Crypto media in a post FTX World by Camila Russo

hi everyone thanks for coming I'm super excited to be here and remember back in 2018 when I came to my first Ethan where never imagined being on the main stage so I am very happy to be here and I'm talking about crypto media and what that should look like in the post FTX world I'm Camila Russo I wrote the infinite machine that's the first book on the history of ethereum the reason why we're all here and I'm the founder of the defiant an information platform focusing on decentralized finance it gets hundreds of thousands of views a month and I hope that includes all of you so the reason why I'm so passionate about what we're building at the defiant is because media and Quality Reporting is crucial and it's especially important in crypto and that's because this place this space is complex so we need journalists to make difficult Concepts digestible to newcomers I mean we do want the next billion users to come to the space and that needs to be through effective communication and journalism the spaces you know is fast paced so you need consistent diligent reporting on all the day the different day-to-day developments that happen to keep everyone updated and there's this Paradox where you have a lot of Untamed transparent data but it's actually accessible to a very few technical people and then finally there's a lot of shady stuff going on in this space unfortunately um you know you have scams Rock pools and so on and so you need dedicated journalists to report investigate and uncover all of those all of the wrongdoing and that that's happening we do rely on to crypto Twitter and and influencers and that's great they can be great sources for journalism but you do need to maintain the standards the consistency the the diligence of actual professional reporting to deliver all of these values day to day but trusting media is at an all-time low um and from what we can see from this Thomas Jefferson quote this is not new there's always been skepticism and distrust around media and it's no wonder there's a flawed business model at the core of the media business the two main issues that we see is that the audience is not really the end user the audience is the product so media businesses are relying on huge amounts of traffic and eyeballs you know resorting to clickbait to bring in uh to pay the bills basically and then there's the issue of ownership centralized ownership has usually been historically been in the case in in media and that brings all sorts of conflict and so when the advertiser is the final user the client for for media companies and you take that to the extreme you get things like this I mean we get these kinds of emails all the time at the defiant advertisers asking to over overtly pay for coverage um without disposing that it's actually an ad of course we would never ever do that but there are many media companies and Publishers that actually fall for that and then media companies aren't famous for being hugely profitable businesses but what they have historically brought to the wealthy and Powerful can't really be measured in business metrics they bring the Press brings influence so you have in crypto things like dcg owning coindesk and in this case coindes has proven that there's this strict wall between ownership and coverage in the end coindesk did break the FTX Story uncovering the flaws in its balance sheet and that brought down in turn dcg's portfolio company Genesis and then you have the example of svf secretly financing the block which was disclosed after you know recently and again the blog has proven that the the coverage hasn't it doesn't appear to be biased but we have to trust that that will continue to be the case when ownership and financing is at this centralized and opaque so we believe that we can use crypto to improve media and to improve this flawed business model on the one hand we should use crypto for what it's best to bring this transparent digital Ledger showing where the money is Flowing so the financing for media can become more transparent showing where Investments sponsorships subscriptions um are are coming from by bringing all of this on chain and I think what's most exciting and most important at least to me is this transition to making the audience not the product but the actual owners of of media and tokens Can facilitate this and what this would do is really align incentives of the end user the audience and the content producers in the past couple of years there's been a lot of experimentation with web3 Native media some of the main kind of buckets that we can group these experiments in are nft and token gated memberships which function sort of like a subscription kind of model there's con content that's actually Minted as nfts with GM news is a great example and then there's a Dell based content production and or vetting and decrypt media with pop dial is a great example of this they have the style system where token holders can vote on educational content and there's this whole organization of outside Publishers publishing to to pop down so you know lots of experimentation in a web 3 native media um I think these are these are great examples to to learn from and to build on I think that in addition to transferring funding and making the audience the owner which is really at the core of what web3 media should be there should be a these other features to to take into into consideration when building web3 native media I think it's really important to make sure that content remains at the core I mean we are doing content we're building a media and uh what happens in a lot of web3 native and crypto media companies is that Tech starts to become the the main event so we start building a lot of complicated dial structures or the token introduces a bunch of friction or the nft also has adds this barrier between the audience and and media so technique to be a tool to produce better content and to online incentives with the audience but it shouldn't be the main thing that web through media is bringing to the table the content should always be at the core um then related to that is how dials can improve and complement news Gathering and content production a lot of I think the issues with web3 media and and maybe why it's it really kind of failed to take take off is that um when when you lower the value of entry and you decentralize a news coverage yeah you you democratize content production but at the end at the end content quality also starts to come down so I think those can be there to complement the fact checking to add a an opinion on what should be covered but there always should be a centralized professional editorial body to make sure that content quality is always maintained and then finally something that I'm I'm really excited about seeing is how we can bring back investigative journalism because of this flawed media model where you know traffic and eyeballs is what's maximized for investigative journalism has been folding and failing in a lot of the major news organizations so I think if we bring a crowdfunded token based you know models with crypto we we can't view investigative journalism as a public good and really bring back this Essential Elements to news Gathering so these are all the things that we're excited about at the defiant stay tuned to what we're building and really invite all of you to build this together with us because the idea is that the future of web3 media will be a lot more democratized and and really based on on its audience as owners and also contributors so thank you so much and hope you're as excited as the future of media and disrupting this flawed model as I am [Applause] [Music]