The Flow: Crypto and Media with Frank Chaparro (GSR, ex-The Block)

Season 3 of The Flow opens with Frank Chaparro, who leads strategic communications at GSR. Frank started out covering US equity market structure: Nasdaq, NYSE, CME, and trading firms such as Virtu and Citadel Securities. He followed those firms into crypto in 2017. Within months, crypto went from a tenth of his coverage to almost all of it, and in 2018 he joined Mike Dudas and Larry Cermak to build The Block into a go-to information source for digital assets.

In this conversation, recorded in Singapore, Sergey Klinkov, Managing Director at Finery Markets, and Frank look at how crypto and its media have changed together. They cover the retail peak of 2021, the FTX collapse, the early stablecoin market, the pressure AI puts on news outlets, and what a very different Wall Street means for the market going into 2027.

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Highlights

From retail fervor to the infrastructure era
In 2021 and 2022, crypto reached mainstream culture. Celebrities promoted NFTs on late-night TV, and strangers on the street recognized Frank’s stories. That period ended with FTX. Frank describes today’s market as a quieter infrastructure phase, while the speculative energy crypto created has spread into other markets through 24/7 trading, perpetuals and real-world assets.

Crypto media in the age of AI
The media business model is under pressure from aggregation, AI-driven discovery and a crypto sponsorship cycle that lags market prices. Frank also sees a tailwind: audiences are moving toward individual voices they trust, especially people who have worked in the industry they cover. More journalists are leaving legacy outlets to build their own platforms, and the field will get crowded. The winners, he argues, will combine trust with real distribution.

Reporting the FTX collapse
During the FTX meltdown, Frank estimates he spoke to around 100 people in a single week. Some were FTX employees calling in distress. Others were insiders he had never met, who walked him through how the firm had operated. He calls the reporting impactful and remembers the energy of corroborating one source with another minutes later. He also has a regret: he would have handled The Block’s own exposure to Alameda with less defensiveness.

What a reporter learns about crisis communications
That experience now shapes how Frank runs communications at GSR. The harder and often better path, he says, is to address a crisis clearly and directly instead of reacting to every angle and every troll. The internet moves fast, and an issue that feels overwhelming from the inside often fades quickly for the average reader.

Stablecoins: from a niche to core infrastructure
Some of The Block’s earliest reporting looked at Tether’s banking relationships in 2018, when the stablecoin market was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Today it is worth hundreds of billions and moving toward trillions, which Frank calls a core part of the industry’s future.

Banks kept building this time
In 2021, the biggest venture and investment firms rushed into crypto, and the capital proved fleeting. This cycle is different. Over the last year, firms such as Morgan Stanley, Citi and JPMorgan kept hiring and building as prices fell, which Frank says never happened in 2017 or 2021. Going into 2027, he expects power to move toward firms within traditional finance. The winners will be those bringing tokenized finance and DeFi into capital markets, not necessarily the next layer one or layer two.

What Frank from 2017 would find most surprising
Frank entered crypto to follow the people, not out of belief in Bitcoin. What would surprise his 2017 self is the scale: founders he once had casual lunches with now run multi-billion-dollar businesses, and tokenized equities and 24/7 trading are now shaping market structure. For listeners working in market structure, he recommends Flash Boys and Dark Pools, along with his favorite, Bad Blood.

About The Flow

The Flow is Finery Markets’ branded podcast series, dedicated to exploring the dynamic world of institutional crypto trading. Each episode examines the forces shaping digital asset markets, offering expert insights into market structure, liquidity, infrastructure, regulation, and electronic trading. Hosted by leaders from Finery Markets and featuring voices from across the financial and technological landscape, The Flow provides a clear, thoughtful perspective on the future of trading.