Rekt is a media as strange as fascinating
Among all crypto media, Rekt is one of those that shake up the rules to follow their own, so much so that the first glance is destabilizing.
To make parallels, it's a bit like listening to Tool for the first time or discovering Dark Souls a decade earlier. These are productions that disturb us because they are so different compared to the others. But as you discover them, you get more and more interested in them until they finally impress you.
I wanted to talk about Rekt because it's a media ahead of its time on many points, but lately, it's sometimes clumsy in its approach, this article is the opportunity to write everything I think about it and why not discuss it together.
Before giving my opinion about Rekt, it must be introduced first. Rekt is a media specialized in decentralized finance, and more precisely in hacks.
When a DeFi protocol is hacked, Rekt looks at the case and presents us with the crime scene: how the protocol was hacked, how much money was lost, what lessons can be learned from it... A bit like a medical examiner showing his report.
But Rekt is also about decrypting and investigating stories specific to decentralized finance. After all, hacks are only one way to get rekt: Curve Wars tells the story of a merciless war between different protocols that seek to have as much power as possible over Curve, and the investigations on Wonderland and Sushiswap highlight the abuses to which decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are exposed.
All of this in a black and white art direction, with puzzle-like lexicography, as if Michel Audiard had become a DeFi developer.
Among all the existing media, Rekt wants to be different. It was even thought to be different with a precise bias that was applied from the beginning. And this bias has paid off very well, since it has become the undisputed specialist of hacks, and today the trademark of Rekt is immediately recognizable. From my point of view, 3 pillars compose it:
The general crypto media is ultra-saturated. In that field alone, there are already 5 reference media, with hundreds of news that reach us every day, at all hours.
As if that wasn't enough, the crypto universe is starting to segment into different categories (DeFi, NFT...) which themselves are exploding in terms of activity so that even the media talking about a particular sector are having trouble keeping up.
Rekt has directly chosen a very specific field: DeFi protocol hacks. An area that will only speak to a very small, but extremely engaged community. And it's very wise to adopt this approach because you can federate a community without having to ensure an unsustainable news flow.
To be a specialized media in a particular sector, you also need the right skills to talk about it.
Rekt has chosen to go deep into the technical side. In other words, Rekt will not talk to everyone. And that's okay because as a specialized media, it doesn't have to do so as long as targeted people find it interesting.
At this level, Rekt's contributors are all actors professionally involved in decentralized finance, who would already be working as smart contract developers and/or auditors. And that's the least we can do when we realize the technical level needed to comment on a smart contract hack.
I'm speaking in the conditional tense because apart from Julien Bouteloup who is the founder, I haven't been able to put any names on the team that makes up Rekt. And it is precisely a bias that is addressed in the following point 👇
A media’s primary purpose is to satisfy the need for information. But we don't judge a media only by the information it provides. The interest for a media also passes by a way of presenting or a way of functioning specific to it. And it is there that Rekt deploys all its singularity:
All contributors are anonymous. When the post-mortems are made public and Rekt uses them fortheir posts, only the pseudonyms are published. Beyond that, there is no way to know who writes for Rekt. This is not a bad thing, because investigative journalists are the priority targets in case of retaliation.
Rekt is a DAO. Rekt has to be as incensurable as DeFi itself, therefore there is no company. It is an initiative governed by smart contracts of anonymous participants who aim to inform and keep a history of hacks and "Rekt" of all kinds.
The branding. Whether it's the website, the illustrations, or even the gifs, the whole branding of Rekt revolves around black and white, the crazy years, and other "The Avengers" references (not “those” Avengers, the older ones), which denotes even more with the rest of the crypto universe.
And I'm not even talking about the writing style which is especially difficult to access for newcomers, based on cryptic phrases and obscure references specific to decentralized finance. This style makes Rekt the hermetic and elitist media of the crypto universe, and yet it remains coherent with its domain and its target audience.
All these points that have been discussed allow Rekt to be more than a different media from the others: Rekt is a media that knows what it talks about, to whom it talks, and which is the only one in its category. This is what justifies its success with the crypto community, to such an extent that the mainstream media quote Rekt in their sources. And in my humble opinion, other media will follow their example.
Despite its undeniable reputation as the "Coroner" of DeFi, Rekt is not flawless in its way of doing things, and this media is always subject to improvement.
"It should be noted that Rekt aims to be an agnostic media without bias and that the reader is encouraged to inform himself and form his own opinion on a given subject."
That’s what Julien Bouteloup said in an interview with Sia Partners. However, not all protocols are treated in the same way depending on the development teams involved.
I allowed myself to have doubts about Rekt's neutrality when they published their analysis of the $130 million hack on Cream Finance, where they focused on the total losses caused by protocol hacks in the Yearn ecosystem. Rekt has become particularly vociferous, whereas they had been accustomed to showing hacks without complacency or disdain.
I was going to give them benefit of the doubt until they made THE misstep that would backfire: the investigation against Fantom.
The pitch was to show that Fantom's various protocols were created by a group of insiders to extract as much money as possible from investors (a legitimate point, as the DeFi on Fantom looked a lot like an inbred orgy)
The problem was that most of their on-chain analysis was wrong, and they preferred to expose the on-chain data that supported their assumptions.
On Rekt's disclaimer, it reads:
Although we provide rules for Anon Author conduct and postings, we do not control and are not responsible for what Anon Author post, transmit or share on our Website or Services
So be it, but lack of responsibility does not excuse everything, and it’s incompatible with an unbiased view. Rekt's aura has become too great for authors to let their grievances show without consequence.
Since this affair, it looks like the authors have calmed down, hoping that it remains the exception that proves the rule.
Rekt publishes from time to time more general topics on decentralized finance. Some topics are worth looking at like "The Second Layer", which allows thinking about the future of Ethereum's Layer 2, or "Curve Wars" already mentioned at the beginning. But today, some of them deserve an update:
=> However, there have been quite a few changes 1 year after the article was published: alternatives to Convex are starting to emerge, the protocols participating in Curve Wars number in the dozens, and some like Velodrome are looking to create an improved version of Curve.
=> An interesting follow-up would be the future of the different Layer 2 projects in the medium-long term, as they are not all equal from a technological point of view.
=> Today, the fight becomes much more concrete: the European regulation MICA starts to take shape, and the American regulators overwatch USD stablecoins issuers.
Rekt has the means to have an original and relevant point of view on all these subjects, and this can bring additional value to the ecosystem.
Finally, what do I personally think of Rekt?
First of all, Rekt is of public use for DeFi. We are in an extremely young ecosystem with completely new programming languages. In this kind of environment, only the trial-and-error method allows us to progress.
The more mistakes we discover, the more solid the foundations will be to build tomorrow’s finance. On the contrary, forgetting our mistakes condemns us to relive them. It is therefore essential to keep a history of all previous hacks, and this is a task that Rekt accomplishes brilliantly.
Rekt is also an example to follow for anyone who wants to create media related to the crypto universe. There are too many generalist media and 24 hours in a day is not enough to cover everything. In an industry that is segmenting and exploding in all directions, niche media will be popular for years to come and Rekt seems to be a life-size guide to creating them.
My biggest fear about Rekt is its pseudo-neutrality. The authors are supporters of Julien Bouteloup's projects, and you can feel it when you look at the articles about Yearn and Fantom (Yearn and StakeDAO are competing with each other in Curve Wars). I'm afraid that Rekt will eventually become a lobby that doesn't say its name.
These are all the reasons that pushed me to make this post. Among all the crypto media I read, Rekt is one that has impressed me the most. It leads by example in many aspects but lets itself go on others, and I wanted to express myself on these points.
Now that everything is said, I would like to thank Julien Bouteloup and his collaborators for having created Rekt, because decentralized finance would not have the same face without this media. One way or another, we are all rekt.