Our analyst team doesn't agree on crypto. One of our senior analysts describes himself as a “crypto realist”. Some on the team are true believers. Others fall somewhere in between.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

The job of good financial content is to help investors make informed decisions about the investment landscape that actually exists, not how you want it to be. That applies whether we personally love it, hate it, or haven’t made up our minds yet.

Crypto has gone from niche insurgent to institutional mainstay. Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) now hold roughly $80 billion in assets. The world’s largest asset manager BlackRock is in the game, its bitcoin ETF being the firm’s most profitable. And according to Coinbase’s most recent State of Crypto report, 45% of younger investors already own crypto versus just 18% of older generations. These younger investors are allocating a quarter of their portfolios to alternative assets, triple the rate of their parents’ generation. It’s now a meaningful part of how a whole generation is building wealth.

So how do you cover crypto responsibly when emotion and hype are still running at full tilt? We believe the answer comes down to giving investors frameworks to think with, tools to let them run their own due diligence, and meeting investors where they are. And we help crypto brands do the same for their own investors.

Frameworks over forecasts

The temptation is to chase the price. Bitcoin’s up? Write about why it’s going to the moon. Bitcoin’s down? Write about why it’s all over. 

We prefer to give people frameworks. We want investors to learn how to think, not what to think, because the latter can change multiple times a day.

When the “bitcoin as digital gold” narrative was gaining steam, our Head of Content Reda Farran, CFA wrote about JPMorgan’s valuation framework, which tried to calculate bitcoin’s fair value by equating its total market value with gold held for investment purposes, then adjusting for the coin’s higher volatility. The piece walked investors through the methodology, showed them the moving parts, pointed out where it falls short, and let them draw their own conclusions. That gives investors a durable reference point, regardless of where the price went next.

We've done the same with project-level analysis. How To Size Up A Crypto Investment In Four Easy Steps gives investors a repeatable process: find a project that fits your crypto narrative, look at user and developer activity, check the project’s tokenomics, and screen for red flags. It provides a repeatable method, rather than a recommendation.

The questions that would have saved people from Luna

One of the most useful frameworks is a crypto due diligence checklist. Before you invest in any token, here are the five questions you need to ask: who are the founders? What does the project actually do? Does the project have “unforkable utility”? Is the project secure? And, critically, where does the yield come from?

That last question alone would have saved a lot of people a lot of money during the Luna collapse. If you stake your crypto and generate income, you need to understand the source of that income.

We also published a piece on how to make sure your crypto investments don’t get forked over, tackling the fact that someone can copy a project’s code and launch a competitor overnight. It identified five forms of unforkable utility that can't be replicated: project capital, users, security, token acceptance, and community.

None of these pieces told anyone to buy or sell anything. They gave investors the tools to evaluate for themselves and avoid making a big mistake.

That’s exactly what we help our partners do, too. We’re working with European digital asset manager CoinShares to help retail investors understand bitcoin and ether and choose their digital asset strategy – and with 21shares, which offers the world’s biggest suite of crypto exchange-traded products, to explain how to build a web3 investment portfolio and why it’s not too late to buy bitcoin. These guides help brands educate retail investors in a responsible and actionable way. No “picks”, but practical frameworks and guidance.

You can’t teach people who don’t want to learn

Educating by trying to educate, or baldly telling people what to do, never gets you very far. We learned that the hard way.

Years ago, we built an app, Finimize MyLife, that would ingest your financial information, your goals, and produce a personalized plan. Want to buy a house in three years? Here’s exactly how to allocate your savings. People loved it. They said, “Great, I have a plan.” We checked in six months later. “What plan?” They’d put it all in bitcoin.

As the old saying goes, you can lead a modern retail investor to diversification, but you can’t stop them from YOLOing into whatever’s trending on Reddit. Today’s investors are action-oriented and community-driven. They’re going to speak to like-minded people and learn by doing. But if you meet them where they are, you can educate them in a sensible way – not “here’s a lecture on portfolio theory”, but “you’re about to buy this altcoin, here’s a framework so you don’t get wrecked”.

And the need for these frameworks grows as the audience does. We’ve seen retail investors evolve from asking “What is bitcoin?” to comparing Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, and asking about different stablecoins, staking yields, and Ethereum’s growing role in global financial infrastructure. They are trying to understand the asset class as they would any other. You’ve got a group of active investors who are growing their crypto portfolio alongside everything else and are looking to make better, long-term decisions. 

Agree to disagree

This brings me back to where I started: our team doesn’t agree on crypto.

And they don’t have to: we don’t tell people to buy or not to buy something. And we shouldn’t. What we do is say, before you jump in, here are the frameworks to ensure you’re making an informed decision, and here’s how to think about how much of your portfolio this should be.

And we can say all of that without taking a side on whether crypto is the future of finance or a casino. In fact, we say it better because we haven’t taken a side. When your content team includes genuine sceptics and genuine believers, the work that comes out is more balanced and more useful than anything produced by a team of converts.

Crypto investors are ready to learn. Are you ready to teach?

If you’re looking to engage crypto investors where they are and support a generation in building its wealth with digital assets, without the hype, let’s talk.