Farid Kasongo

Farid Kasongo covers every chain and coin at Token Boost other than Bitcoin — the Coins desk and its new-launch and trending lists, plus Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple and XRP as their own beats.

A new token launch is assumed uninteresting until it proves otherwise, because the base rate on new tokens is poor and most people encounter one only after somebody is already trying to sell it to them. Before any feature description, a launch piece on this desk works out the supply picture: how much of the token insiders hold, on what release timetable, and how the project is actually funded. A vesting schedule is not a forecast — it is a public document stating that a defined amount of supply becomes sellable on a defined date, and treating that as background rather than headline information is how a reader gets caught by it.

Ripple gets a specific, repeated correction here, because general coverage keeps conflating three separate things: a private company, a payments network that runs independently of that company, and a digital asset that is the network's native unit. Legal proceedings concerning how the company sold the asset are about the company's past conduct, not a ruling on what the network or the asset are — and a story that treats them as the same question reaches a conclusion the facts do not support.

Ethereum and Litecoin coverage on this desk applies one recurring check: when something gets meaningfully cheaper or faster — a rollup, a different mining algorithm — ask what was traded away to get there, whether that is a bridge, a smaller set of validators, or something else, and say so in the piece rather than only in the fine print.