Crypto journalism deserves a new chapter. The past several years have seen an ever-growing amount of ink spilled about the breakthrough of blockchain technology, from coverage of the soaring price of Bitcoin to decentralized financial applications on Ethereum and other smart contract platforms. Beeple blew minds with his shocking $69 million non-fungible-token sale earlier this year. Then of course there are the hacks and thefts and heists and scams have never exit the narrative for long.

What we feel is lacking is the most important part: the people who are making all this happen. There’s too much coverage that only concerns itself with technology or that preaches to the choir; there are of course great writers and great profiles being written, but many of the more traditional media outlets still sneer at cryptocurrency and its attendant ecosystem. Crypto is often described as too complicated, too hard to understand. Why even bother? We reject this.

DeCential was created to highlight the humanity of so many of the people who are building and developing this new approach to how we organize ourselves, both in private and public life. It won’t always be a pretty picture, and we will not shy away from the darker stories and elements that attend themselves to crypto, just like in every other industry. Yet the sheer number of inspirational, brilliant, strange, funny and caring people behind the vast majority of defi and blockchain projects now deserves to be addressed and celebrated. We want to spread adoption of this tech by introducing the vast majority of people – who, let’s be honest, don’t really know much about this, but may be curious -- to the leaders and visionaries who are making it reality.

To do this, the mediums of film and magazine-style journalism make for perfect vehicles to show the human side of this industry. Hollywood is just waking up to the immense potential in this world and we want to be there on the forefront to drive these stories. There are also enough characters lurking in the crypto shadows to amass a small army’s worth of New Yorker profiles.

On a more personal level, I spent 17 years as a reporter at Bloomberg News, where I began covering crypto in 2015. After publishing my book Out of the Ether about the early history of Ethereum in 2020 I felt it was time to strike out on my own. I just didn’t know how. I hoped in some vague way my book would unlock a new chapter in my life and, then, surprisingly, it did. My partner in DeCential, the documentary filmmaker Neil Berkeley, came calling because he wanted to make my book into a documentary. We soon realized there are a thousand other stories we wanted to tell and DeCential was born.

While this came at a great time for me professionally, my personal life was falling apart. In 2019 my wife Rebecca was diagnosed with ALS and the next two years were the most painful and terrible years of my life. She fought as hard as she could but my sons lost their mother and I lost the most amazing person I’ve ever known in October, 2020. (The day I wrote this post, Oct. 19, would’ve been our 20 year wedding anniversary). On top of that devastation, the global Covid-19 pandemic had upended everything everywhere.

So, in part, as I set out to tell the human side of this crazy crypto world I’ll tell my story as well. Seems only fair, yeah?

Put simply, this is the dawn of a new age. A friend of DeCential compared this present moment to being in San Francisco in 1964. You might not have known exactly what was happening in the Haight Ashbury, but you knew something was happening. Crypto is not going away, despite what some naysayers claim. It also won’t destroy Wall Street or cause the U.S. dollar to become obsolete. But it is changing the world – today – now. And we at DeCential are here for it.

LFG!

Matthew Leising

Co-founder, DeCential MediaCo-founder, DeCential Media

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