2024 Reflections

Dear Blockworks Community,

Since launching in December 2017, our mission has been to build the world’s best source of crypto insights and information for investors and professionals. We’re here because we believe crypto improves the world by broadening access to assets, increasing transparency, and reducing financial friction.

This market moves in extreme cycles, but if you zoom out, you’ll see that every year more and more value moves onchain.

This trend will continue for decades, and as it does, the number of investors, founders, developers, and professionals building in crypto will grow by orders of magnitude. These participants will all need access to information to make investments, build companies, and scale protocols. This dynamic will continue to fuel a massive market for crypto data, research, and high-quality insights.

From day one, we built Blockworks to provide this information. And as the industry has grown, so have we.

Our business is simple

Our media channels give professionals and investors the essential news and insights they need to make informed decisions. Our events create the connections that move the industry forward—bringing together executives, founders, investors, and developers to shape the future of crypto. Our data and research provides professional investors with the tools and alpha they need to make smarter investment decisions. And our newly formed advisory business helps protocols build better, stronger businesses.

We make money through ads and sponsorships, event tickets, advisory services, and access to our proprietary research and data platform.

While it might look simple in theory, execution is everything—and execution in both media and software is tough. Social media and AI are reshaping how people consume news, putting pressure on those who can’t adapt. In the past few years, many of our competitors have either folded or been forced to sell due to these pressures. Meanwhile, if you’re building software products without a robust distribution funnel, that means you’re often forced to spend more than you make to acquire customers. In turn, you become reliant on VC dollars. We refer to this internally as the “VC hamster wheel.” We avoid both these pitfalls by owning the distribution layer and by staying profitable.

Default Alive

Folks at Blockworks are sick of this story, but I’ll tell it again.

Three months into starting Blockworks, Mike and I met with a successful entrepreneur at his office in New York. We wanted his advice. How could we compete with the incumbents (CoinDesk, Cointelegraph), the upstarts (The Block, Decrypt), and the institutions (Bloomberg, WSJ)? At the time, this felt impossible.

He gave us one piece of advice that resonated: In an industry as volatile and as vicious as crypto, sometimes all you need to do is survive.

This became, and continues to be, a foundational principle for Blockworks.

We have run Blockworks differently than many of our competitors. Instead of chasing every last ounce of growth, we have intentionally made decisions that sacrificed all-out growth to stay “default alive.”

The culmination of many of these decisions put Blockworks in our best position yet as we headed into 2024. But we still had to execute.

Thanks to the best team we’ve ever had, 2024 was our most successful year yet:

1. Advertising and Sponsorships: We hit all-time highs for advertising and sponsorships on both an annual and quarterly basis; Q4 2024 was our best quarter ever.
2. ARR: Our ARR is also at an all-time high, and we now have more than 100 enterprises, funds, and financial institutions who use the Blockworks Research platform.
3. House of Brands: We believe the future of media lies in dedicated niche brands, each serving a unique audience. We now have five strong brands under our umbrella—each with their own podcast, newsletter, telegram community, and soon, in-person activations.
4. Podcasts: We published 672 podcast episodes, which were listened to more than 15 million times across YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and other podcasting platforms. Our podcast network is the largest in the industry, and I believe now one of the top 3 financial podcast networks in the world.
5. Newsletters: As the value of a page view decreases, the value of a newsletter subscriber increases. Our newsletters grew to nearly 200,000 subscribers.
6. Reporting: Our newsroom published 2,230 stories that reached readers in all 195 countries, cementing Blockworks as the go-to resource for crypto news. Following the acquisitions of two other crypto media publications, we are proud that we remain independent.
7. Events: Hosted two of the leading industry conferences with Permissionless and DAS London.
8. Research: Our research team published 159 research reports and is now seen as the leading analyst team in crypto.
9. Data: “Improve the data, improve the industry.” We shipped massive improvements to our data platform, and we now cover user metrics, financials, and token data for more than 30 of the industry’s leading protocols and applications.
10. Advisory: We launched Blockworks Advisory to help protocols sidestep common pitfalls and accelerate their path to success
11. Acquisitions: Building upon our House of Brands strategy, we acquired and integrated both The Drop and The Breakdown into the Blockworks family, strengthening our editorial and insights capabilities.

Our Competitive Advantage

Our data platform is fueled by the reach of our media channels; our reporting is fueled by our proprietary data and research.

This media-data flywheel is the synergy that keeps us ahead of our competitors.

No other media outlet has our depth of onchain and financial data, and no other research or data platform has our distribution capabilities.

Looking Ahead to 2025

In 2025, you will see us:

• Become crypto’s defacto data and research platform
• Double down on our House of Brands strategy, scaling each property and adding new ones. This means growing podcasts, newsletters, and communities, as well as adding in-person components to each brand
• Turn Blockworks into a talent destination for podcasters, writers, reporters, and researchers. This means finding talent early, building brands around them, and designing the incentives to retain them. It also means investing in journalism at a time when others are divesting
• Host three of the industry’s best conferences: DAS New York and DAS London for institutions; Permissionless for developers and builders
• More tightly integrate our media and events with our research and data
• Help more protocols scale via our advisory business

The Little Moments: Day After Day

As we look back over the past seven years, building Blockworks has been less about the big moments in time—less about the product launches, the huge hires, and the exciting fundraise. It’s been more about putting one foot in front of the other, day after day after day while making sound decisions that optimize for sustainable, long-term oriented growth.

That’s how we survived Covid and made it through both the 2018-2019 and 2022-2023 bear markets. It’s also how we were ready to thrive in this new bull market. And that’s how we’ll continue to build the best crypto media and information brand and platform in the world.

Thank You

We couldn’t do this without our customers, employees, readers, and listeners. Your support powers our mission every day. As we move into 2025 and beyond, we are more excited than ever about the future of crypto—and our role in it.

Jason and Mike

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