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Over just five years, crypto has exploded from a curiosity to a cultural touchstone, with millions of boosters, Super Bowl commercials and billions of investment in the belief that a new financial system, built for the digital age, is being created.

And along the way crypto has become highly divisive. Its most ardent supporters are hardly known for their understatement, giving crypto the whiffs of both libertarianism run amok and a speculative frenzy that’s given cover to all manner of grifters. The Gold Rush mentality isn’t a bad thing, according to Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, a crypto-focused media company that expects to top $20 million in its fifth year.

“Bubbles are good,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “They bring in capital, that’s how innovative technologies get built. Railroads went through a massive mania from 1840 to 1870 with all these bubbles. But obviously railroads got built. Bubbles just bring talent and capital.”

Jason and I discussed how four-year-old Blockworks has built a $20 million business by positioning itself as the go-to resource for financial institutions to understand the fast-moving world of blockchains and crypto currencies. 

Believing in crypto’s inevitability

As newcomers to crypto in 2017, Jason and co-founder Mike Ippolito saw a nascent industry stuck in boom and bust cycles and with its scruffy edges. But they believed one key thing: crypto would eventually become a very large institutional asset class.

“The white space that we saw was around information in the industry. In 2017 there were basically two media sites, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. You had one or two podcasts, and then a bunch of information on things like Twitter and Reddit. We would go to these events, and they were clearly run by a bunch of scammers. And then you'd look online and it seems like a bunch of people pumping different coins. But 1% of this feels real. We've done so much wrong over the last four years, but the one thing that we got right is believing that crypto would eventually become an institutional asset class and that we would need better information, insights, data analysis, news, research, et cetera, for the massive cohort of capital markets and people coming into crypto.” 

Building from events

Blockworks started out in events, hosting its first one in February 2018. Went into the business full-time in May. Blockworks only then branched into content with a podcast network, including popular crypto podcaster Anthony Pompliano. It was only in January 2021 that Blockworks launched its news site. The advantages of this approach: Blockworks was generating revenue from the start.

“We've never had to raise outside venture funding because we started with conferences. We ended up building a community of some of the most valuable people in the world: money managers, hedge fund managers, portfolio managers at endowments, family offices. And that turned out to be a really valuable audience for this institutional bucket of crypto companies that ended up getting built in 2017 to 2010 – Fireblocks, BlockFi, Gemini, Coinbase, all these institutional crypto brands –