Did Bloomberg Violate Block.one’s Embargo?

By Rishma Banerjee

Block.one – the startup that built the EOSIO platform and claims to have raised a record $4.2 billion in an Initial Coin Offering last year, announced the launch of a new social media platform called Voice on Saturday at an event held in Washington, D.C.
Voice uses the EOS digital ledger that Block.one helped create to let users post, share and promote content. Every action is registered on the EOS blockchain.
The news of the launch first got reported by media house Bloomberg that too, a little earlier than expected.
In a surprising turn of events, Brenden Blumer, Block.one’s CEO and co-founder accused the popular news portal of publishing the article before the scheduled B1June event.
Blumer’s tweet read,

“We’ve had a lot of questions from our community and other media outlets as to why @Bloomberg reported on Voice before our #B1June event. Bloomberg breached an embargo agreed to in writing by Alastair Marsh, acknowledged the breach, but still refused to take down the article.”

In response to this, Twitter user @DanielDumbrill referred to Alastair Marsh, one of the reporters who published the article, as a “Facebook maximalist” and tagged a tweet by him, from last month. Marsh had expressed his opinions that Facebook’s cryptocurrency “has a very real chance of being larger and more widely used than BTC.” in the tweet.

Blumer also pledged to remain committed to standing up against Bloomberg’s “abuse of power,” saying:

“We’re committed to standing up for this ongoing abuse of power on behalf of our company, community, and others similarly wronged. Email us at [email protected] if you’ve had similar issues with Bloomberg journalists breaking written agreements or manipulating markets.”

A major section of the crypto community empathised with Blumer. Some suggested using Bloomberg and some others, heavily criticised the journalist and questioned his integrity.