On Oct. 1, 2019, Cointelegraph Magazine’s founding editor, Jon Rice, pressed publish on the first-ever feature story for the publication
On Oct. 1, 2019, Cointelegraph Magazine’s founding editor, Jon Rice, pressed publish on the first-ever feature story for the publication — a story by Swedish fintech writer Jinia Shawdagor about the country’s embrace of a cashless economy.
The brainchild of former Cointelegraph CEO Jay Cassano — who was managing editor at the time — Magazine was designed to fill a major gap in crypto media with in-depth features exploring all angles of the issues in a thoughtful, considered way. While it’s easier to get traffic writing breathless stories about Bitcoin price predictions, Magazine is an attempt to give readers and the industry a more intelligent approach.
I came on board after meeting the team at Cointelegraph’s conference in Singapore. Due to an amusing mix-up between “Austria” (where a story they wanted to cover was based) and “Australia” (where I actually live), I was commissioned to write Magazine’s seventh-ever published article, “Blockchain startups think justice can be decentralized, but the jury is still out.”
This stroke of good fortune led me to become a staff writer, and later to take over as editor after Rice moved on (he’s now editor-in-chief of Blockworks). Three years on, Magazine has amassed a great team of regular contributors, including Blockland author Elias Ahonen — who joined after being interviewed for a story on physical Bitcoin — Andrew Singer, Max Parasol of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, Christos Makridis of Stanford University, and freelance crypto writers Jillian Godsil and Julian Jackson. Magazine is always looking for more contributors, so if you would like to write for the publication, get in touch.
Without further ado, here are some of the highlights (and a couple of lowlights) of the first three years of Cointelegraph Magazine.
— Andrew Fenton, Cointelegraph Magazine editor
The most popular stories
WTF happened in 1971 (and why the f**k it matters so much right now)
The most consistently popular story on the site explores whether former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s decision to get rid of the gold standard, which backed U.S. dollars with gold, caused a host of social and economic problems. Since 1971, productivity increased while wages flatlined; GDP surged, but the share going to workers plummeted; and house prices went through the roof. Is it causation or merely correlation?
How to prepare for the end of the bull run, Part 1 and Part 2
Essential reading before the next bull run, we spoke with some of the most respected pundits in crypto — including Filbfilb, Mati Greenspan and Scott Melker — about how to play the inevitable crash. TLDR: Always take profits on the way up.
Read also
Features
Toxic Twitter Tribalism: The Fuel Powering the Crypto Rocket?
Features
You can now clone NFTs as ‘Mimics’: Here’s what that means
Toss in your job and make $300K working for a DAO? Here’s how
Nataliya Ilyushina and Trent MacDonald transformed their own academic research into a fascinating article about how some of the employees involved in the “great resignation” transformed their lives by working for DAOs. (Readers also flocked to our similar explainer on how to set up a DAO, “How to bake your own DAO at home — With just 5 ingredients!”)
Child’s play: Gajesh Naik, 13, manages a fortune in DeFi
The headline says it all: A 13-year-old kid from Goa in India is managing a million-dollar DeFi platform. Would you trust a seventh grader with your life savings?
5 big questions answered
Can Bitcoin survive a Carrington Event knocking out the grid?
Is Bitcoin a religion?
What the hell is Web3 anyway?
Should crypto projects ever negotiate with hackers?
What really goes on at a crypto OTC desk?
10 great features
The FBI’s takedown of Virgil Griffith for breaking sanctions, firsthand
Author Ethan Lou attended the infamous North Korean crypto conference alongside Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith, who is now serving five years in prison for helping the country evade sanctions using crypto. Lou’s article portrays Griffith as so dangerously naive that he volunteered much of the evidence the FBI used to convict him.
Ethereum is eating the world — ‘You only need one internet’
Zero-knowledge proofs and recursive scaling mean the entire world’s financial system could theoretically run on Ethereum. Reader feedback was very positive, with many commenting this was one of the few things ever written about zk-Rollups that attempted to explain it in simple terms for ordinary people.
NFT ‘art revolution’: Beeple on…
cointelegraph.com