👁️ BREAKING: CoinDesk is Dead. Here's Who to Blame.

Bullish is the fruit of a decade of grifting by Dan Larimer and EOS. These are the morons and cowards who killed the most important news outlet in crypto.

I’m writing a special short bulletin to commemorate an absolutely black day. The most trusted and important news outlet in cryptocurrency has collapsed under the inexorable pressure of ownership by a gang of crooks and incompetents. CoinDesk has saved readers and the industry millions upon millions of dollars, most notably by helping to expose, bring down, and hold to account figures of the 2021-2022 scam wave including Do Kwon (for whom I personally take some credit) and Sam Bankman-Fried.

But now that CoinDesk is effectively dead - despite several good journalists clinging on for at least a few more days. This was largely predictable more than a year and a half ago, for reasons that I’ll get into below. There are individuals who must be named and shamed - CoinDesk CEO Sara Stratobehrda, Bullish CFO David Bonanno, and Bullish CEO Thomas Farley most of all. There is also a historical legacy of serious fraud that teaches us the deadly cost of tolerating grifters and halfwits.

Somebody has to do it, because CoinDesk isn’t going to be able to help solve its own murder.

What Happened Today

This morning, first reported by Fortune, CoinDesk fired three newsroom leaders who have defined its success, and all three of whom I worked with very directly. They include Nick Baker, who sheperded the reporting by Ian Allison that brought down FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. Also fired were Marc Hochstein, who oversaw the opinion and magazine section where I did most of my work; and Kevin Reynolds, Editor in Chief, who made the newsroom as a whole into the machine of loving grace that it was, for all-too brief a moment. These are real men - the real-world version of the fantasy Chads that right-wing morons fetishize - who struggled and fought and stood up for what they believed was right, not just for them, but for other people, and for the world.

They were undone, to one degree or another, by deeply cynical, inept, floundering, check-cashing jokers: Current CoinDesk CEO Sara Stratobehrda; Bullish CEO Tom Farley; CFO David Bonanno; and (though to a meaningfully lesser degree) former CoinDesk CEO Kevin Worth, who engineered the sale of CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group to Bullish for $75 million in 2023.

It’s cold comfort, but CoinDesk is worth much, much less than that today. These are the faces of value-destroyers.

The motive for this mass firing, and for what will likely accelerate within a few days into the complete vaporizition of CoinDesk itself, was an attempt to misdirect attention from the CoinDesk and Bullish executive team’s interference in editorial operations. Specifically, they pulled a genuinely innocuous story about His Excellency Justin Sun eating a banana. It was reportedly Bullish CEO Farley who “ordered” the removal of the “irreverent” piece about Sun - who happens to be one of the biggest frauds in crypto or any industry. According to a letter from staff leaked to The Block, Bullish has been interfering with editorial decisions for some time, particularly blocking the team’s ability to publish op-eds. (I believe this helps explain my own layoff last year, on which more in a second.)

This insult to a world-class grifter of course cannot be allowed to stand, because Bullish itself is a fundamentally fraudulent operation. It is a spot crypto exchange that barely anyone uses - ranking a truly unbelievable 92nd in global volume - and only exists because of the immense war chest raised in the 2017 Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for EOS, a would-be Ethereum competitor. EOS was conceived by Dan Larimer, a right-wing hillbilly reskin of Vitalik Buterin, that never meaningfully got off the ground, and which both Larimer and the shell company Block.One abandoned within just a few years.

If you are in a position to hire Marc Hochstein, Nick Baker, or Kevin Reynolds, you won’t find anyone better in an editorial role. If you’re looking for private communications and strategy help and desire to spite the killers of CoinDesk, you can reach me on Twitter.

In a truly baffling miscarriage of justice, the SEC in 2019 let EOS and Block.One off the hook with an insignificant $24 million fine for an unregistered securities offering. They got to keep what, at least officially, amounted to roughly $4 billion dollars. That’s why inept, clownish nothings like Stratobeherda, Bonanno, and Farley, in 2024, are getting paid multiple six figures to fire people with actual skills and principles.

Inevitably, some blame for the destruction of CoinDesk must also be placed at the feet of Kevin Worth, the former CEO under whom I worked. Kevin did a lot of good work to build CoinDesk over the six-odd years of his tenure, so I feel ambivalent about including him here. But I can’t say he ever had the respect of the newsroom. And from 2021-2023, he was dealt a rough hand and played it abysmally - not only failing to prepare CoinDesk’s finances for winter during a massive bull market when money was falling out of the sky, but also failing to sheperd it into the hands of a responsible owner, which was his primary responsibility for about six months.

There’s a lot more to write here about the fate of news in general, and how the purchase and intentional destruction of principled news sources has now become a viable means for big-money investment fraudsters, embezzlers and thieves to eliminate threats to their freedom and cash flow.

But for now, I’ll just say that this seems to vindicate my intuition that I was laid off from CoinDesk last August because the incoming owners at Bullish saw me as an unmanageable threat. Obviously there was no room for a columnist in an operation designed to publish glorified spon-con for their allied bad actors. In particular, I imagine this column critical of the Bullish SPAC in 2021 was direct enough for their little pea-brains to comprehend that I wasn’t a fit. I can only assume the entire CoinDesk archive will be burned down like the Library of Alexandria soon enough by these snapback-and-shiny-suit Philistines, so I’m dropping commemorative screenshots of the entire thing below.

Finally, remember: we live in a depressing world, where the bad guys often appear to win. But whatever their short-term, Phyrric victories, they still have to grapple with the endless nightmare of being themselves.