Spend any amount of time in the Twittersphere of the and industry and you’ll find yourself inundated with everything from paid shills pumping and hyping coins, to bots touting graphs and charts, and exchanges claiming low fees and the best rates. In between those you have fans of one coin or chain competing against another, arguing the merits of their own coin’s technical superiority because of it’s hashing rate, inter-chain-operability, staking requirements or a lack thereof, a new endorsement / partnership, or the fact that it’s not just going to the moon but to mars.
Perhaps next it will be Jupiter, or Neptune. Maybe even the Kupier Belt. Soon we’ll be at the heliopause.
There’s a darker side to this, especially when it comes to the arguments and discussions between groups, or tribes. Dissent or disagreement is met with blocks and unfollows. In-fighting bleeds over into different platforms like Reddit and Telegram where posts about being blocked for offering an opinion are numerous. It feels almost like being back in high school, where cliques and fights between them spill over into the general populace, and the drama is either met with a “who cares” or “wow this is interesting.” But that’s all it is. Drama. Needless, petty, and ultimately hurtful to the community as a whole. And therein lies the problem. It creates an insularity that any outsider would shy away from. The mistakes of newbie traders, the constant advent of new “shitcoins”, and the “celebrities” of crypto being called out for a litany of reasons has created a toxic place where the barrier to entry isn’t money, but influence. People use the influence of others to build up their own and in turn weaponize it in a variety of ways. Community management is new territory for a lot of people who’s projects took off, and the missteps can be quite public. It’s why I’m so surprised to see the heads of these projects Tweeting off the cuff rather than taking a moment to curate their thoughts.
In as much as the projects of the space have continued to evolve and the technology with it, being able to tell the right message and story of the industry has not. It’s still continually mired in its own inability to stand on its own, but rather in relation to it’s arch-nemesis: big banks (unless you’re a fan). It’s the scrappy little sibling to the bigger, more mature one and a bit of a red-headed stepchild in that regards. Crypto is here to cause trouble, disrupt, and act against what we in society see as the norm. It’s money that’s based on code versus the tangible cotton notes we hold in our hands. Transactions are done in the aether and somehow goods are delivered on the other end. Hundreds of exchanges popped up out of nowhere offering wild-west levels of volatility, crashes, headline-making hacks, and a general lack of transparency. And this is exactly why being able to own the message of and is so important now more than ever.
After having spent over a decade working in both the entertainment and digital advertising industry, while also being a and afficinado, I felt there needed to be a voice in the space of marketing and advertising for the industry. I’ve received countless messages on LinkedIn from people claiming to be “digital marketing experts” that could help me with community management and increase my Telegram group size. I’ve received emails from websites asking me to run display advertising campaigns on their homepages at ridiculous CPMs with traffic that was in the low hundreds of thousands. Multiply that by the number of disparate sites that talk about crypto and in some way and you’ve got a completely fractured and disorganized space that doesn’t need disruption, but guidance. Not centralization, but order in some manner. It’s about bringing the expertise of other long established industries and using those tools and skills to make this space really explode in to the mainstream. Right now the stigma of is not good. It’s likened to illegal activities and flash crashes, causing people to lose millions and millions of dollars, and yet this is the exact same behavior that major banks partake in on a daily basis. The growing pains of a new industry will always be brought into hyper-focus, but this is the importance of being able to tell the story rather than getting stuck in the minutia of the technology. This is an industry populated with economic insiders and technical wizards who for all their expertise cannot tell the story of or in a single sentence that the average person can comprehend. How can you blame them? We derived intrinsic value from lines of computer code and decided it was good enough with which to conduct financial transactions and build an entire multi-billion dollar sector around. It went from a couple thousand dollars to over $20k in a matter of 5 months, and crashed horribly shortly after. How do you expect people to react?
A perfect example of this came when I was at a cannabis dispensary here in Los Angeles. I’ve gotten to know the owners relatively well and they operate as a cash only business, as a lot do due to federal financial regulations and credit card processors generally staying away. This also means the costs stay relatively stable for consumers, as those fees would be passed on to them anyway. I asked the owner if they would take as a form of electronic payment and her eyes immediately went wide with a shake of the head. “I don’t trust it. I don’t really know what it is, but we don’t want to get involved in all that stuff. With the stock market and all that.” The answer was a bit disjointed, but in a way it made sense. It made perfect sense that she had no idea what was and didn’t even want to consider it because of what it currently represented. Price volatility, lack of transparency (even though its core principal is transparency), and a general distrust. I found this fascinating. While I can agree with her on price volatility, perception is everything. She trusted it less than fiat paper currency that’s pegged to no physical financial asset and is purely speculative, and thought there wasn’t enough insight into a fully public and immutable . The fault isn’t hers, it’s the industry for not doing enough to educate the public on it. And that’s why mainstream will always be tough unless people put aside the petty differences between one and another, and focus on the larger method.
I pitched a major exchange on an idea a number of months ago while I was interviewing for a marketing position there. They wanted to see what we could do to attract the average retail investor. Younger, more knowledgeable and savvy than previous generations, but still unsure of how crypto worked. How did they get the message across about the tech they were using and how it was going to make more mainstream. I told them the problem isn’t trying to showcase the technology and logic — it’s the fact that you want to so early in the game. This isn’t about telling people why their exchange is better than another, it’s the fact that most people don’t know your exchange exists outside of the inner circle of the industry. When insiders hear “exchange”, they think of this company. But when someone who’s barely grasping the concept of hears exchange, they think NYSE or NASDAQ. The entrenched institutions that are still trying to price control and manipulate for their own gain. So how do you start chipping away? Use the banks’ own bad behavior against them and start proposing alternatives. Imagine a simple commercial with press clippings of banks and talking heads on CNBC or Bloomberg talking about bailouts, toxic mortgages and assets, CDOs, and everything else that lead to the great recession of 2008? TARP, Lehman Brothers, and everything else that created an environment for to take off. Soundbite after soundbite, layered on to one another until it’s all the same type of noise that we’re used to hearing. And then it fades to black with the showing up with the simple tag line of “It’s Time for Something Different.”
Google and Facebook recently reversed their bans on advertisements in a limited fashion. This means that it’s easier to focus on wider ranging reach of projects that have the ability to spend on digital advertising. We have the opportunity to curate better content for mainstream channels and can capitalize on being the first to reach these new audiences. People want to try something new, they just don’t know it yet. And financial freedom is something every person strives for. The key is being able to package that message into something that piques their curiosity, not scares them away. It’s about education through engagement, not patronizing those who want to learn and will stumble along the way. The tribe mentality has to go and we have to embrace the new challenge of evangelizing the tech that so many others can do. Google and Apple have mastered this, and it’s time we took a page out of their playbook to do so. and crypto don’t have to take over a person’s life, it should be there to make it easier and better and lead to the financial independence so many yearn for.
Published at Wed, 22 May 2019 00:27:20 +0000
