Believe In Something
A background in sociology turned into a crypto career for reporter/podcast host, Jack Kubinec. He has been covering the industry for Blockworks since the fall of FTX and now reports daily on everything that happens in the Solana Ecosystem in their Lightspeed newsletter and hosts the associated podcast.
YAP met with Jack to discuss his background and the philosophy of money and got insights into what is interesting in crypto news.
What got you into crypto?
I majored in sociology in college, and I was particularly interested in how people derive meaning from money. Money is supposed to be this neutral means of exchange, but really isn’t for most people. As part of that, I became interested in crypto, because this was 2021 lots of headlines about it. I discovered Blockworks while researching for a term paper about how people evaluate crypto. I applied for their journalism internship, got the role in the summer of 2022, and got to cover the FTX collapse in real time, and I’ve been there since.
Do you feel like working in crypto has been the philosophical dream you hoped it would be?
I guess I’m maybe a little sad because it feels like that’s going away a bit. When I started, crypto was publicly perceived as this kind of crazy libertarian crowd that wanted money that’s not controlled by a central bank. People now want the US government to buy Bitcoin – it’s lost some of that edge that I really enjoyed back in the day, but, no, I continue to be fascinated by the question of why people choose to make certain decisions with their money.
Can you have mainstream adoption and still have the libertarian fantasy of lawless money?
In the Solana world, there’s this rallying cry, at least among meme coin traders, of “believe in something,” which is ironically mostly about the speculative casino mentality. I think people should believe in something bigger – like creating alternative forms of money and those early techno-utopian ideas, not just meme coins.
What excites you most about crypto?
So I don’t know if this excites me per se, but what I do think has the most obvious real-world potential is payments. Current payment systems like Stripe charge around 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction, making microtransactions (like paying 25 cents to read an article on Blockworks as an example) impractical. The main hurdle is crypto on/off ramping fees, but that seems solvable as crypto becomes more commoditized.
Another example is in the case of moving money. Crypto allows you to move any amount of money around the world instantly. I’m not sure if making money transfers a little more efficient justifies all of the stuff that exists in crypto today, but that is the use case that I’m personally the most bullish on today.
Is writing for a newsletter and podcast work very different from beat reporting?
The approach is similar, but I lucked out with the Solana beat. It’s the blockchain of the moment. Who knows how long that’ll last? I really enjoy the experimentation side of it. When I was more on the Ethereum side of things, it tended to be very academic. You needed to have, like, a PhD understanding of economics to get how these DeFi lending protocols were working. And I don’t know. I just think that Solana’s a bit more interesting in that regard.
Authors Note: This interview took place in November 2024, before any politician-backed memecoin rugs had occurred.
What makes a strong podcast pitch?
The bar is higher for podcast pitches because I put out five newsletters a week, but I only put out two podcasts and I’m a co-host, so I’m really only putting out one podcast every week, and so, like, there’s a lot of podcast pitches I don’t even read. I’m more likely to consider pitches from PR people I know and work with. Cold emails rarely succeed given the high demand.
If I get commentary, that’s like, “here’s something my client wrote about Donald Trump winning the election,” that’s like, mediumly helpful. But something that I really like, that some PRs have been doing lately is if they have clients that put out research reports, and then whenever the asset that I cover, which is SOL, is mentioned, they’ll flag it, and they’ll say, “hey, check out this research report we talked about Solana.” There’s a bit more heft to a research report that has data and stuff. And so I am a big fan of that. And because there are often cool charts. I love charts.
From questioning the meaning of money in college to covering the chaos of FTX and the ever-evolving Solana ecosystem, Jack Kubinec’s crypto journey is one rooted in curiosity. His reporting brings a sociologist’s lens to an industry often driven by hype—and a welcome reminder to believe in something deeper than just meme coins.
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