Jason Yanowitz on the Transparency Alliance: Blockworks' Plan to Fix the Token Market

Exchanges sign on

Jason Yanowitz says the alliance includes the biggest exchanges in the industry: Coinbase, Kraken and Binance US, along with custodians and other companies. The aim, he says, is to have hundreds of companies adopting the Token Transparency Framework.

Blockworks went to the SEC a couple of times while working on the Token Transparency Framework. Yanowitz says regulators gave a lot of feedback, and in their last meeting they said an alliance of people could be really helpful.

From premium to discount

Jason Yanowitz argues that from 2015 to roughly 2025, maybe 2024, tokens traded higher than they should have, and that they now trade lower than they should. The reason, he says, is that "people don't actually know what they're buying." He also says many companies offer two ways to bet on them, a private equity round and a public token, which leaves investors unsure where value accrues.

He points to Venice, Zcash and Hyperliquid as tokens doing well because each has only one way to bet on it, with no equity for sale.

A bull market call

Jason Yanowitz thinks a new bull market has begun and will be seen as the institutional one. He compares the moment to early 2023, when Solana traded at $8 before running to 40 and 50, and expects a couple of tokens to 2-3x "and the timeline's gonna be silent."

Media first, then data

Blockworks reached $25M in revenue by bootstrapping media and events, and only turned on its data business in year five. Yanowitz says it is now the fastest-growing, largest data business in crypto because it owns the media funnel. He credits an early-twenties employee named Robert, saying the framework and alliance would not exist without him.