Pompliano, Ex-Journo Melinek Spin Up 'Token Relations' Startup for Blockchain Firms

• Token Relations is a communications startup from crypto entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano and former TechCrunch reporter Jacquelyn Melinek
• The startup aims to deliver tailored information to crypto companies' stakeholders and to supplant X, at least in part, in distributing information to the crypto community.

Crypto entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano and former TechCrunch reporter Jacquelyn Melinek are behind a new crypto communications startup, Token Relations.

Not quite a media brand or a PR shop, Token Relations instead will give clients a direct path to talking to their "community" about metrics, milestones, product launches – the kinds of things that don't always fit neatly into a marketing plan, the two told CoinDesk in a recent interview.

Token Relations will seek to partly displace X, formerly Twitter, the chaotic catch-all for nearly every piece of content currently released by crypto companies. Crypto Twitter's "one-to-many" distribution model prevents companies from getting their message to their core audiences, Pompliano said.

"We're stepping in as a dedicated effort to communicate to your existing stakeholders," the podcast host and investor said. He called Token Relations a "third bucket" separate from "marketing intended to get new users," and "PR, intended to talk to the press."

Token Relations enters an industry whose loudest voices are perhaps well-attuned to debating media theory and the value (or lack thereof) of talking through the press. Last week the widely followed entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan railed against PR companies as a "sleeper cell" for what he described as tech-hating journalists, advocating instead for founders to go "direct."

Pompliano and Melinek aren't quite creating a PR shop for their clients, who include entities associated with blockchain projects Avalanche, Optimism and Aptos. The startup is instead betting on direct channels, be it video interview content or newsletters disseminated to crypto buffs who want to be most in-the-know.

The startup seeks to solve a decidedly crypto problem. No other industry has quite the same mashup of stakeholders whose interests can be financialized (token holders), career-focused (developers) and even cultural. They want to know what's going on, direct from the source and unfiltered through media, according to Token Relations' founders.

Crypto's comms landscape is also unruly: There's no regulator in crypto pushing token-issuing startups toward making streamlined portals for disseminating critical information to their stakeholders, as with publicly traded companies and their investor relations websites.

Instead, there's the black box of social media algorithms that Pompliano said suppress and lose information.

On Token Relations "there's no algorithm that will govern whether a communication is important," he said.