Han Kao on Crypto Briefing’s mission for unbiased crypto news

0:00I'm Ashley Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have han cow the CEO of crypto briefing han thank you so much for being on the show today it's a pleasure to have you on yes and great to be here very very excited to hear a little bit about crypto briefing as well Han if you would just kick it off with

0:24first of all why did you start crypto briefing and what are you hoping to achieve within the cryptocurrency community yeah so it was really us scratching on edge at the very beginning my co-founder John and I we we met in a telegram group in 2017 when we were spending a lot of time doing research on crypto investments and I SEOs for ourselves and we saw what was happening

0:50and all the fake news papists and just the general lack of legitimate source of reliable information that was available publicly for crypto investors and we said well it's nice that we had the right information but it'd be great if everyone else had it as well so we said what can we do and we realized that there were two main things that were perpetuating the problem of people

1:12investing in scams and bad projects on one hand it was media so fake news paid advertisements sponsor stories disguised as real news and on the other hand the lack of honest reviews professional analysis and reporting on these different crypto projects so so we figured well since we were doing all this research anyway we might as well share with the public and help other

1:35people avoid making bad investment you know the savings and so we started cooked the briefing with the mission to inform educate and protect the cryptocurrency investors and we would do that by having a three pronged approach and which would be on one hand at an editorial component that would publish on sponsor and unbiased honest news and on the other hand we would have a

1:58research component that conducted the heavy due diligence and published the real facts and analysis of behind these different cryptocurrency projects and we decided from day one that we would not do any sponsored advertising or take any type of compensation from the token projects so that will be fully aligned with the interests of our readers mm-hmm wow

2:25that's great hon and how major would you say are the issues right now with the level of bias and cryptocurrency news and does this also mean that coin desk and coin telegraph are in that same category yeah that's that's a really good question and I think it's important to remember that crypto media companies today exist for a reason and the and as a reader it's really important to

2:50understand the economic structure of these new sources that you're reading in order to understand what their true motivations are and if they could put media exist to generally profit as their primary objective then it's pretty straightforward you follow the money you see where they generate money whether they drain your revenue is it advertising the sponsorships and then

3:09they'll ultimately prioritize the interests of the avatars because that's that your customer not their readers so as an example if a media company is bigger sabotager is you know for example 15 X and tether they will they go out of their way to publish negative news about the finnex to their readership knowing that if they did so they may lose their

3:33biggest revenue source and ultimately their ability to sustain themselves as a company and so they're the line of journalistic ethics becomes quickly blurred and potentially compromised depending on how badly they need an advertiser and how necessary it is to release a piece of news and so and in the end the customers are no longer the readership and the readership becomes

3:55simply an asset that they leverage for the sake of advertising revenue and so in order to really remove and inherent bias a media company has to line their economic interests with that of their reader in the country that's a lot harder to do then it's sad than it sounds yeah that definitely sounds like a big dilemma and with crypto briefing are you guys focused on specific content

4:17like technical analysis and trading or is it more so fundamentals of companies and industry news yeah it's a good question we get asked that a lot and so while we spend a lot of time on fundamentals we focus on both the qualitative as well as a quantitative side of the projects in order for a holistic analysis so charts are a visualization of quantitative data

4:45that helps us visualize and tell a story and also see trends so for example the theorem may have a lot of dabs or on changings actions if you look at it from a snapshot but if you look at a chart of auditing transactions on your theorem versus eels or Tron you'll see that if Hiram's actively lose a ground especially over the last six months so the short answer is that we look at

5:11everything and then we pulled together a cohesive story based on both the fundamentals and the quantitative analysis in order to get a head of news and to understand the trajectory of a project before stories break and then we published these 30-plus page reports detailing our learnings our analysis and an overall investment grade that goes along from A to F giving investors an

5:36idea of how strong a project compares to others industry from the perspective of long term viability and sustainability mm-hmm interesting and where's your team located and are you guys growing right now yeah so we're we are a non-traditional company we're fully distributed everyone works motely our management team is spread out around the world I just moved back from Singapore

6:00on now based in LA my co-founder John is the managing editor he's based right outside of st. Louis Missouri we've got biz dev in New York we've got tech guys all around the world our research team is it's based in Europe and yeah and so we you know as far as geographic boundaries goes we have we definitely have a competitive edge when it comes to acquiring talent and we're

6:25we're hiring pretty aggressively we doubled our team over the last month and yeah we're looking to grow pretty quickly mm-hmm that's awesome maybe you could touch on the customers a little bit you know where do you see your customers coming from and how do you plan to grow summer acquisition yeah so we haven't actually spent a dollar on on on on acquiring customers just yet we we've

6:51done it pretty organically and we've done it through partnerships and we've just last this week announced a partnership with corn market cap the world's largest online crypto destination and so there's two pieces to the partnership on one hand we're gonna be joining as a member of their data transparency alliance where we're going to be giving suggestions or

7:17recommendations on self reporting standards for both the crypto projects as well as exchanges and on the other side they'll also be sharing in summaries of our research reports as well as their investment grades on the actual token pages themselves wow that's a huge partnership congratulations on that hon crypt corn record cap is one of pretty much the top domain in

7:45cryptocurrency right now for everyone to check their prices yeah absolutely we're very happy to be working with them Wow Congrats on that and maybe we could talk a little bit about the business model and you touched earlier in the interview on how a lot of cryptocurrency news outlets use advertising and sponsorship to grow their revenues however you guys

8:04have vowed not to have sponsored articles and things like that so what is your plan to have a revenue model and how are you planning to grow that yeah so that's a really good question and up until last week we were pre revenue and we've spent the past two years releasing all sorts of different types of free research content and innovating on different content types to

8:28bring bring about your readers and see what they like what they don't like where they see value and we've published over about 2,500 pieces of original content and over a hundred research reports and after all that we've we've oh in and we've also published dozens of code reviews that walk readers through a project-based screen buy scream and tell them

8:53what they the projects have and what they don't have and and you know whether or not the the project is has no is able to do what they say they're going to do and it's you know since we don't have any advertisers we don't have to filter our content and we are able to be completely objective mm-hm very interesting so you're putting out more like cryptocurrency reports on is

9:22it just industry news or company news or is it actually like buy and sell signals like how direct is it yeah so so we've open to the last two years it's it's been both news and research just just last last week we launched a new subscription product called symmetry and the idea of symmetry is to bring information symmetry to apply to an industry plagued by information

9:51asymmetry and so it's a institutional great research product that's cater to and priced for the retail investor and what we're going to be giving people are deep fundamental analysis reports that are about 10 reports a month that are ranging from long term prospects that we think are fundamentally strong and have a clear case for a commercial adoption

10:18to shorter term high-risk high-reward prospects that where we give insight on projects that are perfectly positioned to capitalize on short to medium term trends in industry that could yield higher gains in a short period of time mm-hmm that's great hon and what do you see for crypto briefing in the next six months is it just growing the symmetry product and customer acquisition purely

10:43yeah so over the next six months we're gonna be continuing to get feedback on this new product that we launched we're gonna see how how people like it and what their feedback is we're gonna be innovating on that and see we're gonna be introducing other sorts of report types that will give people even more insight on you know how to make smarter and more

11:07important decisions mm-hmm great and are you looking for any other strategic partnerships or to work with any other cryptocurrency companies in the industry yeah we're always looking for partnerships we think that's the best way to grow organically and we we are pointing with all the data platforms we have a few other big announcements that we will be making an upcoming weeks

11:29we're also looking to part with other industry leaders that are aligned with their mission in order in in terms of transparency and also also in terms of the the interest of seeing this the synergy chrony and is sustainable and in a safe manner mm-hmm great I'm looking forward to that how can more viewers learn about the news on crypto briefing

11:58and get a hold of this symmetry product so people can go to crypto briefing com to see our news or editorials and our opinions and in order to learn more about symmetry they can go to symmetry crypto briefing calm that's si a meat-eor i crypto briefing calm awesome thank you hon I'll leave those links in the description box below that's all the time that we have for

12:22innovate for this interview but I appreciate you taking the time and let's follow up in the near future absolutely thanks so much thanks so much Aston it's been fun