As crypto prices soar, everyone from app developers on popular blockchains to token holders is looking for quality sources of information on their favorite projects.
Jacquelyn Melinek, a former senior crypto reporter at TechCrunch, and Anthony Pompliano, an investor and financial influencer, are launching Token Relations, a platform to help bridge digital asset projects with their myriad stakeholders.
“I wanted to build something needed in the crypto space,” Melinek told Fortune. “What we’re building here hopefully provides that easy avenue for people to get educated and engage with the blockchains that we’re working with.”
While traditional public companies have dedicated investor relations teams that share updates through quarterly letters and webinars, crypto projects tend to engage with their communities through marketing efforts, such as starting a Discord server or placing articles in publications.
Pompliano said this method of “one-to-many” communications can often feel disjointed or rely on notifications, with no understanding of who receives messaging. “If you’re a foundation or a protocol, you actually have an ecosystem,” he told Fortune. “It’s not just about what are [they’re] doing, but what is happening in [their] ecosystem. It’s really hard for them to communicate.”
‘Whatever’s needed to win’
Pompliano and Melinek plan to build out their methods for connecting blockchain projects with stakeholders, which they said can include token holders, developers, employees, and users of apps built on blockchains.
For its launch partners—which include three major blockchain projects, Avalance, Aptos, and Optimism—Melinek said that Token Relations will focus on email communications. They plan to build an app in the future and will include the information on their website. Melinek, who hosted a show called Chain Reaction at TechCrunch, also plans to launch a podcast and newsletter.
“We want to capture direct relationships with these blockchains’ communities and get to know them, who they actually are, and build that network,” Melinek said, “as opposed to these algorithmic routes that can get lost in the noise.”
The project’s ambitions also stretch beyond information sharing. Pompliano noted that Token Relations could help gather insights on an ecosystem’s users without collecting Personal Identifiable Information, or PII.
Meanwhile, as the crypto regulatory landscape evolves in the U.S., blockchains engaging in investor relations could also faced heightened scrutiny over whether their offerings are securities. In a recent ruling in a case involving Coinbase, a federal judge ruled that a crypto token’s “digital ecosystem” helps distinguish it from non-security collectibles such as Beanie Babies.
Pompliano said that crypto organizations are spending time with their legal counsel to evaluate their operations. “We rely on whatever they’re doing and that legal advice,” he said. “We very much look at ourselves as a communication company.”
Token Relations didn’t raise outside funding. Instead, it will be bootstrapped by Pompliano, who declined to share how much he plans to invest. “Whatever’s needed to win,” he said. He also recently launched Opening Bell Daily, a financial news platform, with former Business Insider reporter Phil Rosen and has a YouTube channel with over 550,000 subscribers.
Pompliano will serve as the cofounder of Token Relations alongside Melinek. “I only asked one person,” he told Fortune. “Either she was going to do it with us, or I wasn’t going to do it.”
