutions in the in the PR space too what we've seen is a lot of investigative journalism popping up this is a very good thing you see I told you at the very beginning of this talk then in 2013 2014 with the exception of some of the beat reporters at the top publications there were essentially promoters of the technology and I believe that there is a real place for that especially something as complex and sophisticated and tough to understand as blockchain and cryptocurrency but it's very important that reporters maintain their station as the Fourth Estate to provide a check on the goings-on of an industry especially one as borderless and although the technology itself may allow for trust lessness what you need is some sort of trusted source telling you what isn't isn't and the investigative journalism now happening I think is going to help clean up some of the messes that we've seen in the past couple years it's going to get rid of some of the people who have been essentially making a challenge for those of us who are good actors in the space and I think you're gonna see a lot more of that B's is going to start being funded because of this whole lag time that media tends to experience by real media companies and I would not be surprised if there's not a substantial amount of consolidation and M&A not just in the Bitcoin space but in the coverage of the Bitcoin space to a couple more interesting things before I let you all go the conference scene has been essentially a shadow following along with the evolution of the Bitcoin industry and what we're here today at token 2049 the premiere event in Asia and this type of high-caliber event that can draw in the world's best speakers from everywhere continues to be very well attended and hyper successful last year my events team which I cobbled together from professional event organizers from Google and the biggest banks they went and vetted 800 crypto events worldwide 800 nobody has time for that which is why I had to assemble a team of near 15 people to do that full time many of those conferences are those which thought they were gonna be making money until the end of time are now dead and what we're left with is simply the super high calibre event and those high-caliber events I believe are gonna continue to be draws even during this bear market the so on the event side you're seeing a flight to quality on the news side I believe you're seeing a flight to quality too but there's some nuances so one thing that's also popped up in the last couple years is podcasts went from being pretty amateur to much more sophisticated what we're also starting to see is infinite through different several different mechanisms high quality video production that looks more like something you'd see on television and less like an amateur podcast being done from someone's basement that's another very very good sign for the industry and we're seeing some preeminent people doing some of these podcasts who have real really something to say and much more than simply killing some new token again another very good sign of the industry I think what's next is going to be actually TV channels devoted and focused on this industry through through of course the web at first and I wouldn't be surprised they get piped into people's homes via satellite cable I think we're also gonna see an increase as security tokens become much more than norm in people covering the space in different let's call it bifurcated ways so you're gonna start seeing reporters who focus on market structure on token price and these types of things we're gonna start seeing tech heavy reporters who are gonna be able to reviews of code and these are gonna be very popular people there's gonna be some reporters covering the code of some of these companies that are gonna be essentially celebrities into themselves because we've become that far and there are enough different developers actually working on solidity and going to be nine labs to learn more about how to program in in various blocking languages that are gonna be kind of reading the stuff and they're gonna again anoint them as celebrities too and then what we're gonna finally see these reporters covering the larger trends of blockchain these stories of bitcoins price went up why percent or ether dropped 10% today those stories are gonna become increasingly less popular and the stories about people in the industry are gonna actually take shape it's kind of amazing and I'll leave you with this that an industry that has many unique personalities as the cofounders of aetherium a combative brilliant bunch of people that there's never been a really good story about that there's never been a book or movie covering the people of blockchain in the same way that social network came out in 2010 and there's been if you think about it far more years passed since the dawn of the bitcoins revolution as the social network when it came out in 2010 talking about Facebook which has only been around about six years before so I expect to see movies beyond Netflix documentaries talking about our industry too so as you can see here we've had a grand evolution of the media space since I came on the scene at the end of beginning of 2014 I imagine it's going to become more and more sophisticated as a reporter it's going to be even harder to cover the industry especially if you don't have subject matter expertise and you haven't been in it but it I think it's the job of everyone in this room and all the entrepreneurs out there to do your very best to educate reporters on what it is that you've actually done remove the adjectives remove the adverbs just tell them the facts and let them determine how best to tell the story thanks everyone you