The Glorious Grind of the Crypto Writer
Famously, a wildly wonderful profession. In dreams, the crypto writer is a visionary, a digital prophet translating the complex language of blockchains into world-changing prose. The reality, however, is a different kind of animal, a grind that is comically unprofitable for the vast majority.
The romantic ideal of writing is perpetually at odds with the act itself. There is the tortured ennui that comes with having to deal with actually writing, or the thought of actually writing, or the crushing guilt of what you are not right now actually writing. This is only amplified in crypto, a space that moves at light speed. By the time a thoughtful analysis of last week’s protocol upgrade is published, the market has already pivoted to a new narrative involving memecoins and AI agents.
The writer’s job is more harrowing than ever. The once halfway-decent living one could make from publishing is going the way of the dinosaur. People read less and scroll more, their attention spans fractured by an endless stream of notifications and price charts. Meanwhile, sophisticated AIs hoover up intellectual property from across the web, including your carefully researched articles, and regurgitate it with little to no attribution, further saturating the space with low-value content.
Yet, for the crypto writer, this technological shift is not just a threat it is the very subject matter. Writing about decentralized technology means operating in the crosshairs of the automation that seeks to replace you. The irony is palpable. The challenge becomes not just to inform, but to offer something a machine cannot: unique insight, a distinct voice, lived experience, and a critical eye that questions the hype instead of mindlessly reproducing it.
The real value of human-written content in crypto is its ability to separate signal from noise. It is the investigative piece that uncovers a flaw in a smart contract, the thoughtful commentary that questions a token’s valuation, or the clear tutorial that truly onboards a new user. This is the grind. It is sifting through Discord threads, parsing governance proposals, and conducting interviews to provide original analysis that has actual weight.
It is a tough, often thankless market. But for those who persist, the reward is not in virality or vast riches, though those are nice. It is in becoming a trusted source in a notoriously untrustworthy arena. It is in building a community of readers who value clarity over clickbait and substance over hype. In the end, the crypto writer’s role is not just to report on the evolution of money but to help shape its narrative, one painfully earned word at a time.
