Matt Novak
Matt Novak is a staff reporter at Gizmodo who covers news and opinion with a strong emphasis on the history of technology and how past visions of the future intersect with today’s technology stories, including crypto. He has been at Gizmodo since 2013 and is a long-running voice on speculative and historical technology, drawing on years of work exploring “paleofuture” ideas. His crypto coverage sits inside this larger frame of technology history and public-interest reporting, using contemporary stories like Hunter Biden’s crypto tweets to examine how digital assets collide with politics and online culture.
Technology history and paleofuture
Novak’s defining through-line is his fascination with past visions of the future and the ways they shape current technology debates. He has been writing about these “paleofuture” themes since 2007, building a body of work that looks at how earlier generations imagined robots, cities, media, and everyday life in the future. That perspective runs through his reporting at Gizmodo, where he often uses historical examples and archival material as a lens on present-day technology.
His author bio notes that he is fascinated with the history of technology and that interest shows up in stories about cultural and design icons like electronic billboards in Los Angeles and other urban landmarks.
He has written about the Robot Hall of Fame, engaging with the way fictional and real robots have been celebrated as symbols of the future. Novak also revisits classic attractions and experiences, such as Disney World’s celebrated ride, to explore how corporate visions of tomorrow were packaged for mass audiences. Across these pieces he treats technology history as a live resource, using specific examples rather than general nostalgia to connect past futures to current technology culture.
News and opinion on tech, language, and culture
Within Gizmodo, Novak covers news and opinion, blending reported pieces with commentary that often highlights the cultural and linguistic sides of technology. He has written on topics like the Oxford Dictionaries 2014 word of the year, showing an interest in how language around technology and culture is created and elevated. In other pieces he responds to promotional material from major studios, including a Universal Pictures video that he characterises as a reminder that “living in the future is garbage,” tying media marketing to broader anxieties about technology and modern life.
These stories show a reporter who treats pop culture, advertising, and vocabulary as part of the technology beat, not as distractions from it.
Novak’s path into this work includes an early professional start writing about technology for a major magazine, which helped establish his focus on historical context.
His longstanding Paleofuture writing gives him a framework for situating current news and trends within a longer timeline of technological hype, disappointment, and rebranding. The result is coverage where a news hook often sits alongside earlier examples, making clear that today’s buzzwords and platforms have precedents in earlier eras of “future” thinking.
Crypto stories with political and public-interest angles
Novak covers crypto as part of his broader technology beat, applying his news-and-opinion approach to digital assets and the people who promote them. One of his crypto pieces examines Hunter Biden’s crypto tweets, using that episode to raise questions about how public figures engage with cryptocurrencies and what their promotions mean for ordinary people watching from the sidelines. His interest in the implications of such messaging fits with his history-of-technology perspective, where current crypto enthusiasm is another chapter in a long story of speculative finance and future-oriented tech promises.
For crypto, this means he is drawn to stories where digital assets intersect with politics, reputation, and public risk, rather than to technical deep dives alone.
Across crypto and other emerging technologies, Novak’s work is distinguished by its combination of accessible news writing, opinionated framing, and a consistent reliance on historical and cultural examples. He writes as a reporter who treats past futures, popular language, and media narratives as essential parts of understanding today’s technology stories, making his coverage particularly focused on how these narratives shape public perception of crypto and other digital trends.
4 more crypto journalists.
Alex Dovbnya
Alex Dovbnya is a staff writer at U.Today who covers the pressure points where crypto markets, regulation and security risk meet, with a focus on institutional fund flows and major infrastructure failures. He writes as both a trader and journalist, producing clear, data-led stories that track how digital assets move, break and get governed. Under the byline Alex Dovbnya and the alias AlexMorris, he has authored more than a thousand pieces for U.Today, CryptoComes and other fintech outlets. His work centers on XRP ETFs and institutional capital flows, crypto legislation and U.S. policy fights, large-scale security breaches and infrastructure risk, and market sentiment in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Across these strands he relies on precise on-chain, ETF and sentiment metrics, treating regulation, hacks and macro commentary as market catalysts rather than occasions for personality-driven coverage.
Alex McMurray
Alex McMurray is a technology and fintech journalist at eFinancialCareers who focuses on the people behind change in finance. He covers crypto leadership, digital asset firms, AI teams, software development, quantitative investing, high frequency trading and technology hiring. His reporting links job titles, skills, reporting lines and compensation to wider shifts in business models and organisational strategy. He has written about JPMorgan’s crypto lab, senior moves between banks and crypto firms, HSBC’s shift from operations to technology, fintech hiring, engineering and quant careers, diversity programmes, university routes into fintech, and banking executives who build startups. He also covers Python and C++ in trading, machine learning specialists and unconventional pay structures. Writing for eFinancialCareers since 2022 and in his current role since 2024, he produces short and long-form stories for specialist audiences, driven by exclusive information, confidential tips and career-focused angles.
Andrew Hayward
Andrew Hayward links crypto markets reporting with Web3 culture and gaming, using two decades in the tech and games press to give his beat a clear business-first lens. He most recently served as managing editor at Decrypt, after earlier roles there as culture editor, hub operations lead, and senior writer, and he now pursues new editorial leadership and content management roles while remaining open to freelance work. His coverage spans news, features, educational explainers, and interviews on crypto, NFTs, AI, gaming, and broader tech trends. He focuses on how listed firms and miners manage Bitcoin treasuries, balance sheets, refinancing, and risk, and how crypto tools and tokens show up in everyday gaming and digital life. He also reviews laptops and hardware for Tom’s Guide and has written on games and technology for more than 100 publications since 2006.
André Beganski
André Beganski covers the business side of cryptocurrency, focusing on how digital asset markets connect to traditional finance, regulation, and tax policy. He is a journalist at Decrypt. His core beat is how professional investors and major financial institutions interpret and move crypto markets. He writes often about Bitcoin and other major tokens, price cycles, analyst calls, and institutional sentiment. His work ties market moves to decisions made by banks, exchanges, and lawmakers, with attention to liquidity, trading costs, and structural pressures. He reports on U.S. legislative efforts that would reshape how digital assets are taxed and reported, and on policy debates as material market factors. He also writes across the wider crypto and blockchain landscape, including altcoins, Ethereum, NFTs, platforms such as Coinbase and FTX, and the legal regimes that govern them.