davidsmithmq

About davidsmithmq

CoinMinutes’ Dedication to Ethical Crypto Journalism

In today’s crypto market, about two-thirds of online coverage is just pure BS – misleading info, hidden conflicts of interest, or clickbait hype.

The crypto media scene is a mess, with four big problems wrecking reader trust:

Secret paid content is rampant. Last year, we caught seven publications taking straight-up bribes for coverage without telling readers. The going rate? $2,500 to $28,000 per article depending on how many eyeballs they have.

Pump-and-dump schemes are obvious if you look for patterns. We dug through data on 1,243 projects and spotted that over a third getting sudden praise across multiple sites crashed hard within 60 days. Coincidence? Yeah right.

Most outlets just skip the downsides. Remember DeFi Summer 2023? Over 80% of articles about those juicy yield protocols never mentioned smart contract risks or impermanent loss. That’s nuts! Those are basic risks any half-decent article should mention.

And don’t get me started on all these overnight ”experts.” Our team looked into 50 popular crypto voices and found nearly two-thirds had zero background in finance, computer science, or blockchain. One loudmouth ”DeFi specialist” was selling houses just 11 months before becoming a crypto guru.

How We’re Different: Our Verification Standards

Our BS-Busting Approach

Here’s how we check everything before you read it:

Go to the source – We need real documents or actual statements. No repeating Discord rumors or Twitter drama without backup. We save everything we find because people love to delete stuff later (happens way more than you’d think).

Triple-check the facts means we need three separate confirmations before publishing anything important. For the technical stuff, we get devs with no skin in the game to review the code.

Tech reality checks are our edge. We’ve built relationships with actual experts – cryptographers, blockchain devs, and security folks – who call BS on technical claims before they make it to print.

Readers who listened to us pulled their money before several projects went sideways. The ZkSync folks were pretty pissed about our coverage, but tough luck – we look out for readers, not projects.

Breaking news is a headache. We handle it like this:

• We clearly mark what we know for sure and what’s still fuzzy

• We stick updates at the top with time stamps as we confirm details

• When we mess up, the correction gets just as much attention as our mistake

Transparency and Editorial Independence

Real Rules, Not Just Talk

We don’t just promise to be straight with you – we have actual policies:

Show Your Bags: Every team member’s Cryptocurrency Market holdings over $1,000 are posted on our site, updated monthly. If someone writes about a coin they own, we tell you right at the top.

No Secret Relationships: If we’ve got history with a project, you’ll hear about it. Did we interview the CEO at an event we helped sponsor? We’ll say so.

Where Our Money Comes From: Most of our cash (73%) comes from subscribers like you. The rest is sponsored content (18%) and events (9%). No mysteries here.

Our writers don’t answer to the business team. Period. The people making content decisions don’t even know which projects are buying ads.

When we run sponsored stuff, we play it straight:

• It looks different so you can spot it easily

• We keep it out of the news section

• Our editors can kill anything that’s BS

No need to play detective or wonder what we’re not telling you.

Beyond Reporting: We’ve Got Your Back

Spotting Trouble Before It Hits

We watch for sketchy behavior:

• Founder wallets suddenly moving coins around

• GitHub repos that go from busy to ghost town

• Teams that change how they communicate

• Weird stuff happening with smart contracts

When something smells fishy, we dig in and warn you based on what we find:

• ”Keep an eye on this” for things that look off

• ”Watch out” when we confirm problems

• ”Get out now” for serious, immediate risks

We’ve spotted 31 projects headed for disaster before anyone else since starting this system 14 months ago. We’re getting better at it, though we still get some false alarms. Our readers seem to dig it, though.

Picked For You:

Adopting User Feedback to Enhance Crypto Tutorials at CoinMinutes

CoinMinutes Methods for Cross-Department Crypto Knowledge Sharing

We’re also teaching people to spot BS themselves. Our DeFi checklist covers:

• How to check if an audit is legit (and not just for show)

• Spotting when a few wallets control too many tokens

• Digging into team backgrounds without getting fooled

• What on-chain activity really tells you

I’ve watched too many friends get rekt after buying into hype. We’re trying to stop that, one article at a time.

Pushing for Better Crypto Media

One site doing things right isn’t enough. The whole industry needs to step up.

Raising the Bar

We’re trying to drag standards higher:

• We’ve open-sourced our fact-checking playbook for anyone to use

• We’ve got four other Cryptocurrency sites working with us on a verification network

• We give new publications our ”how not to suck” toolkit with step-by-step guides

Talk is cheap, so we hold ourselves accountable:

• Columbia Journalism Review checks our work annually to make sure we’re following our own rules

• We let 12 readers serve six months each reviewing random articles

• We publish our mistake rate and other embarrassing stats on a public dashboard

All this ensures we answer to you – the people actually reading our stuff – instead of advertisers or VCs.