review

As a newbie in the crypto world, it can be difficult to figure out which media outlets to trust. In 2019, it’s natural to want to use an aggregation site to save yourself from hours of research. CryptoPanic is a product that aims to be a solution to those conflicts, but can you trust it as your main aggregator?

Are quality sites featured on CryptoPanic?

The edge that CryptoPanic has on sites like Reddit is that new posts are automatically pushed to the site. Many Reddit pages have intense criteria before users are allowed to post links, which means even if there is worthy news, a worthy poster must decide to share it.

CryptoPanic handles the vetting process with the news outlets rather than the users. They do allow smaller outlets to be posted, but they must fulfill specific requirements. Some of the most important criteria is not being a single person blog, having original content and maintaining a “high quality” of journalism.

In order for a site to make it into the CryptoPanic aggregator, it must be at least 3 months old. This may seem lenient, but because of venture capital flowing into the crypto space, there are publications that have been top tier since their release.

Are there any advertising conflicts?

There are no traditional banner ads on CryptoPanic which is a good sign. If Coinbase decided to pay for banner ads, they might not want CryptoPanic to allow negative news or opinions about Coinbase to be posted on the site. Instead, they hand pick one company to work with at a time.

According to CryptoPanic’s advertising page, they work with “projects” and “products.” Right now, advertisements are colored differently than posts. The current advertisement is a product that lets users simulate crypto trading which at face value seems pretty neutral. They also claim to work with one exclusive advertising partner at a time, but there doesn’t seem to be a standard length of time.

From the information CryptoPanic makes available, they seem to handle advertising very ethically. Ads are clearly labeled, go through a vetting process and further the goal of aggregating quality information.

How to customize your feed

Users can sort through filters such as blogs, news sites, types of news and followed currencies. After filtering by type of news or outlet, users can also filter by how the community is reacting to them.

CryptoPanic lets users add reactions to posts such as “bullish,” “bearish,” “important,” or by likes and dislikes. This feature is particularly important to someone not very media literate when it comes to crypto news. Rather than sorting through all of the posts shared on CryptoPanic, we would recommend new viewers to sort by “important.”

The site makes money through additional features such as instant alerts, custom RSS feeds, Reddit and Twitter sources. That’s about all of the paid features though.

TLDR

CryptoPanic seems like they care about aggregating quality content. There is a relatively strong vetting process before sites are allowed on the feed, and proactive measures to ensure minimum advertising conflicts.

Still, sifting through the feed, I’ve found sites that post polls with no sources. When aggregating so much content, they cannot completely ensure the integrity of all posts. This is why it’s good to look at community feedback before taking a post seriously.

It is probably the best site to find every bit of news in the crypto space as quickly as possible. This can fulfill the needs of a day trader who wants to be on the cutting edge of what is happening with their coins, or for the blogger who can’t miss out on anything. A casual follower of the crypto space might find all of the information to be a bit much though, and could be better off creating a custom reddit feed.