From the Editors’ Desk

It doesn't stop trading, and it doesn't take holidays, and as we've talked a lot about on this podcast, these markets are known for their volatility, so it's our job to assess both the big trends and the small moments, and to figure out how to translate these into stories and of course podcast episodes. Today you'll get to meet three of Bloomberg's Crypto editors, folks who are making decisions all day long about how we approached this asset class.

Joining me to day Beth Williams and Dave Likka, who are both based in New York, and Philip Logger Kranso, who's normally based in Zurich but is with me in the studio in London. I know I talked to you all about every five seconds, but this is the first time you've all been on the podcast, so thank you for joining me. We have Beth and Dave in New York. Hello, Hello, and Phil. You're normally in like Switzerland, in a very fun office with lots of plants in the background, but

today we're in the same studio in London. Because we're global like that, we are indeed to be here. What is the you'll do all day? We look at crypto um from our perspectives, We look at crypto markets, we look at crypto implotions a lot of that lately, and we look at everything from crypto mining to crypto lenders

and bust and Dave. This is not your first crypto winter, no, no, I'm been through the Winner of two thousand and eighteen and actually start following a little earlier when maybe there was a little bit of a winner, but I don't think anybody realized the call it that what had has been for you. The biggest difference about covering crypto now versus two thousand eighteen and earlier just the scale of it.

Right now on a two thousands, seventeen and eighteen it was it was all about one coin, and that was Bitcoin, and now it's just Bitcoin on steroids. And Beth, you come to crypto from a very different part of Bloomberg entirely. What has that been like? Yes, I came from the editorial opinion section of Bloomberg, where we spent a lot of time interpreting what was going on and helping readers kind of connect the dots of the events that were happening.

So coming to crypto sort of cold and having to learn as I go along, but also from that perspective, always keeping in mind the bigger picture, what what does this mean? What can we tell people about the significance people who aren't, you know, trading coins every day, and just giving that sense of that wider perspective is something that I always have in the back of my mind.

To your point about that wider perspective, what have been for you, Beth, Like some of the pieces you've been able to edit or kind of shepherd into existence that you think have done the best job of joining up those dots for our audiences. I think in terms of those big picture pieces, we did some pieces around the time, you know, in the in the Fall and and heading into year end, we were it was sort of a celebratory mode. It had been a really big year for crypto.

Records were set, there was a sense of, you know, a lot of momentum going, you know, cryptos going mainstream and f teas are everywhere, you know, Matt Damon, Tom Brady, etcetera.

And I think we did a good job of sort of putting that in perspective, acknowledging that there was this mainstream um acceptance and that there seemed to be it seemed to be on the brink of some sort of I don't know, maybe legitimacy, and maybe that that shows my own bias, but we also showed that there were many parts of crypto that are still very young, and also there's infrastructure issues. There still remains hacks, their scams. So as exciting as this industry seemed to be, there's

a lot of quirks about it. Fire beware, And as we moved into two and we're seeing this decline in prices and then resulting crises, I think that reminder of you know, sort of these problem issues with with crypto that came home to roost when sort of the music stopped.

The last thing I would say on that most recently in terms of sort of summing up the crises that we've seen in the and the major plunge in the market is sort of how it all comes full circle to many other crisis that we've seen in other markets, and that comes down to hubrists, complacency, and in the case of crypto, much like the financial crisis, a lot of leverage. Dave, I ask you this question because I feel like you've covered markets that have been saturated with

hubrist complacency and leverage, whether in crypto or otherwise. What is it like covering our market that doesn't close. That's the big adjustment on it. So as a group, we've struggle a little bit and kind of learned a lot doing that with seven atmosphere here that this market has, I guess the biggest thing is that we always have to remind ourselves a little bit in our reporters to kind of step back, take a breath, get the big

picture on it. A lot of our reporters are what you would you call some of our recent hires are crypto natives. They began their career here, so they haven't experienced those other markets. They know this stuff inside and out. But the big challenge they face in and we as editors are to kind of slow it down and explain it, to make it understandable to everybody, and it just moves

so fast. We're winding our baday here and the next wave hits and we're kind of trying to get out the door and hand it off to Asia or coming in on the train in the morning, and uh, Phil is doing the tap dance in Europe until we get in. Definitely a lot of a lot of handovers and perhaps not as much sleep as any of us would necessarily like or appreciate. But Phil, you have spent a lot of your career Bloomberg and breaking news, and yet crypto

seems stressful. Why is that? Well, I mean it's it's it's basically I started in I think it was early January, and I think we've had a succession. We've had three or four different crisis of different flavors. You first have to learn what is a crypto bridge when one get hacked for about half a cool half billion dollars six six million dollars I think it was in the vaccine Infinity hack, and then once you get a grip on that, well, low and behold an algorithmic stable coin goes and explodes,

and you have learned what that is. Once you master that, well, guess what, you know, it's time for the crypto landers to start blowing up in a in a kind of series of explosions. And so it's like you're always you're always catching up to what the latest sort of nice and shiny, bright thing that's going to explode. And that's been that's been something to really kind of get used to.

And the scope of six months now covering crisis of different flavors every month pretty much, it's been quite quite a job getting used to, especially when so many of those just happened on like a weekend or at four o'clock in the morning and whatever that time zone might be. This is where Dave comes in handy, because he'll he'll say, yeah, this happened before, and actually just on that point on it, and and Stacy and I know Beth also covered during

the credit crisis on it. To be the biggest difference is that that was almost glacial to me, and it's just kind of like slow moving. Every day you'd hear rumors about Merril lynches in trouble on it and it be take a while to play out. This is just like full set. It just happens in an instant and we go on to the next one on it. So it's it's uh. I guess the best analogy I've heard is this, this really is like the credit crisis, but minuses central banks to kind of manage the landing here. Yeah.

I think that that idea of the pace is so interesting because I remember every Friday, you know, we call it bank failure Friday, when you would get the ports of which banks have gone under um usually on the sort of the smaller, the smaller lenders, and it was like a very orderly there would be a pdf, you know, you can look at the spreadsheet um to your point. Sometimes you'd hear rumors, but very few things would happen on weekends. Governments around the world be meeting super intensively.

But there was almost like an understanding that this was like a nine to five crisis to an extent. Obviously that accelerated as as things got worse. But I'm truly fascinated that crypto as an asset class and therefore the crises and crypto seemed to operate at Internet speed, which is as fast as you can tweet something, that thing can come true. And I'm wondering, and this is perhaps

a more existential question. Do we think the fact that so much of crypto is happening in like real time right that the lack of market closes, the lack of circuit breakers, the lack of any ability to have somebody step in and say, hang on, we need to regularize prices here? Do you think any of that is contributing to how bad things can be and have gotten. I

would say absolutely yes. If you look at if you look at the traditional financial industry and any any traditional industry, they announce you have, you know, announcement windows for the companies that are listed. You know that, for instance, between six am and eight am, you might get releases and you're gonna get them over channels that are pretty easy to terrify, to verify control. Here everything happens in the phittosphere. Who have a company go and say on Twitter, by

the way, hey we just went bust. And the first thing you have to do is look at is this is this a verified Twitter handle? And so it's a completely different cadence and as a completely different method for you know, making certain and at the same time, these are very very consequential announcements. I mean, these are these are companies announcing that they've hit the iceberg, and that is incredibly hard to get used to, an incredibly hard

to adapt to as a news organization, I think. And similar to follow on to that point is that unfiltered nature of the way that the news is dispersed in the fact that everybody in the crypto universe is part of the news cycle and including a retail you know holder. You know, everybody's on Twitter and could somewhat like in it in terms of the company sort of or the

developers or whoever making these announcements on Twitter. To the the change in the news cycle when Donald Trump was elected president and you know, a lot of life became, you know, monitoring Trump's tweets, well, we do that times a thousand different crypto people. I mean, the good news is none of the crypto companies have the keys to nukes, so you know, there's like there's a degree of difference in terms of the consequential nous, but yes, it is.

It is still a very different dynamic. Up next, you'll hear more from our editors Beth Williams, Dave Lica, and Philip Bloggercranza. As we talk about how we cover these crypto markets. Dave, you know, you talked about various of the reporters on the team, various of the editors on the team having come either to crypto specifically or coming at crypto from different asset classes. One of the teams that we work with most closely at Bloomberg is called

Cross Assets, and they are incredible. Several of those reporters have been on the show. Folks have heard from Vildana, you know, We've had Katie Greifeld, who does a show for Bloomberg about et f s. What do you think, from your sort of vantage point of getting to work with all these different people, how do these different perspectives

that we have on the team like help our coverage. Well, just by the nature of the group one and I actually came from that group, and our crypto coverage was originally part of the When it became a thing back in two thousand and seventeen, we start to formalize coverage.

But I think the advantage of of that was that you had people covering a lot of different markets who understood a lot of different things work, so they have been connect those dots fairly quickly understand this market and give some perspective quickly because that group just basically it's almost like a breaking news desk for markets. For me, looking at how we operate. I think one of the things that's so interesting it's not even only Twitter, right

that we have to be paying attention to it. Somebody might be putting out a YouTube video, or there might be a lot of conversation happening in a particular subreddit, or there's a website somewhere that is being updated with you know, bankruptcy filings, or it's just the like the distribution of information across lots of different platforms. And Phil, I want to go back to something that you said about verification. You know, Beth mentioned earlier that we there's scams,

there's hacks, there's frauds. There's also just market manipulation, and perhaps Dave you can also wig in. But having covered other markets, what do you think about the scale which this sometimes is happening. It's amazing really to see that just the branchness of these folks, both on the in the down aspects of it. Obviously the various platforms, Twitter, YouTube, telegram, exactly on it. So this is it's still the wild West,

it really is on it. I mean, this is an unregulated market that grew as an alternative to a regulated world. On that this is the world those folks chose. I've been done this for a few years and it's one of the most fascinating aspects of covering it. On it makes it. It's just from from a news perspective, it's a great thing to cover, really, isn't. It's just a it's a dynamic story that that never stops. And Phil, I know you have a lot of conversations with different

folks who are like, where do you even start? What would you tell them in terms of covering crypto. I'm still you know, that was the question I had when I started. Where where do I even start? Look, I think getting to know the big players in the industry.

Who are the key players that you will be looking after, and how do you get to know these people and how do you get them to confide in you what's going on behind the scenes, Because a lot of this is going to be about sort of peeling back the layers and understand what really you know beyond the Twitter wars that you know, people wage against each other. Um, just being able to understand on a fundamental level what's going on behind the scenes. That's obviously a long journey,

but sort of that's where I probably would start. You know, you've both raised this idea of one there being a lot going on at all times and to every player in the ecosystem sort of being almost like on equal footing. Anonymity makes journalists very uncomfortable, Um, except when we're talking

about anonymous sources, which a different story. But how have you approached figuring out reliability and robustness and other capitalty traditional journalistic markers when you can't always tell who the person on the other side of an account or a wallet might be. First of all, it's you know, kind of the smell test. Does it seem re reasonable what this entity is saying? Is there any way that we can match it up against something that's already out there?

The basic tools of journalism when it comes to you know, dotting the eyes and crossing the teeth just become even more crucial when Facebook stuff like this. If somebody is crypto native right there, like I only care about this market, but you could make them pay attention to any other market because it would help them understand some of the dynamics that they were seeing. What would you suggest I

think the closest analogy was probably currencies on it. I mean, it's kind of a a derivative of that market, and the currency markets are just all about profits and loss on it, so that the it's just a trading thing, and they had a lot of issues in that market too, about similar things about manipulation, um, insider information, that type

of thing. Over the years. You can look back at some of those scandals on it and it was it's currency market is just huge, so a lot of actually those traders have gravitated over when regulation really kind of clamped down on that stuff. In the currency world, I want it. I know plenty of traders who are who used to trade currencies who are now trading crypto similar kind of rush, I would imagine, and you know, sort

of free for all in terms of the hours. And then Beth, given you know how much in the past as you say, and now you've done on kind of like the dot joining and helping things be interested and accessible to people. What do you think is one of the more interesting storylines that people are perhaps paying less attention to. It's a question I keep asking myself is

what is the use of crypto? It may sound really basic, but I think it's it's something that when you see they have this huge rallies and huge plunges, it's a part of the market, seeing these these winters and these rallies, and how much this whole market is Bill Alton speculation. You know what I learned about it going up and going down, and all of the talk about web three and blockchain and all the ways that it can improve the world. I would like to know more about the

use case. And I think people are want to know about making money. How can I trade this? The lesser known thing and something I want to know more about is what do you use crypto for? What can you use this for? Well, we will try to and I don't have an answer to that. Yeah, this is where we go to. Our reporters were like, hello, here are some story. It is since I know we all have to actually go edit some things, I think we will

call that the episode. Thank you to all of you for joining me and see all when I'm back in New York. You heard from Beth Williams who's the deputy for Bloomberg Crypto, and two of our senior editors, Dave Liqua and Phil Logo Cronzo. You can find all of our work on the Bloomberg terminal. We're on Bloomberg dot com and on Twitter. Beth is b Willie Lou. I'm gonna spell that for you. That's b w I l l I l i o U. Dave is d Litqua that's d l i e d t k A. And

Phil has the coolest. It's his last name. It's at Lagerkranza. That's l A g e r k r A n s e R. On the next episode of Bloomberg Crypto, you could argue that crypto is no stranger to a recession. In fact, it was the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, but even birth the idea of bitcoin in the first place. But this recession feels a little different. In the decade or so since that formative Bitcoin white paper,

crypto has experienced spectacular growth. But now in the midst of this crypto winter, investors who entered the digital asset class during its so called bull market are reevaluating their whole relationship with digital coins. Bloomberg Reports of Claire Balantine joins me Monday for a look at how investors are feeling about this wintry mix in the market. I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, and this is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast

from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Email your questions, comments or suggestions for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net and you'll find us on Twitter at Crypto. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky very Galina. Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producer is Mohammed Feru.

Our producer is Sharon Burriro. Our associate producers Zanam Siddiki, Thie Butler and Moses and um Desta wonder At is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin