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How CoinMinutes Inspires Trust in the Digital Finance Era
Why is crypto media so hard to deal with than your conventional financial one? One of the reasons could be that there is a pressure to be the FIRST to publish. I've been in both situations, and I have to say the chase after crypto news is so fast that the traditional financial press can hardly be compared. Then, there is the problem of complexity. How many readers (to be honest, how many writers) understand the tech behind optimistic and ZK rollups? This prepares the ground for a huge number of inaccurate explanations.
The person who is searching the net for info regarding a token, and sees a Discord saying that the token is the future of finance while Twitter is calling it a scam is probably you. That confusion between two opposite opinions not only frustrates you - it is just your head telling you that there is something wrong with this pile of contradictory information. Your inner voice that doubts in these situations is your guardian, even if it sometimes results in missing the opportunity while you are double-checking. It is as the saying goes, better safe than sorry.
Definitely, all of the crypto news do not hold the same standard. Although most of them appear to be the same, their fact-checking procedures vary greatly. Some of them really carry out fact-checking, whereas others only extract the content of press releases and wrap it with a thin layer of journalism without doing anything further.
So what should be the conditions for financial news to be considered trustworthy? Based on my experience as a reporter in both traditional and crypto markets, I have come up with four main elements: factual accuracy, transparent sourcing (which means giving the source and the reason for the information), having the full picture (not just the selected parts), and understanding that someone is giving their opinion when they are not stating facts. In the media of crypto, that is packed with examples of the absence of any of these elements, everything starts to fall apart. Hence, the resulting instability is people's money that goes to waste.
In the crypto world of information, there exist two radically different perspectives. The first one is characterized by hype-driven articles that inundate the readers with sensational claims, promise of the future, and manipulate their feelings to get clicks. We have all come across such headlines as: "This Altcoin Could 100x By December!". Evidence-based news, however, focuses on verifiable facts, discusses the current state of the technology, and uses a calm, rational tone - thereby giving up a portion of the credibility for the sake of the lack of excitement. The difference between these two approaches becomes very obvious during market turmoil times, people's emotions losing control, etc.
How CoinMinutes Builds Trust
Our Verification Process
To be able to verify facts and not lose the fast Cryptocurrency pace at the same time, we employ a three-layer verification system. Our system is not a single point of verification, rather, it functions as several very important checkpoints - and it is crucial because different kinds of information require different methods.
In fact, it is quite significant for us to connect the source-checking part with the entirety of the verification process. Corresponding to each factual claim, a source should be available wherein the confirmatory evidence can be found - this may be an official announcement, on-chain data, a social media account of a person or entity that has been verified, or even a direct quotation from the named individual. Whenever the original sources are not in agreement (which is quite frequent), we reveal the difference. Hence, the "telephone game" in which the information gets twisted each time it is passed from one layer of report to another is halted at this stage.
Local specialists are the people who study the content and thereby help us in the technical part of the work. It is quite significant - those among us who are developers and are quite familiar with particular L1s and L2s try to ensure that any technical explanation tells how something is actually working right now and is not simply the trader's hype. I cannot remember a single instance when this has not been the case, so it is very significant in saving us from that, and besides, we do not have to face the consequences of reporting misinformation and losing our credibility.
The last layer is about the bigger picture and what it all means. Facts are real in a vacuum, and presenting facts without context can be just as deceiving as lying. This check is ensuring that we are providing you with the complete story. The question changes from "Is this fact accurate?" to "Does this give readers an accurate understanding of what's really going on?"
While this works pretty well most of the time, our system isn't perfect - I should be upfront about that. When big news breaks like exchange hacks or surprise regulations, original sources aren't always available right away, forcing us to either wait (and be late) or rely on secondary confirmation. Technical fact-checking takes time that fast markets don't always give us - sometimes by the time we've verified all the details of an exploit, the damage is done. And figuring out context is sometimes a judgment call that different people on our team might see differently. We're constantly tweaking how we handle these challenges.
Transparency Practices
One of the most valuable things in crypto is transparency and CoinMinutes is very transparent about the three things that really matter for giving the most trustworthy information.
If we make a mistake (which is the case - we are human), we do it in a consistent manner. Errors of fact that are identified are fixed with an explanation both at the top of the article and right at the place where the error was, with the time showing when the correction was made. We do not change our articles in a sneaky way - unlike many sites that quietly update controversial claims after publishing them.
Though being very transparent is quite helpful, I should point out a few somewhat difficult points. A full disclosure of every single influence is practically impossible - how can one measure and disclose unconscious biases? The border between what is relevant to be disclosed and what is not requires some judgment. Also, sometimes too much transparency simply creates information overload and that makes things more confusing. We're still figuring out the sweet spot.
Building Comprehensive Knowledge
Educational Depth Beyond Headlines
It is very essential to understand the information delivered. News offers facts, but education content enables you to understand those facts. It is a crucial point in crypto, where the degree of difficulty is so high that making smart decisions is extremely hard for the average person.
At Coinminutes Cryptocurrency, we produce educational content through the building-block method that has three components. Firstly, we come up with the basics before diving into the complicated stuff - advanced concepts will never be thrown at beginners. Next, we include more and more complex ideas little by little and, quite often, refer to the previous concepts to help you connect the new with what you already know. At the last stage, we illustrate the operation in the real world by linking the abstract ideas to the actual usage and market activity.
Community-Powered Accuracy
Changes are frequent in the crypto world and not a single entity, not even the team, knows everything. Therefore, CoinMinutes functions by depending on the people's collective knowledge but still maintains our editorial standards.
Community input is a process of four steps that involve: obtaining data from sources (our Discord server and a feedback form), the contributor's profile (contribution and technical background), content evaluation, and if we can identify the person who provided something valuable, then we give the credit back to him. These steps put us at a point where we can have the advantages of community input and at the same time, we ensure the quality of that input.
The community expertise was the main source of the most of the coverage of the Arbitrum ecosystem which was the reason for our 2023 success. In our first reports, when we didn't realize the numerous projects that were building on the platform, community members via the feedback channels informed us that we had left them out. After their confirmation, not only did we respond to them but we also expanded our coverage by including such projects as GMX and Dopex which were doing a lot of groundbreaking work that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. Simply put, the community was way ahead of us in terms of what was going on in that ecosystem.
Good information is only half the battle; however, knowing how to use it is what gives you the real advantages. The following are the best ways in which you can use the crypto content you read:
Before you put the information into your mind, make sure that it is based on facts by considering the publication's history, verifying if the claims come from the original sources or if they are only the author's opinions, checking whether the authors neither ignore their limitations nor the opposing views, and lastly by looking at the publication date and if that information is still up to date. This very first check gives you the opportunity to distinguish the bad from the good even before it has any influence on your decisions.
If the information meets your initial criteria, you should perform an additional one by looking at it from different perspectives: confirm main points with at least two different sources, ensure that the technical explanations are correct by getting the opinion of various experts, realize that technical, financial, and mainstream sources may have different interpretations of the same information, and be aware of the areas where there is no consensus and that require further research. It tells you which ones are reliable and which ones are still uncertain.
You should understand the information before taking any action. Figure out how it affects your situation by checking its agreement with your goals and risk tolerance, identifying what else you need to know, trying out with a small initial share, and deciding exact time when you will either increase or decrease your holdings depending on new developments. Thus, general advice becomes your personal strategy.
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