What the media get wrong about Ethereum

And so we’ve rolled out an NFT glossary to help the uninitiated

As a former tech journalist, I sympathize with the plight of reporters who need to get up to speed with the fast-changing world of crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Often, there are few authoritative sources to turn to in order to get a solid grounding in the subjects.

But, as every journalist can tell you, when you get something wrong, it stings. Or at least, it should.

Here’s a little rant I just came across on a recent Into the Ether podcast episode about last week’s big news that Visa would now support payments in Ethereum. The milestone event was besmirched to some extent by the hamfisted way in which much of the news media reported the event.

Complained news commentator Anthony Sassano on the show:

Even though this is really positive news, the thing that actually annoyed me the most was the mainstream media coverage of this. … All these popular sites like Forbes were just saying it had to do with Bitcoin, which makes zero sense because it’s got nothing to do with Bitcoin. And I just think this speaks to how bad the information is out there regarding crypto and more specifically regarding Ethereum. The mainstream media gets coverage of Ethereum wrong all the time — it’s just so inaccurate on the technical level, but even on the surface level.

I think it’s a lack of education in … a lot of the reporting where things get like twisted and turned around for narratives. This definitely seems to be a pretty common theme for Ethereum and DeFi.

With that in mind, the team here at Digital Culture Works has just published an NFT glossary as a good basic starting point for readers new to the subject matter — including journalists covering the crypto and NFT beat. We’ll be updating it from time to time with additional essential lingo.

Consider it our gift to the crypto-challenged news media.