Crypto is a battle for ideas and attention. To be successful, projects have to understand how the story they want to tell relates to the narratives driving the conversation. — When I’m not curating Long Reads Sunday or streaming or generally yammering on Twitter, I help crypto companies with communications, the outputs of which are strategic (messaging and positioning) and tactical (content production). The approach I take is something I’ve come to call “narrative marketing.” …

The threads and essays that defined a year that went from the height of mania to something much more interesting — Originally published on Twitter. Long Reads Sunday #27 — Best Of 2018! Simply put, this is the best crypto content of the year — the most interesting, influential & inflammatory threads and essays. You may not agree with everything here, but you can’t ignore it. …

As Gloom Sets In, Expect Even More Competition To Explain What Happened And Where We’re Headed — Introduction When I published the first Crypto Narrative Watch, I made the argument that market narratives are marketing. In other words, when we start to see a narrative emerge, our question has to be “who has incentive for this narrative to become dominant?” Recognizing market narratives as marketing doesn’t delegitimize them…

Forward to the book “Can You Describe Bitcoin? Ethereum? Blockchain?” by The Bitcoin Podcast — A few months ago, the hosts of The Bitcoin Podcast asked me to write the forward for their new book summarizing 3 years of answers to the simple sounding but often revealing question: “Can you describe <Bitcoin, crypto, Ethereum, blockchain> in 10 words of less.” …

TL;DR: As we transition from a business paradigm of closed-door and centralized to a network paradigm of open and participatory, we’d benefit from recognizing that decision-making is an inherently political process. An interesting thing happened yesterday. A funding announcement that might have, in other contexts, been greeted with nothing but…

Complexity theater is when the presentation of ideas is complicated in order to make those ideas seem more valid. It is not limited to the crypto space, but has wreaked a very particular havoc here. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way. In bull markets, people spout wisdom like…

Like any emergent phenomena, crypto is a battle ground for narratives that compete to explain what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what might happen next. — Investors invest against narratives; builders build directionally towards narratives; commentators race to associate themselves with the dominant narratives or, alternatively, to be the contrarian positioning against the conventional wisdom.

On this 4th of July, it’s interesting to note that one of the unique properties of blockchain projects is that the same mechanism used to propagate change can be used to disobey and declare independence from the chain. …

Startups pattern themselves off the capital available to them. The creativity and diversity of strategies around how crypto economies are funded is not only the first and (so far) most powerful disruption in the blockchain space, but a force that could allow true innovation in the structure and approach of…