Starting today, CoinDesk’s digital magazine, formerly known as Layer 2, will be renamed Consensus Magazine.

Last December, we launched Layer 2 as a place to explore the big themes of crypto, blockchain, and Web3: the reinvention of money, the decentralization of the Internet, the reordering of organizations around trustless collaboration (to name a few). We call it Layer 2 (usually used to describe add-ons to the base layer of a blockchain) because we envisioned it as a second layer to what we were doing in the newsroom. CoinDesk has long been a leading source for crypto news. Layer 2 aimed to take advantage of the daily headlines, providing context, explanation, opinion, and research.

The need for such content has never been more acute. Over the last 12 months, we have seen cryptocurrencies and Web3 increasingly filter into the mainstream conversation. It has penetrated the centers of power in the United States. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are now minted by actors, athletes, and musicians, while franchises like the Bored Ape Yacht Club are taken seriously in Hollywood. Central banks are launching digital currencies, spurred by monetary competition from bitcoin and ether. Wall Street banks are offering custody and trading services, hoping to get a piece of the action. Washington, DC, which has long largely avoided cryptocurrency, has finally stepped up to regulate the industry and take your money.

At the same time, we have also witnessed the ugly side of the blockchain revolution. Names like Terra, Celsius Network, Three Arrows Capital and, above all, FTX have moved into the same notorious lexicon as Lehman, Enron and MF Global. Crypto’s reputation is once again in the toilet in the financial press, especially among skeptics who never gave it a chance anyway. Trillions in value have been lost, likely setting the cause back several years.

It’s a mixed and complicated picture: too much good and too much bad. Cryptography is a very promising industry that is tainted by frequent controversy, incompetence, and misconduct. (Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX falls squarely into the latter category.) But it is an industry that deserves to be explained and considered. Whatever the consequences of FTX, there are still millions of developers, asset holders, and observers who believe in Web3 and want to understand its implications. Web3 offers solutions for the future even if it is not always good at enunciating or demonstrating them.

the story continues

Furthermore, FTX showed why journalism still matters: CoinDesk’s early November story about Alameda’s dubious balance sheet, which triggered the meltdown, is a response to all those who said the best reporting and analysis these days comes from vigilantes with anonymous Twitter accounts. At CoinDesk we are never afraid to uncover unpleasant aspects of what increasingly powerful players are doing.

So why the name change? Because the best thing about a magazine is a conversation: a place where people can offer and discuss ideas. Magazines are powerful when they provoke a dialogue about what is happening now and what could happen in the future. And that’s Consensus, CoinDesk’s annual event, all over the place. It’s where the most important conversations happen in Web3. Consensus Magazine aims to be the place where some of those conversations begin, whether it’s in articles by our writers, in interviews with leading figures, or in opinion pieces addressing the latest scandals and triumphs.

Like Layer 2, Consensus Magazine is partly periodic and partly continuous analysis. It consists of monthly topic weeks dedicated to crypto and Web3 topics (like our list of the most influential, which we reveal today), as well as daily commentary. We’re here to explore the big issues in print and on TV (taking them on stage in Austin, Texas, in April) and to offer commentary you won’t find anywhere else (like describing SBF for what it really is).

We have even more plans for the Consensus Magazine experience using our DESK social token. Stay tuned for more news on that soon.

We hope you enjoy our new look and that you want to be a part of what’s next too. None of us know what the future holds. But we are steadfast in our belief that decentralized peer-to-peer technologies will be a part of this and it is up to all of us to pay attention.