Crypto news websites shrink extremely fast. But why?

Crypto media entered 2026 with a quite odd problem. Crypto itself was still big, loud, volatile and full of daily stories. The newsrooms built to cover it, though, were getting smaller.

The latest example came from DL News, a DeFi-focused crypto news website that started in 2022 as the news arm of DeFiLlama, a crypto data platform best known for tracking DeFi protocols.

In a May 7 post, DL News said it will close at the end of May 2026 after failing to build a sustainable independent media business.

DL News didn't say crypto had become boring. That would've been hard to argue anyway. There were still token launches, lawsuits, stablecoin fights, prediction-market hype, ETF stories and Bitcoin price swings almost every day.

The problem was more uncomfortable. Crypto news still had stories. It just didn't have the same business behind it.

As DL News noted, it was first built around the DeFiLlama brand, but later became effectively separated from the data platform after an internal conflict at DeFiLlama in early 2023. That left the site with a familiar name in crypto, but not enough distribution and business support behind it.

For a media startup, that gap can get painful fast. Good reporting helps. A clear niche helps. But without traffic, repeat readers, ad demand, subscriptions, events, data products or some other stronger business line, the newsroom sits on very thin ice.

DL News said its research business grew 270% in 2025 and "crossed seven figures in annual sales." Still, the outlet said it "was not enough" to offset the pressure on the news business.

Where the pressure started

It would be too simple to blame AI for the whole thing. Crypto media was already cutting jobs before Google's AI summaries became the obvious villain. The first wave came after the 2022 crypto crash, when token prices fell and crypto advertising cooled.

CoinDesk, a crypto media, events and index company, was one of the first big examples. In August 2023, the company cut 45% of its editorial staff, or about 20 people, while parent company Digital Currency Group, a crypto conglomerate, was planning to bring in strategic investors, according to reports.

The Block, another crypto media company, had its own cuts around the same period. Axios reported in March 2023 that The Block laid off roughly one-third of its staff after a leadership shake-up tied to undisclosed loans from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX founder, to former CEO Michael McCaffrey.

The Defiant, a crypto outlet focused specifically on DeFi, also got smaller. A Media Operator reported that the company had laid off eight of its 20 employees, mostly developers, after crypto volatility hurt its wider media plans and made capital harder to find.

Each case had its own mess. CoinDesk had a parent-company and sale-process problem. The Block had the SBF funding scandal hanging over it. The Defiant had the smaller-company version of the same market squeeze.

But for journalists inside those companies, the result looked pretty similar. Crypto-native newsrooms were already shrinking in 2023.

Then the market turned again

For a while, the mood looked better. Bitcoin hit a new all-time high in October 2025, and crypto did what crypto usually does after a big price move. People started talking like the cycle had properly turned.

Then the year got messier.

2025 total crypto market cap & trading volume. Source: CoinGecko

Data from CoinGecko shows total crypto market capitalization fell 10.4% in 2025 to $3 trillion, making it crypto's first down year since 2022. The fourth quarter did most of the damage, with market cap falling 23.7%, or $946 billion, after briefly hitting a record $4.4 trillion.

Stablecoins rose nearly 50% to $311 billion, prediction markets, platforms saw volume jump more than 300% to $63.5 billion. Even perpetual futures volume on centralized exchanges rose nearly 50% to $86.2 trillion.

Data became the new flex

The liveliest parts of crypto were moving toward trading infrastructure, stablecoins, prediction markets, institutional products and data-heavy stories. Those areas can be great for dashboards, research, events and professional tools, but they don't always turn into broad retail traffic for news sites.

CoinDesk's sale showed where the business was moving. When Bullish, a crypto exchange operator, bought CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group in November 2023, Bullish pitched CoinDesk as an integrated media, events and index platform, not just a news website.

Blockworks, once best known as a crypto media company, made the same shift more directly. In October 2025, founder Jason Yanowitz wrote in an X post that the company would "sharpen our focus on software and data" and exit the news business.

That same month brought another kind of warning.

Cointelegraph, one of the largest crypto news websites, disappeared from large parts of Google search in late 2025, according to crypto and SEO industry analyses. Coinbound, a crypto marketing agency, suggested that the drop in visibility appeared around October 6, 2025, and called Google's site reputation abuse policy the "strongest hypothesis," while noting that a manual action wasn't publicly confirmed.

Search traffic became harder to trust

The next hit came from distribution. For years, crypto publishers had a simple reader habit working in their favor. People searched basic questions on Google.

Why is Bitcoin down. What is a stablecoin. Is XRP a security.

Those searches fed explainer pages, price stories and quick market updates. A reader asked a question. SEO teams had stories ready for that question. Google sent the reader to a publisher.

But that loop is weaker now.

Pew Research Center, a U.S. nonpartisan research group, analyzed Google search behavior from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025.

• It found that users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared.
• When no AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result in 15% of visits.
• Links inside AI summaries were clicked in only 1% of visits.

Pew Research Center also found that users ended their browsing session after 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages that showed only traditional results. So the risk for publishers is very simple. If the answer is already on Google, some readers stop there.

The Reuters Institute, a journalism research center at the University of Oxford, pointed to the same pressure in its 2026 media and technology report.

• It said publishers expected traffic from search engines to fall 43% over the next three years.
• It also cited Chartbeat data showing Google organic-search traffic to more than 2,500 sites fell 33% globally from November 2024 to November 2025.

Still, the direction is bad for publishers that rely on search only. Google traffic is weaker and AI answers make some clicks less likely.

As a result, the archive model that helped crypto explainers and market guides is less dependable now.