Sources: media startup Tech In Asia, which runs a blog and events business in Southeast Asia, laid off a third of its staff in July after canceling planned ICO
in the end it canceled those plans, made layoffs to streamline costs and launched a subscription business. Media is a tough business. https://techcrunch.com/... Jon Russell / @jonrussell : Tech In Asia's blockchain project - ‘Tribe’ - would have looked something like Civil, a platform for decentralized media and communities. Ultimately the company stopped developing it because of concerns around distracting from the core business.
Context & Ripple Effects
Tech In Asia's canceled 'Tribe' project was its bid to fund journalism through a token sale, on a model that would have resembled Civil — the blockchain media platform that later shut down entirely after losing its backer ConsenSys (Civil's collapse). With the ICO off the table, the company fell back on the classic media toolkit: cutting a third of staff and launching a subscription product.
The subscription pivot places it in the same experiment TechCrunch itself ran with TechCrunch+'s launch as a complement to ads and events revenue — an experiment its own founding editor later described as a failure. The layoff also lands mid-pattern: Protocol shut down with ~60 staff months later, and aggregator SmartNews cut 40% of its US and China staff.
First-order effects
- A third of Tech In Asia's staff is gone immediately, and the 'Tribe' blockchain project stops consuming engineering and leadership attention that management judged was distracting from the core blog-and-events business.
- The new subscription business becomes the company's primary growth lever overnight, layered on top of existing ads and events revenue rather than replacing a funded roadmap.
Second-order effects
- Losing the ICO path forces Southeast Asian media startups watching this to price reader revenue realistically from day one instead of treating token sales as a substitute for a working business model.
- With headcount down a third, the events business has to generate more revenue per employee, pushing pricing up or format cuts for sponsors and attendees.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Civil dead, Protocol closed, CoinDesk cutting 45% of editors, Tech In Asia shrinking — venture- and crypto-funded standalone news outlets give way to either reader-funded operations or subsidiaries of larger companies that can absorb the losses.
- Subscription-first economics favor incumbents with brand and archive over regional challengers, structurally concentrating English-language tech coverage of Asia in fewer hands.
The trend: Venture-backed digital media is abandoning speculative financing experiments — token sales, single-backer models — and consolidating around subscriptions and cost cuts, with layoffs as the recurring adjustment mechanism.