Ben Schiller has been in journalism since 1997 and in crypto for a decade, which makes him one of the few people who watched the dot-com bubble inflate and pop before he ever heard the word blockchain. He spent five years as managing editor at CoinDesk, sitting in the newsroom that broke the FTX balance sheet story, the piece that detonated a $40 billion company overnight. Today he’s a senior advisor at Miden.
Ask him what Bitcoin is and he won’t give you the textbook line.
“Bitcoin’s really a movement. Millions of people subscribing not only to a digital asset, but to a set of values: decentralization, self-sovereignty, privacy, personal empowerment. It’s technology, but it’s also an idea.”
The 2008 Moment That Made Exit Feel Necessary
He traces his own conviction to the financial crisis, when the people charged with guarding the system torched it and walked away clean.
“You could see a self-interested group of elite people in government and in banks self-dealing, externalizing all the losses to homeowners and people on the street while they walked off with their fat paychecks. There was no accountability. That gave rise to Bitcoin. It’s about exit.”
Why the FTX Story Almost Didn’t Run
Schiller is blunt about how thin the standards are across much of crypto media, and how much restraint the biggest story in the industry actually required.
“You had a $40 billion company that went down overnight. If we didn’t know that balance sheet was really FTX’s, we never could have published. It turned out he was hawking nine different balance sheets around to different investors. There were many versions of the truth.”
His frustration extends to the loudest voices in the room, including one in particular.
“Some of the things Elon says are very offhand. It doesn’t seem like he’s being responsible about the enormous voice he has. People can say whatever they want, but if you’re in the media, you can’t just say whatever you want.”
AI Is the User Interface Crypto Has Been Waiting For
Ask him about the next decade and he doesn’t talk about price. He talks about agents.
“The new user experience of crypto is going to be AI. Instead of going to Coinbase and making some complicated transaction, you’ll just speak into your phone. An AI agent finds the pathway through the financial rails and does it for you. The whole question of user interfaces becomes moot.”
For anyone convinced they missed it, Schiller has a familiar answer, delivered with ten years of pattern recognition behind it.
“I’ve been in crypto for ten years and people have always worried they’re too late. Absolutely not. We’re in the first inning of this revolution of money. I don’t know what the price of Bitcoin will be at the end of the year, but it’s definitely going to be higher than it is today.”
Outside the market, he boxes and runs the D Salon, a traveling series of living-room gatherings modeled on the early 1900s salons, held alongside conferences like Consensus and ETH Denver. The topic isn’t tokens. It’s exit, mobility, and what replaces the institutions on their way out.
Ben Schiller is a senior advisor at Miden and served as managing editor of features and opinion at CoinDesk from 2019 to 2025, where he also led Consensus magazine. A graduate of the London School of Economics, he has worked as a journalist since 1997 and organizes the D Salon, a global gathering series on decentralization.