New Media: Hazeflow x Raiku
Philosophy behind Hazeflow, New Media, and Case Study of our 6+ months work with Raiku.
I believe that meaningful articles should be AI-free. In terms of crypto companies, almost all articles are supposed to be meaningful.
Crypto protocols are not media outlets, they don’t have to push multiple long-form pieces per day. You optimize for quality over quantity: you want to gain recognition in the field, you want to keep it technically accessible for potential users, but you also want it to be deep enough for technical people to understand the difference.
The core difficulty is how
to present the product, the thoughts behind it, the architecture behind it, and the outcome in a way that people care about.
You can brainstorm this with AI, but it’s impossible for any model to lay a foundation for work that has even a small part of creativity.
Humans like to read things that other humans write. The taste of the presentation, the vision behind it, and just the “gut” that something is right make people care about the thing they’re reading.
@a16z defined New Media as their service that helps startup founders with brand strategy, storytelling expertise, and media distribution to grow influence and build generational companies.
I want to define New Media slightly differently — it’s the authentic human publications that make your product, brand, or company more recognizable in the field you operate in over time.
Different Stages For Caring
Each crypto company often experiences four stages: pre-fundraising, pre-product, pre-TGE, and post-TGE. Each stage is obviously very different from each other because priorities, target audiences, and outcomes are also different.
Founders experience the whole color spectrum when they have to pivot to slightly different intermediate goals, even if they’re doing alright.
When you’re pre-fundraising, you want to look good in front of investors.
When you’re pre-product, you want to look good to potential developers and new hires.
When you’re pre-TGE, you want to look good to potential token holders (I’m not talking about teams who want to dump everything on TGE).
When you’re post-TGE, you want to look good in front of basically everyone because now you have two things to justify: your core protocol and token performance.
Each stage is different, and each stage requires deep thinking and explanation of why things are built this way and how they’re built this way.
I think the most challenging part here is when you’re pre-product. To brag is not an option because you don’t have the data to back up your thesis (and you don’t want to lie). You don’t really have a lot to show yet, but you still want to capture attention for the upcoming product.
What should you do?
Hazeflow x Raiku
That’s one of the cases that we have been working with Raiku. First, I want to say that they’re an amazing team who we’ve been working with for over seven months now, and I believe Robin assembled Barcelona in its prime (sorry Real Madrid fans).
Anyway, Raiku is still in the development stage and their product is not live yet, but you can already start building a connection between the product and audience — precisely, builders at the moment.
You can’t build a deep connection without deep conversations.
After someone has finished your article, they shouldn’t only think about how good the article was, they should also think about who was behind this article. This is something that builds connection and retention.
In the current chaos on X where the “tips format” is popular, do you really care who was behind writing these tips if they were put out without much thought behind them? No!
You might find them useful right now, but you forget them after you exit the page. Each article (and content strategy in general) should be done with deep research behind it — people only come back when you give them some value.
Each piece of content has a different value behind it, whether it’s an interesting statistic, an explanation of how a particular architecture component functions, or a case study that shows how the product was used, can be used, or will be used in the future.
You have to highlight weaknesses
Every protocol / ecosystem / infrastructure you’re building on has some weaknesses. If you’re planning to live in a new country, you usually want to know both pros and cons.
It’s easier to highlight pros because they’re usually on the surface.
Finding cons (especially non-obvious ones) is harder. You don’t want to move into a new country without knowing what might make your stay not so pleasant.
Developers moving to a new ecosystem is the same process as people moving to new countries. You want to know something in advance (reading docs), something when you go there for tourism (exploring tools), and everything when you move there (focusing on development).
It’s better to build trust through saying “Yes, we know, guys, there are such problems at the moment, it’s not ideal, but we still love it here because of x, y, and z”. Rather than saying “We love it here, it’s the best place in the world…”
You want to relate to potential users, investors, developers, and ecosystem users. It’s tough to relate when you’re fully unaware of problems, and you can only be aware of different problems and mention them to others when you do research!
It’s fundamental to research before producing and saying something.
Clarity & Depth
Every team should aim for effective communication internally and externally (I still believe the comms role is very underrated).
When you talk to a bunch of people externally, all of them have different interests. Someone wants X, someone wants Y, someone wants Z: how do you fit this into a single article?
Well, that’s the beauty of the combination of a technical job and a creative job — making complex topics accessible without dumbing down.
The core thing that we’re doing with Raiku is making sure that articles are understandable to a broad audience while retaining technical flexibility.
If some segments are intended for validators or developers, we add more precise technical terms.
If some segments are for the general reader, we balance the technical stuff with analogies.
It sounds simple, but cooking all of this is difficult but fun (otherwise Hazeflow wouldn’t exist).
Examples
Debunking Myths
One myth that we wanted to debunk about Solana is that it goes down. Solana had a series of outages back in 2021-2022 during the bull market peak activity. That is something that each Ethereum maxi or competing chains like to bring even nowadays, but those moments are well behind.
Of course, it’s not that easy to just say “Solana is stable more than ever” — we need to back it up with some data.
Pump.fun peak activity with 70,000+ tokens launched in a single day didn’t break it.
When Donald Trump launched his token, Solana processed $38B in DEX volume (Ethereum’s max was $6B) and didn’t break.
When the market got ADL’d in October 2025, the slot duration was only 395ms (versus 392ms baseline), only a 3ms increase despite a 32x fee spike and 2.7x transaction surge.
And more stuff.
So eventually we’re saying that outages happened, but they were in the past and those times are not relevant for us now. It only shows that the network is more stable than ever and the network has matured, so potential developers join the ecosystem that is constantly innovating. Here is the article that we have made: click here.
Applying Medicine
Another goal that we had is showing the problem of transactions failing on Solana, because Raiku is literally a solution to this problem in different ways. Transactions can land, but they can also be delayed as well.
If a transaction lands late, you can miss a liquidation, lose an opportunity to arbitrage, or even fail loan repayment.
Some transactions must land immediately, some at an exact time, and some just need to land cheaply in general.
That was an ideal topic to discuss the two execution paths that Raiku has: Just-In-Time and Ahead-Of-Time. We explained why transactions fail in the first place (gives value to a general reader), what AOT and JIT are (gives value to institutions), and how Raiku works in general (gives value to developers).
There are multiple topics that we have covered in a single article which educated people, gave technical explanation, and introduced a product. To learn more, here it is: click here.
Explaining Benefits
While Raiku’s product is not fully live, we’re obviously at the pre-product stage. In Raiku’s case, we need to attract more builders to Solana in general and establish ourselves as an authority in the field, so when people think of Solana, they also think about Raiku (and Mert, Solana’s CEO, as well).
So we have decided to dig really deep into accounts, programs, ownership, transactions, PDAs, and other different stuff and learn how it all works together.
This is one of the most fundamental articles about how Solana works, and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback on it from the team and from builders as well.
I believe that if you fully understand the topic, there are countless ideas that you can explore, and they can be unfolded in a way of combining something deeply technical with something deeply creative. To read, click here.
New Media
This is our definition of new media. Something authentic and AI-free, both creatively unique and technically precise, written by humans for humans that makes your product more recognizable over time.
We’re happy to continue working with the Raiku team on that horizon and looking forward to working with new long-term talented teams.