TRM Talks: Laura Shin Unchained

Laura has been a leading independent crypto/blockchain writer since 2015.

As a former senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream reporter to cover crypto assets full-time.

In the course of reporting her book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze (PublicAffairs, 2022), she and her sources found evidence that appears to resolve the biggest whodunnit in crypto: who was behind the 2016 DAO hack on Ethereum.

Laura is also host and producer of the popular blockchain and cryptocurrency podcast, “Unchained,” where she interviews the top minds from the crypto world. Laura is best known by her audience for her confidence in asking tough questions, and for her ability to distill complicated crypto concepts into an unbiased, accessible narrative, so that more people can understand the relevance of crypto and blockchain tech—and the degree to which it will revolutionize all of our lives in the near future.

As a journalist for over twenty years, Laura has always been captivated by financial turnaround stories. She first became interested in blockchain tech and cryptocurrency when she was spearheading the first Forbes Fintech 50 list. As she dove deeper into the subject, she realized that because the technology was far superior to anything that came before it, crypto would eventually transform the world. She quickly “fell down the crypto rabbit hole,” as they say, and began inhaling everything she could about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and blockchain technology/crypto with the goal of making it accessible to a wide audience—first at Forbes, then through her podcast, and now through her book.