Most people know Catherine Jenkin by a single byline: Opinion Editor at Cointelegraph. Far fewer know that it’s just one of her jobs out of four.
Catherine also works at OM Bank, heads up strategic partnerships at BankerX, and co-founded Kernel Media. Whatever the workplace, her goal is to find the truth. Then, she can prove it even to the most sceptical reader would hold onto it.
The Drofa Comms team is happy to announce that our latest Women Leading the Way interview is out! Its hero is Catherine Jenkin, Co-Founder and Head of Editorial at Kernel Media.
Basically, Catherine didn’t apply her way into crypto. Back in 2018, she simply kept asking a colleague building what was then SA Crypto if she could help. Suddenlly, the offer stuck. What magnetised her was the builder community. Later, it was blockchain’s ability to reach South Africans that traditional finance had already written off.
TradFi and AltFi, as she put it to us, are “oddly connected” in her day-to-day routine, sometimes even bleeding into each other. By the way, ask her how she manages four jobs at once, and she’ll politely decline the question. Her worth, she told us, was never meant to be proven through overtime.
In our conversation, Catherine didn’t spare the industry’s blind spots. She explained why so many crypto projects still lead with the mechanism instead of the transformation it creates for the person on the other end of it. She also argues that an industry with a genuine reputation problem keeps talking to the “already-converted” instead of earning the confidence of the “sceptical.”
Asked to close on tokenism, Catherine pushed back on the premise itself: “The question isn’t whether to platform women, but whether you see women as pretty or as purposeful. Those are different editorial instincts, and they produce different journalism.”
