It is customary for a writer to leave their job, then start a Substack. So here I am doing that cringe, customary thing after being laid off in the Blockworks newsroom shutdown yesterday.

I joined Blockworks in July 2024 and spent 15 months as a “reporter”. Prior to Blockworks, I was a “newsletter writer” for ~18 months at BanklessHQ.

The question I got most often at Blockworks:

Can we do a paid article with you?

Apparently, people think this is how the conversation internally goes:

Boss: Hey Donovan, ABC is paying us a bunch of money. Please write something nice.
Me: Cool, what do they want us to say?
Boss: Please emphasize this and that. Oh yeah, hate on Ethereum a little pls.
Me: Got it.

Sorry to disappoint, but that never happened – not once in my entire 15 months in the Blockworks newsroom. I never wrote a single story because someone paid us to. I never got told to be “anti-Ethereum” because the company has a Solana podcast.

In my years of covering crypto, I’ve realized that crypto is really insanely hard to cover well.

Being a good writer requires obsessive curiosity. And being a good crypto writer requires that curiosity x10.

The space moves at breakneck speed (everything is open-source forkable), it’s deeply technical (I didn’t major in computer science), it’s hyperfinancialized (I don’t have a investor background).

You have to make up for all that with curiosity.

Here’s an example. This is one of the hundreds of PR pitches that lands in my inbox daily:

“EMBARGO: ABC perps DEX from Solana is now an appchain integrating Celestia for data availability”

The easy thing to do is to report this matter-of-factly. You can do that in something like 30 minutes.

The much harder (and rewarding!) thing to do is to take that lede and turn it into a big picture story with lots of context. So you ask questions:

1. Why is a Solana perps DEX venturing off on its own blockspace? I thought Solana was the fast, “monolithic” chain?

2. Why Celestia for DA? Is Solana’s DA not enough? Isn’t that an Ethereum Layer-2 rollup thing!?

And if you go down those rabbitholes, you’re 10 tabs deep and learning about how Hyperliquid is eating Solana’s perps lunch, how Jito’s Block Assembly Marketplace is solving Solana’s throughput problem, why other perps DEXs (Drift) are choosing to remain on Solana.

The result is a story I wrote previously that looks a little like this:

That’s how a basic announcement can turn into a story worth reading.

But it’s difficult!

That requires some familiarity with the Solana tech stack, Ethereum’s roadmap, the memes in the Crypto Twitter zeitgeist (like Solana’s IBRL), etc.

If you’re not obsessively curious about crypto and spending time on CT reading what researchers/investors are saying, it’s hard to connect those dots.

AI is super useful here as a sounding board. (You wouldn’t believe how dumb the questions I’ve lobbed at GPT to shape a story).

You should speak to the team if you can. You should listen to podcasts and make notes. You should ask researchers smarter than you for their two cents (thank you to every Research Analyst, sincerely, for entertaining my questions).

Crypto is one of the most fascinating spaces I’ve ever had the privilege to work in. The constant tribalistic infighting, the financial degeneracy, and most of all, the bold technological version for what this industry hopes to build.

I’ll be sticking around in crypto. Expect one post a week on this Substack. I can’t promise you will agree with all of it, but I’ll work to make every piece worth your ten minutes to read it.

Thanks for reading Muff Taicho! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Some other stray thoughts:

• Thank you to all my peers at Blockworks. You guys truly inspired me to excellence.

• PR folks I left on unread – sorry. The inbox is a warzone

• Aspiring writers: you’d be amazed what you can get done with a deadline

• Subscribe to Byron Gilliam’s The Breakdown daily crypto newsletter. Every issue is consistently excellent and a masterclass in story crafting.

It is customary for a writer to leave their job, then start a Substack. So here I am doing that cringe, customary thing after being laid off in the Blockworks newsroom shutdown yesterday.

I joined Blockworks in July 2024 and spent 15 months as a “reporter”. Prior to Blockworks, I was a “newsletter writer” for ~18 months at BanklessHQ.

The question I got most often at Blockworks:

Can we do a paid article with you?

Apparently, people think this is how the conversation internally goes:

Boss: Hey Donovan, ABC is paying us a bunch of money. Please write something nice.
Me: Cool, what do they want us to say?
Boss: Please emphasize this and that. Oh yeah, hate on Ethereum a little pls.
Me: Got it.

Sorry to disappoint, but that never happened – not once in my entire 15 months in the Blockworks newsroom. I never wrote a single story because someone paid us to. I never got told to be “anti-Ethereum” because the company has a Solana podcast.

In my years of covering crypto, I’ve realized that crypto is really insanely hard to cover well.

Being a good writer requires obsessive curiosity. And being a good crypto writer requires that curiosity x10.

The space moves at breakneck speed (everything is open-source forkable), it’s deeply technical (I didn’t major in computer science), it’s hyperfinancialized (I don’t have a investor background).

You have to make up for all that with curiosity.

Here’s an example. This is one of the hundreds of PR pitches that lands in my inbox daily:

“EMBARGO: ABC perps DEX from Solana is now an appchain integrating Celestia for data availability”

The easy thing to do is to report this matter-of-factly. You can do that in something like 30 minutes.

The much harder (and rewarding!) thing to do is to take that lede and turn it into a big picture story with lots of context. So you ask questions:

1. Why is a Solana perps DEX venturing off on its own blockspace? I thought Solana was the fast, “monolithic” chain?

2. Why Celestia for DA? Is Solana’s DA not enough? Isn’t that an Ethereum Layer-2 rollup thing!?

And if you go down those rabbitholes, you’re 10 tabs deep and learning about how Hyperliquid is eating Solana’s perps lunch, how Jito’s Block Assembly Marketplace is solving Solana’s throughput problem, why other perps DEXs (Drift) are choosing to remain on Solana.

The result is a story I wrote previously that looks a little like this:

That’s how a basic announcement can turn into a story worth reading.

But it’s difficult!

That requires some familiarity with the Solana tech stack, Ethereum’s roadmap, the memes in the Crypto Twitter zeitgeist (like Solana’s IBRL), etc.

If you’re not obsessively curious about crypto and spending time on CT reading what researchers/investors are saying, it’s hard to connect those dots.

AI is super useful here as a sounding board. (You wouldn’t believe how dumb the questions I’ve lobbed at GPT to shape a story).

You should speak to the team if you can. You should listen to podcasts and make notes. You should ask researchers smarter than you for their two cents (thank you to every Research Analyst, sincerely, for entertaining my questions).

Crypto is one of the most fascinating spaces I’ve ever had the privilege to work in. The constant tribalistic infighting, the financial degeneracy, and most of all, the bold technological version for what this industry hopes to build.

I’ll be sticking around in crypto. Expect one post a week on this Substack. I can’t promise you will agree with all of it, but I’ll work to make every piece worth your ten minutes to read it.

Thanks for reading Muff Taicho! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Some other stray thoughts:

• Thank you to all my peers at Blockworks. You guys truly inspired me to excellence.

• PR folks I left on unread – sorry. The inbox is a warzone

• Aspiring writers: you’d be amazed what you can get done with a deadline

• Subscribe to Byron Gilliam’s The Breakdown daily crypto newsletter. Every issue is consistently excellent and a masterclass in story crafting.