CoinDesk staffers wrote letter to Bullish calling Justin Sun retraction 'outrageous' ahead of leadership firings

CoinDesk’s parent company, Bullish, has fired three senior editorial staffers, including Editor-in-Chief Kevin Reynolds, according to several employees. The move comes after news broke on Thursday that upper management at Bullish forced CoinDesk editors to pull a feature story about Tron founder Justin Sun purchasing a $6 million conceptual artwork made of a banana and duct tape at auction. 

Deputy Editors-in-Chief Nick Baker, who previously worked at Bloomberg, and Marc Hochstein, who resigned as editor-in-chief of American Banker to join CoinDesk in 2017, were also affected by the layoffs. Both declined to comment. Fortune first reported the news.

According to a letter sent to Bullish CEO Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, and CoinDesk CEO Sara Stratoberdha, the former vice president of Far Peak Acquisition, where Farley also worked, many members of CoinDesk’s editorial team are concerned about Bullish’s increasing influence over newsroom decisions. 

The debate is just the latest instance of the influence that wealth carries across the crypto industry, including in nominally independent sectors like crypto journalism. 

“In the original press release announcing Bullish’s acquisition of CoinDesk, you expressed your ‘unwavering support for CoinDesk’s commitment to journalistic independence,’” the letter, seen by The Block, reads. “Unbeknownst to most of the public — we no longer function as an ‘independent subsidiary’ of our parent company. Instead, we have been fully absorbed into Bullish, a crypto exchange that directly competes with many of the companies we cover.”

CoinDesk was purchased for $75 million by Bullish, an entity spun out of EOS-operator Block.one, in 2023, while the newsroom’s previous owner, Digital Currency Group, faced bankruptcy proceedings. The acquisition came after CoinDesk published award-winning scoops related to the FTX fraud that nearly crippled its previous parent company. 

At the time, Bullish hired former Wall Street Journal EiC Matt Murray to a “one-person” editorial committee to serve as the liaison between editorial and business operations. 

“Evidently, this was all for show. Bullish executives now heavily influence editorial and content decisions,” the staffers wrote, noting that Murray has been “stretched thin” by other responsibilities taken up since taking office, including serving as executive editor at the Washington Post. On Thursday, Fortune reported Murray resigned from the CoinDesk-Bullish editorial board.

In late November, CoinDesk reporter Callan Quinn (who previously wrote for The Block), published an article about her experience watching one of the cryptocurrency industry’s richest founders, Justin Sun, purchase a conceptual art piece called “The Comedian.” Following publication, representatives for Sun reportedly reached out to Farley, requesting the article be removed due to its irreverent tone. 

Farley “ordered” CoinDesk “to take down an article at the behest of TRON,” according to the letter. (The article, which remains offline on CoinDesk, was syndicated to YahooNews and can be read here.) 

Tron is the largest sponsor for CoinDesk’s upcoming Consensus conference in Hong Kong. 

“The decision to retract this article was outrageous, crossing every ethical line that we’re taught to observe as journalists. It showed blatant disregard for CoinDesk’s editorial independence and for our profession,” the letter states. “If this got out to other media, it would, rightfully, become its own news story, risking the reputation of CoinDesk, Bullish, Block.one and our journalists.”

CoinDesk has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since being acquired by Bullish last year. 

Concerns about relationship with Bullish

Bullish emailed its employees — including reporters at CoinDesk — that it was looking to go public and that such news should be kept confidential, according to Fortune. 

In public comments, Farley has been clear that he believes the newsroom should be a driver of revenue rather than a loss leader. To this effect, CoinDesk staffers have raised concerns about being turned into cheerleaders for Bullish and the Consensus conference series, which is being expanded to a bi-yearly cadence.

This is not the first time CoinDesk has removed or edited a story to accommodate an advertiser's request. The staffers note that Bullish management has also “placed limits on our ability to publish opinion articles … to avoid offending industry leaders.”

While there were spats between CoinDesk and previous owner DCG — most notably over moving the newsroom into the same New York City office as the crypto conglomerate — the journalists and editors noted that there was a firewall between the companies. In contrast, CoinDesk staffers wrote they have been “fully absorbed into Bullish," including sharing an office — despite initial plans to have a walled-off section and separate keys — as well as a technology stack. Reporters are also “encouraged to attend weekly ‘Bullish Scrum’ meetings that have little relevance to our journalists.”

"Bullish no longer seems interested in operating CoinDesk as a real newsroom," the CoinDesk journalists wrote in their email to Farley and Stratoberdha. "Instead, it feels we are being kept in stasis until your IPO, after which point we will be hung out to dry or repurposed as a thinly-veiled marketing arm for Bullish and the broader crypto industry."

Editor's note: Removes a statement about a clause in CoinDesk's employee contract, which was never effective, a current employee told The Block after publication.