Independent journalist Molly White knows how to follow the memecoin

DailyTrend

Aug 15, 2025 - 00:00

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Independent journalist Molly White knows how to follow the memecoin

If you were looking for a single journalistic catchphrase, you could do worse than “follow the money.” Investigating and documenting the flow of cash and other resources is almost always a worthwhile pursuit for someone trying to get to the bottom of things.

Molly White, an independent journalist, software engineer, and one of the sharpest technology critics around, knows this well. She’s been tracking cryptocurrency industry spending — which rivaled spending from the energy sector and big pharma during the 2024 election cycle — on Follow the Crypto for more than a year now.

White writes about cryptocurrency and the broader tech industry in her newsletter Citation Needed and an extensive timeline project called Web3 is Going Just Great. There’s been no shortage of material, from Donald Trump’s web of crypto projects (“All the President’s tokens”) to the dismantling of federal cryptocurrency regulators to the right’s war on Wikipedia. For people who want to keep tabs on the crypto industry without drinking directly from the firehose, White offers regular recap issues. She also takes a step back and writes about building your own newspaper with RSS, what it’s like being your own legal department, and why the truth matters. Every Citation Needed article has an audio version that’s read by White — not an AI-generated voice. Most have generous footnotes and references.

Citation Needed is pay-what-you-want with suggested subscriptions starting at $10/month or $100 a year. White currently has about 29,000 subscribers and about 2,400 (around 8%) pay up despite the lack of a paywall.

I talked with White about the stories she’s generated by following the money, moving her newsletter from Substack to Ghost, and why, despite covering enough scams to build her own “grift counter” complete with animated flames, she can still see the good in technology. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Sarah Scire: I wanted to start with Follow the Crypto. Do you want to tell me a little bit about how you compiled it?

Molly White: I created that site last year when I was starting to really follow the crypto spending in politics. I originally created it as a tool just to help me personally, because it’s all public data. It comes from FEC filings, but they are a little challenging to navigate. You have to look up individual companies, or look up different filings for, like, six different Super PACs, and keeping a finger on the pulse of what spending was happening was really challenging. There are groups like OpenSecrets that do a really good job of trying to present it in a more accessible way, but they don’t have that focus on the one specific industry. They often will lump things together under finance or something like that.

So I created that tool, and then it occurred to me that, maybe instead of just having it [as] something I use personally, I could make it publicly available and then reference it as needed and direct people there — including people who may be interested in what’s going on in their state or what’s going on with a specific Congressperson. That’s why I created it: to provide that lens into the spending that was happening without people having to go to, you know, the fec.gov site, and know how to search it and parse through all these messy filings.

Scire: What are some of your takeaways from building this tool? What are some of the trends or stories that you pulled out of it?

White: I was really staggered by the degree of spending that was happening, because the crypto industry is not that big when you compare it to big pharma, big oil, and the sort of big spenders that people generally think about when it comes to political to political influence. You look at the overall size of the crypto industry and it’s very small, relatively speaking, and yet it was spending just an enormous amount of money — rivaling the pharma industry even. That was really shocking to me, the size of that push.

And then — I think that by being able to follow where the money was going, it gave me much better insight into the strategy by the crypto industry. When I look back through my writing over that year, I can see my own thought process developing where I was at first, like, “Why are they spending all this money on, you know, the Katie Porter primary election, for example?” I was like, she doesn’t really talk about crypto that much. And I was having the same thoughts about Cori Bush. It was like, “What’s going on here?”

As time went on and I was watching more of the spending, it suddenly sort of dawned on me that this was a show of force. This was a marketing strategy. They were able to leverage those victories in those primaries and threaten Congresspeople going forward to say, look at how we got Katie Porter out of the running. We got Cori Bush out of the running. We’ll do that to you if you don’t get on board with our agenda.

I was also running into this perception as I was writing about [the crypto industry’s] political spending, that it was almost exclusively spending to support Republicans. Obviously crypto has been very closely associated with the Republican platform. It has a lot of support from Republicans, but the spending actually was not really backing up that theory. That was something I was really able to follow closely through the site as well, the extent to which crypto was trying to court Democrats. That became a little bit clearer, even as the presidential election progressed, and we started to see that very last-minute push by the crypto industry to get Kamala Harris on board. I think we probably could have foreseen that a little bit, given the Democratic spending and the attempts to get Democratic Congresspeople on board.

Scire: Do you feel like they’ve gotten what they’ve paid for so far?

White: Absolutely. We’ve seen a total change in the regulatory stance around the crypto issue. Part of it’s come from the White House, but a lot of the spending that we saw in 2024 was actually not presidential. It was mostly congressional, although there were, post-election, a lot of contributions to Trump’s inauguration fund. We did see a lot of presidential moves that have benefited the crypto industry in terms of firing various skeptics at the SEC, the CFTC, etc. and installing a lot of very pro-crypto Cabinet members and other appointed positions. And then, obviously, there are the executive orders.

At the congressional level, we’ve seen three [crypto-friendly] bills that just passed the House. One of them also passed the Senate and is signed into law. The Senate has confirmed a number of extremely pro-crypto nominees. So I think that, yes, there has been a considerable payoff for the industry.

Scire: What would you say isn’t reflected in the sheet? What additional questions do you have that you aren’t able to answer through the FEC data? I’m thinking of some of these $TRUMP coins and other potentially corrupt things that are harder to trace because they’re happening outside of campaign spending.

White: There’s a lot of influence being bought and sold that is, like you said, outside of campaign finance with the Trump business endeavors. I’ve started tracking that a little bit, not so much on Follow the Crypto, although I do have a quid pro quo page. That’s a major part of it — the influence peddling that’s obviously not being reported in the formal sense.

Then there’s the lobbying side of things. Lobbying is reported, but it’s not something I’ve so far been tracking at Follow the Crypto. It’s something I’m hoping to incorporate in the next iteration of the site. That’s a separate disclosure regime.

I’m also looking to follow the extent to which individual Congresspeople are invested in the industry. It’s possible, to a limited extent, to see through financial disclosures which Congresspeople hold crypto or have more traditional investments in companies with crypto exposure — and I think that is also very relevant to a lot of the conversations. There was some recent reporting from The Washington Post and [Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] around White House employees and appointees holding fairly significant holdings in either cryptocurrencies or crypto-adjacent assets. I think that’s an important thing to follow.

We’re even seeing some people almost positioning it as a good thing. Like, “Oh, the regulators have a stake in this industry. Isn’t that so great?”

Scire: Hm, that’s a spin I hadn’t heard before!
One of the things that stands out to me about your work is that you obviously read widely. You link out very thoroughly, you track your own personal reading, and you’ve published stuff like how to build your own newspaper with RSS. Do you want to take me through your media diet and how you find interesting stuff to read?

White: Yes, and RSS is a huge part of it. I’ve always been a huge RSS person, so I follow a bajillion writers or publications there. I follow a lot of people who do sort of what I do on my personal website, which is, [publishing] “I just read this cool article. Here’s what I think about it.” I see that and then that person goes in the feed reader, you know? So it’s a lot of word of mouth.

It’s funny, because when I published my article about creating an RSS feed, people were like, “But what about discovery? How do you find new people?” It’s sort of like the old days where people would share interesting things, and you weren’t relying on the algorithmic black box to show you new stuff. That works really well.

I do still find a fair bit of stuff through social media and it’s actually a very similar process. These days I mostly use Bluesky where I see posts from people that, you know, I actually follow.

Scire: And posts with links. Can you believe it?

White: It’s sort of a revolutionary concept these days. I also read a lot of fiction, especially these days. For that, I follow various literary websites like Book Riot [and] Lit Hub. I also really like Reddit for book suggestions.And, finally, through publishing what I’m reading, I actually get a lot of new reading, because every time I say, “Look at what I read this month!” People are like, “Oh, you liked Murderbot. You should go read, you know, Bobiverse.” The social aspect of publishing what I’m reading works really well for me in terms of finding new books.

Scire: Yeah. Sometimes I find myself on Goodreads looking for new things, and I’m just reminded, every time, this is absolutely the worst way to go about it.

White: Yeah, I do use Goodreads and StoryGraph to track my own reading, but there’s just so little human curation happening on those sites. Keyword matching just doesn’t work that well for books, especially nowadays, where we’re seeing the proliferation of AI-generated books. It’s like, “No, I don’t want to read the SEO-optimized book that most closely matches the book that I loved based on some keywords.” It just doesn’t work that way for writing.

Scire: Right. Okay — the other thing that I want to talk to you about was this handy newsletter platform cost comparison tool you’ve built. Could you talk a little bit about how you chose your own tech stack and run us through some of the decisions that you made?

White: Back in the day, I was publishing on Substack, which I feel like is the default choice for someone who is trying to go independent or start a newsletter. And it was working fine; the emails were going to the inboxes. But there was increasing concern, generally speaking, about the platform’s moderation approach, which I found to be lacking. I spoke to some of the Substack leadership and had a call with them where I was trying to ask them, “What are you doing? Why is this a priority for you?” And I found their responses to be really frustrating. I was beginning to feel it was the Nazi bar comparison. It just doesn’t feel good to be publishing in the same place where there are some really reactionary people pushing really worrisome ideas.

There was also this separate aspect of it. I am a critic of the tech industry. I have written very critically about the influence of venture capital on tech and on people who use tech. I think that Andreessen Horowitz is a net negative in terms of the way that they go about things. And then here I am publishing on this Andreessen Horowitz–supported platform? That doesn’t feel good.

Finally, there was the financial aspect of it. As the newsletter grew larger, a very large amount of money was going to Substack. They take it off before it gets to you and I think a lot of people don’t actually realize the extent of the amount of money that you pay. It was a confluence of multiple things that made me decide, it’s been real, but let’s go somewhere else.

I wanted more control over the platform and how my writing was presented. Every Substack looks more or less the same. There’s, like, three font choices. Maybe you can change the color, but other than that, it’s pretty identical. I wanted a more custom experience, especially because I’m a heavy footnoter. I was sort of kludging it together on Substack and I couldn’t separate my footnotes and my references, and that was driving me up the wall.

I settled on Ghost. I discovered, actually, it’s pretty great software these days. They’ve come a really long way since when I used it in college. Now I have my footnotes and my references and my side notes — and it’s all how I want. It looks a little bit more unique and recognizable.

As time went on, I was hearing other writers talking about considering whether or not to move [from Substack]. I was seeing a lot of misunderstandings around like, “Oh, well, Ghost charges you $20 a month, or whatever it is, and Substack’s free.” And I’m like, just because you’re not cutting a check at the beginning of the month to Substack, that does not mean that you’re not paying for Substack.

I was trying to get across to people that maybe not only does it make sense from a moral, ethical standpoint to move, but it actually might make sense from a financial perspective. Unless you’re a very small newsletter or a free newsletter, generally speaking, almost any other option is actually cheaper than Substack.

Scire: Can you tell me a little bit about your readership? What are some of your most popular posts or articles? And, I don’t know if you can or do track this, but are those the same ones that also convert people to paying subscribers?

White: I actually don’t do a whole lot of tracking on my my newsletter. I have pretty much all of the analytics turned off, aside from tracking deliverability to make sure that the emails are getting there. But in terms of who’s clicking what, and where people are coming from — referral traffic and that kind of stuff — I mostly don’t track it. It feels invasive. I hate the idea of peering into people’s email inboxes.

I also found that previously, when I had those analytics on Substack, I wasn’t using them, or when I was, it was not a productive use, you know? It was like, “Oh, people unsubscribed when I wrote that. Do I need to write something different?” I don’t want to be chasing that. I want to write what I think is important and attract the people who like that type of writing. This way I don’t have to worry about safeguarding people’s data, I don’t have to worry about spying on people, and I don’t have to worry about my own brain goblins being, like, “Maybe you need to optimize more.”

What I do get is the human feedback, like, “Hey, I really love that piece” or “Oh, I really disagree with that.” That’s actually the more valuable piece of it to me. I recently did a reader survey and it’s an interesting mix, I think, of subscribers. I have some subscribers who are just there for the crypto coverage. They love to keep up on what’s going on in the industry. I have other subscribers who feel like they don’t understand it, and they’re trying to understand it through following me.

And then I have some subscribers who actually would prefer that I didn’t write about crypto, which is really funny to me. It was like, where did you come from? But they love when I post about Wikipedia, or RSS, or making the web a better place. I have a diverse readership, which is really fascinating to me, because I see myself as a very niche writer.

Scire: One of the things that I like about your work is that you’re obviously a critic, but at the same time, you have some optimism. You believe, like I do, that technology can be cool and interesting and life-changing. I think you have something like “tech should serve human needs rather than profits” on your About page.
Is that more optimistic position toward tech something that you find hard sometimes to put into practice? Do you feel generally optimistic about some of the tech that you’re using, if not, the tech you’re reporting on and being critical about?

White: I’ve talked to a handful of other folks who do similar work to me, and it’s interesting because there’s this weird perception that tech critics hate technology and, you know, that we’re all Luddites, that we would rather the internet didn’t exist, or whatever, you know. [Ed note: White sells some tongue-in-cheek Luddite merch.] Nobody looks at a food critic and says, “Oh, that person hates food.” Or says film critics hate film and that they wish that nobody made films. It’s like, no, they love food. They love films. And that’s why they’re a critic.

I think it’s very similar for the technology world. Most of the tech critics I know, we love this stuff. We grew up on computers. We think they’re amazing. They’ve changed our lives for the better. And we see things that are happening in the tech industry or coming out of the tech industry, and we’re like, “Oh god, that’s not what I grew to love about computers. Why is this happening?” And so we criticize it for that reason, because we would love to see the industry and broad technological developments moving in a direction that benefited people and humanity. I think that’s where a lot of it comes from, even though often people are like, “Ah, she just hates computers.”

I don’t think it’s hard to keep that philosophy because it’s so fundamental, but it can be challenging to continue to be optimistic about the forces that influence the development of technology. It does sometimes feel like an unstoppable force, when it’s huge, mega-billion-dollar companies that are capturing regulators or flouting laws to do what they want or buying politicians to write the rules that they think will profit them the most.

That’s frustrating, and it can be dispiriting. But my belief is, if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t inform people about it, then it’s absolutely going to happen. I might as well do what I can to try to keep people abreast of the stuff and allow people to make their own decisions when it comes to their voting or their political contributions or the software that they choose to buy. And, you know, God willing, we will start to see some change for the better.

Cryptocurrency image via Adobe Stock