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While prices of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have dropped this year, fortunes have been much better for a Perth-based global news and media group specialising in the blockchain that underpins the technology.
With a background in financial journalism at Bloomberg, Heidi Cuthbert (pictured) founded her digital PR agency Multiplier in 2016 with a focus on startups, some of which have scaled up internationally to become successful players within their industries.
One of her clients is ASX-listed DigitalX (ASX: DCC), which through a joint venture with Multiplier founded Coincast Media in April this year.
Coincast was created to tell the story of blockchain businesses the world over, and the company is now producing a weekly TV news show with Sky News and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
"We have quickly established media partnerships in Japan, Hong Kong, Manila, New York and London. The show is the first blockchain TV show to be aired on a mainstream network. We are bringing blockchain to the mainstream," says Cuthbert.
"We develop fast-paced video news content, which has been designed to be shared across digital networks."
She says one of the biggest problems with blockchain technology is its complexity, but with a team of former business journalists from Bloomberg, WSJ and Sky, her aim is to foster understanding and make the tech accessible to the world.
At the same time Coincast Media has developed the blockchain news site Multiplier Crypto News, which Cuthbert claims has quickly become one of the most visited blockchain news sites in the world as the first crypto news site to be accredited as a news organisation by AAP.
"We're this tiny team out of Perth that managed to get to the forefront of blockchain technology all around the world. That's 'pinch yourself stuff' really," says Cuthbert, adding the group has already knocked back a lucrative buyout offer from a US company.
"We're bootstrap so we haven't had a major injection of funds into it either. We developed a business model to get it off the ground quickly and scale it quickly with a very small team."
Expertise from the Multiplier side of the business has been brought to Coincast as well, not to mention years of journalistic experience distilling complicated ideas into straightforward stories.
"A lot of the time these businesses have awesome technology and they just can't even explain it," says Cuthbert.
"They can't explain to the layperson about what they actually do in a simplistic way that's not marketing jargon.
"We took the learnings from the Multiplier side and brought that over to Blockchain, because we could see there was a clear need for some really good explanation around some pretty interesting tech."
Through the stories Coincast tells, Cuthbert hopes to help people understand what blockchain will mean for governments, banks and society at large.
"Whether a business was successful or not used to be determined by a bunch of older blokes in suits in Silicon Valley somewhere, and basically that entire system has changed," she says.
"When you start looking at the implications of some of that technology and how it might impact across government, across voting, even government, whether that's paying your bills or reading your electricity meter, you start to see this technology is truly transformational.
"It's going to be the next version of the internet really, and nobody was telling that story, so we decided to tell it."
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