Crypto needs more innovative stories for mainstream adoption: Halcyon co-founder
Companies can find new audiences by moving beyond traditional press releases, says Aubrey Strobel
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We’ve talked about a lot of sectors in crypto and how the past year has shaped them or redefined their approaches to the industry, but we haven’t really discussed one aspect, which is crypto comms.
As crypto hits the mainstream and momentum picks up, firms like the newly announced Halcyon act as the liaison between projects and the mainstream media.
Halcyon co-founder Aubrey Strobel hopped on the phone with me to chat about comms in 2025 and the changes she’s seeing as someone who’s been in the space for a while.
“It feels like there’s still a huge gap for the mainstream media, and we want to fill that in…things aren’t just the same as press releases and op-eds. There’s a lot of visual content for the attention economy,” she said.
Nowadays, tech companies have changed the way they make their own announcements. Instead of issuing a press release, some — like Astronomer’s video response to the infamous cheating scandal — have found a more direct-to-audience approach to have a greater impact than hoping for press coverage.
“Going direct is one of the biggest ways to really break through, and I think a lot of companies have realized that. I don’t think founders and entrepreneurs always know how to get their message across. There’s a lot of really good tech being built, and crypto has the numbers to back up its success,” Strobel told me.
For Halcyon, that also means offering content and video production services for firms who are interested in going that route, versus the more traditional press release.
“So, it’s helping them write those stories and go direct if they need to, because sometimes going direct is better. There are times when you don’t want to tell them to go to the media. I would say, ‘No, this isn’t a press release, but it could be a really interesting story.’ And even so, if a crisis moment breaks out, sometimes, you can give a quote to the media, or you can really own the narrative.”
She also acknowledged a problem in crypto that will continue to persist even as we see more mainstream adoption: The industry excludes people by using terms or language that’s not easily understandable.
“There’s some terms that you can’t totally change the meaning of because they are inherently tech…[so] there’s a lot of terms that we make up on our own that are not totally accurate, and I think that we need to do a better job of choosing the words that we write, and being strategic and creating those words for ourselves,” she noted.
One of her goals with Halcyon is simple: Make it so that the public can digest crypto and can feel like it’s meant for them.
When my work focused on traditional finance, I found that it had a very similar problem with jargon and exclusionary language (and systems) designed to keep the financially illiterate out. Crypto, if it’s really for the masses, can’t have the same problem.
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