Farokh Sarmad Breaks Down Crypto Media 2.0: AI, Predictions & What Comes Next at KBW2025

We have Amanda Cassat, founder [music] and CEO of Serotonin. Okay, panelists, the floor is yours now. Hello everyone. Thank you for being here right after lunch. Um, I'm Ursula Okinington.

I've been in the media space for 20 years. First as a journalist, then as a media executive, then experimenting in this crypto media space. Um, first of all, a civil media company, an organization that Amanda knows well because it was incubated within consensus and we were like too early when we were like doing all of this experimentation with tokens and how to decentralize um, crypto media and beyond local media as well. So anyway, before further to you, I just wanted to have my fantastic panelist and and can you guys introduce yourself because you have a real story to tell on crypto media?

Sure. Hi, I'm Faruk Sarmad, president of Dan, which is the parent company of Rug Radio through Cryp Media and now Myriad Markets, our production market platform. Hi, my name is Rahan Kim and I've been a journalist for the last 18 years and for the last four years and a half I've been in the crypto media space. First as a editor-inchief of Coindesk Korea and now uh East Asia editor-inchief of B in crypto. Nice to meet you.

Hi, I'm Amanda Casset aka Amanda, the founder and CEO of Serotonin. We bring the world's breakthrough technologies to market and before that as alluded to um I led the team at consensus that brought Ethereum to market back when I was a CMO over there. Thank you. So we all have the experience of media and this crypto world and everything is evolving super rapidly right now. So without further ado, I will start a question that it's for all of you.

Is crypto media death or just evolving?

I think um in the history of history, media has never died, right? Um whether it's print or written or speech or TV or radio, the medium has evolved and the medium has changed over time, right? Platforms have died, right? Platforms like I don't know Buzzfeed of this world or some print platforms, etc. have come and have left.

But creators also as media come and go dime a dozen every other few months. But media itself I believe has never and will never die as long as humans exist. It's just going to evolve. Right? You'd had back in thousand years ago media was you know speech media and then came the print then came the cassette and the VHS and this and TV and now you know you have a new form of media which is uh which is prediction markets right?

So all it does in my opinion is just keep evolving and then it's up to us the founders and the people working within that industry to keep these platforms alive uh and constantly evolving.

Well, you picked the wrong person to ask this question because I'm working for crypto media and I've been working for crypto media for the last four and a half years. I'm getting paid and yeah, my company is not broke. So crypto media is live strongly breathing every breath. We are live. So I think in terms of quality, crypto media outlets are some of the best and that's because the global uh regular media has suffered from some mind viruses over the past decade that have made the reporting um so adversarial toward business and technology and growth that it has bordered on opinion.

Um whereas the crypto media hasn't been cheerleaders for industry and gone the opposite direction where they've been counterfactual the other way. Um but they've been earnest um reporters covering what's happening in the space without being against it, without trying to shut it down. And that's been very special within the larger media ecosystem because it means you can do some really accurate reporting and get some really great information out there to people that are trying to make financial decisions um that are trying to make business decisions based on information. Um, and so I think crypto media has been some of the highest quality, some of the most accurate reporting, some of the least biased reporting at a time when some other outlets have introduced various forms of bias. Um, and so that's been an incredible win.

Where crypto media has failed is to produce a radically different business model for media other than um selling subscriptions or ads or conference tickets. And I guess it makes me and maybe prediction markets will be that maybe um and there are still experiments going around this which is great and fine. But I guess I wonder why are we demanding of our crypto media that they need to innovate on that media business model if they can successfully not reinvent the wheel and be profitable um with ads or subscriptions or conferences. So I would say the quality of what they've produced is amazing but they haven't reinvented the media business model. Um Farak I will start with you because you are the creator of rag radio.

You are now the owner of decrypt media one of the largest publication in this ecosystem and you created this communityowned ecosystem but right now everything is evolving as we have speak with AI. People trust Twitter, Telegram, even WhatsApp more than headlines. How do you keep community engaged? Because I agree with Amanda. Uh the quality of some of these reporting, they've been good.

The business model, it hasn't really evolved sometimes within times.

Yeah, I totally agree on the business model and happy to double down on that later if it comes through. For us, prediction markets is the way that we believe, you know, crypto media is is going to go through. And now, if you go to decrypt media, you'll every article you'll see our SDK is actually injecting a prediction market and serving people markets, right? because you're serving people opportunities on top of serving people, you know, instead of serving people just ads or or news, right? I think in terms of the quality for us, the way we do it, we're talking about distribution is I've always believed that distribution um sorry, content is king and distribution is queen and um and you know, it's important for us to become just a distribution machine, right?

So on the rug radio side, the way we went to market was just like be in your face all day long, right? You could you could not open Twitter back in 2021 and not see either me or like a bunch of other creators. We had like what over up to like a 100 creators worldwide just creating content non-stop um uh in the industry and then now with the cryp media our focus is on like just proper reporting you know proper journalism and you know like Amanda was saying it's very high quality um you know articles similar to like you guys and then the folks at Coindes Blockworks also doing an incredible job at that. So for us just keeping the quality high is very important um especially in the age of AI. However, it's really important for all of our team members to know how to use the AI, right?

Because AI is to me like I personally I think blockchain technology is a much more interesting um um invention than than AI is. I think AI is just like some somewhat of like a tool that helps you kind of become limitless in a way. And so for writers like I encourage them to just use AI not for like to chase the headlines and whatnot, but to be able to like polish the reporting and or go move faster and be able to report on more stuff. So AI comes in very handy in terms of like using the tech and pushing it out faster. But for us, it's just still a focus on like actually like publishing the right articles because you don't want to end up just like writing a bunch of garbage and you know also skewing the market the wrong direction.

Speaking about garbage, Amanda, I would love to have your take because of a lot of what we have we have seen on especially on social media uh is a lot of like paid media more than real media acting coming out of a professional journalist. You are the one who has been in this ecosystem for a long time working in media and working with a lot of companies within this ecosystem. Um, how do we trust what is real and what is not given the fact that we are living in this ecosystem right now? We we will see a lot we are seeing and we will see more of these pay media ads. Well, first of all, I don't think that the traditional gatekeepers are necessarily purveyors of truth either.

Um, and so I think their losing power actually leads to a more open information ecosystem where the onus shifts to the information consumer to do their own research rather than necessarily trusting just one source. So it's really important for people to triangulate to read multiple sources with multiple different opinions. There's no problem with showing um w with with having a piece of content not go through the traditional means. Like I think Autism Capital deserves a Pulitzer for their reporting on um SPF and FTX, right? Like they should get a Pulitzer, whoever they are.

They they they did better than anybody else. Um no gatekeeper approved that account to do that. And yet they offered better information than the approved folks. So I think what's going to go away is this idea that information, credible information can only come from these people or only these sources and that onus is transferring to the consumer um to triangulate and also that onus is transferring to the consumer to make sure something isn't AI generated. I think the default assumption with content now is that it's false and that it's a fake photo.

And that's great because that's making for a more resilient um information ecology, an information consumer if it's the default false assumption.

I love to have that positive input because I thought that this panel would be a little bit depressing, but there's a lot of hope and we have a journalist here, a real journalist working as a journalist right now. And so, u you are covering Asia for the last 18 years. Um I would have love to have your take on how Asia crypto media is different from western crypto media. I will say probably it's the same but you guys are focusing on regulation well in western as well but um there's a lot of consumer focus here with gaming and finance with Asia. They love gaming here.

Well, the narrative of media being dead itself tells a lot to us regarding this perspective because well, I did a little research on media dead last night on Google and I could find CNN saying liberal media is finally dead. Little Black Rock says the death of mass media. Dame magazine is legacy media dead. new scientists, social media is dead, all media is dead, but I couldn't find crypto media dead. But anyway, um so the the a lot of narratives about um being that the media being inefficient and uh hard to survive in this AI focused era is prevalent all over the world including of course Asia.

So I don't think we have any specific or a special angle regarding this matter but um the thing is how you define crypto media could be different uh according to where you're coming from I think and a lot of media companies here in Asia are trying to focus on price actions whereas as there are some media outlets in other parts of the world who are focusing focusing more on uh regulations or institutional um movements in the industry that might be a different but well as the industry evolves and moves on I think that'll not be the case either because overall in the end they will pursue after the same um goal. One of the things that we have seen and this is a reality that sometimes influencers are replacing journalists as well. Um maybe this is the new reality in media not just crypto media and overall but I would love to open the mic because I have seen great people here in this panel. We have Ben Schiller that he was part of Breaker Magazine, one of the earliest magazine in this ecosystem. And we have Jun as well that he's actually creating crypto media companies as we speak with use cases, use case magazine.

Um, so we would love to open the mic and to have questions coming out of from June or Ben.

No, I'll give you mic. Um

well I guess I have a comment. I'm one of these annoying people that's going to give a comment and form of a question. I mean I think one of the problems in the media cryptome I was at Coinets for six years and covering crypto for about 11 years is kind of a supply and demand problem. You know, there were a lot of crypto companies out there that wanted coverage, legitimately wanted coverage, and the mainstream media, as Amanda was saying, was writing these kind of negative stories, and it was up to the crypto media to cover those companies effectively. But there's no way even a company like CoinDesk, which at one point had quite a lot of resources, could really cover the industry effectively.

We could do certain numbers of stories, but not all of the stories that we wanted to do. And for every FDX scandal that we reported on, there were all kinds of other scandals that we never got to. So I think that was always like a sort of a mismatch of supply and demand. And uh my own sort of opinion about crypto media is it dead? I think the kind of click economy is definitely kind of dead.

I don't see how you can sustain a quality newsroom like CoinDesk on the basis of a few thousand clicks on an article that you've researched and reported on for weeks and months at a time. that's just impossible. So, you end up supplementing it with something else and so, you know, I think that's uh a problem.

Wow, that was spicy to have any opinion on what Ben just said.

I think that's the mainstream opinion about what's happened to media in general, right? It used to make sense before the aggregation business model to invest in a a proper newsroom. That's how you that's how you got, you know, some of the big stories that there are movies about now. Um because it made sense to invest in having a newsroom full of reporters because then you'd break a story first. But with the aggregation business model, an aggregator who hasn't invested in hiring all those journalists can then just rip off that headline and then link out to your original article and get a huge percent of the total traffic that flows into that story.

um and so without making that investment and so everything reverts to that mean and there's a race to the bottom and it it changes uh the journalistic profession because these newsrooms can hire fewer reporters that's going on throughout all of media. It's not a phenomenon local to crypto media. It's happening for everyone. And I really think that the financial success of the crypto space has led the crypto industry trade pubs to actually be in a better position um with regard to those trends than the general media. And so when I say that like long live crypto media and when I say these bullish things about it, it's in contrast to the media environment that it's embedded in where it really is the winner and the golden child.

Plus, like if anything, crypto media is always at the cusp being at the cusp of uh technology like blockchain tech, etc. We're always the first and the earliest at being involved in these technologies, right? Like we're already embedding prediction markets into our media platforms, right? But then you have like web 2 million is like, "Wow, this is cool." But like they're probably going to get into it in like 2027, right?

And then you have uh CT, right? Crypto Twitter. Like we were we're by covering by being part of CT, by being part of that, we were early to this narrative change which is like, "Hey, you have to deliver news on Twitter." Twitter like Coindesk is super active on Twitter. So are you guys, so is us.

And now all the other media companies are scrambling to come and build their platforms on X Twitter because they had a bias with Twitter or they're not happy with Elon. We truly I don't give a who owns Twitter, right? I'm just going to build my place because this is where the people are and that's where people want to consume that media platform. So that's kind of like the advantage we have over every single other media in general within crypto is that we're at the cutting edge of this technology and we're actually blessed to be reporting on it cuz then we get to be involved with you know this like change that's happening in every single area in the world and I think that's like honestly the advantage of crypto media if not if anything like we're way ahead of of every other uh media that has has ever been.

Yeah. But the thing is um the readers of crypto media want market intel from crypto media and that's that's probably they want the most out of crypto media but crypto media usually often fails to deliver correct and accurate uh market intels in time and that's how we are losing readers and then make us readership so small but at the same time. If if it's not about market intel, uh if it's about the shift of uh technologies, shift of regulation, shift of um uh the the flow of the the crypto world that we we are uh dealing with. I think uh the small readership could be an advantage to be amplified if the crypto media find the right hole that can go through the right amplifier and I don't think we should be afraid of having smaller audiences and smaller reporters as well but um Yeah, I think that's one of the ways that we can survive as a crypto media.

So, one of the reality that we have seen here that crypto media is not that it's just evolving but it it is evolving with AI. Will you see AI and humans creating content good content in the next coming years? I mean, there's awesome like AI content creators already around us, right? Like whether it's on on social platforms, I think they're doing it pretty well. We don't have any, but like I could see one day Rug Radio Show host being an AI, right?

Like that would be so cool. Um,

or maybe we can see media being like a

video game or gamifying the whole the whole industry with prediction market.

That's where it's I think that's where we think it's headed. So that we're all into this prediction market game. So I think it's awesome. But yeah, AI, like I said earlier, just it's good good tool for for media platforms that I think to use and just amplify.

I think AI is going to usher in a golden age of consumption of all kinds of content, all kinds of entertainment, right? I think the dangerous thing is that it's going to create something that you can't look away from and eventually it says, you know, chew off your own thumb to keep watching this and you'll chew off your own thumb. So I I think it's kind of the other way around like, yeah, we're going to have some really engaging content, that's for sure. So there are two conversations going on here. One is is crypto media producing good content which I think the answer is yes and then is crypto media a venturein investable business and I think that answer might be no.

I think media in general might not be a venture style technology company style investable business. That doesn't mean it's not investable by anyone, but it's not necessarily for the type of tech investors who expect the 100x return of um I don't know a Panta Polychain, founders Fundy, 16Z kind of kind of folks. So, what are we comparing it to when we talk about the business model? What I want to see from a business is a profitable business that can hire people solidly that's that's producing more than it consumes. And in terms of that, I think it's still solid to be a media business.

And I think if people figure out good ways to use AI and they can charge for the interesting way that they've chosen to use it and they're producing really interesting content, they can produce a business that produces more than it consumes.

Well, what about a business model like like so so what I mean is like the information, right? So this is the Jessica lesson thesis and she wrote this piece is crypto adventure is is media venture investable business and so she created the information which is profitable um and a lot of people's substacks are profitable I don't know the individual P&Ls of some of these companies but what I know is there's this funny squish going on where a lot of media companies have raised historically through the as from the same kind of tech investors that expect the multiple of a tech company um and I think A different investor profile might make more sense for many media businesses, ones that don't have that software style scale.

Yeah. But well, in general, media companies, not just crypto companies, they're losing money and they're based and surviving by investors.

Well, they're they're they're they're being bought by people who have another motive for owning them, like Bezos and the Post.

Yes. Yes. Exactly. That's accurate. Um, anyway, we're running out of time, so thank you very much.

Thank you for all of the guests here and thank you for the audience. Thank you. Thank you very much, Miss Ursula and our panelists. [music] Thank you very much.