About CryptoThreads

Understand the news, not just read it.

The problem

Crypto news arrives as a flood of separate headlines. The same piece of news shows up five times from five outlets, each headline on its own, with nothing about what came before it. To understand one story you have to find its history yourself. And it is hard to tell what anyone actually checked.

What we do

• Each story once. One piece of news is one story, however many outlets covered it. We show how many did, and every outlet's own headline is a link to its article. Today this holds for the stories we have checked; joining other outlets' headlines about the same news is still being built, so for now each of those headlines is shown on its own.
• What came before. A story that keeps developing becomes an ongoing story: a dated record of every development and who reported it. Ongoing stories never end; a quiet one comes back when something happens.
• Checked, or not yet. A person checks every development before it joins the record. Those stories are marked ✓ and carry our own one-line title. Everything else is shown as the outlets' own headlines, marked as not checked yet.
• Sources you can check. We link to the articles. We never copy them.

How we stay neutral

• We say who reported what. We never say who was right, and we never call an outlet wrong.
• We never take a side between outlets, or between the people and companies in the news.
• Colours tell things apart. They never mean good or bad.
• "Most covered" is a count of outlets, not a judgement of importance.
• When we use AI to draft a sentence, a person approves it before it appears, and we mark it. AI never supplies a date, a link or a source.

Where the news comes from

Headlines come from the public feeds of 6 crypto outlets: CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, The Block, The Defiant, Unchained. General-news outlets' headlines appear only when they are about crypto. Today we follow 5 ongoing stories with 55 checked developments.

Why a quipu

The Inca kept their records without writing, as knots tied on hanging cords, called a quipu (KEE-poo). Each cord held one account, recorded in order. We do the same for the news: each ongoing story is a cord, and each development is recorded on it, in order, with who reported it. The knots you will see on our pages are drawn from that idea.

What's planned

Not built yet: following an ongoing story or a company and getting one email when it moves, and making calls on what happens next with knots, our free points. Knots are never bought, sold or exchanged for anything.