How to Make a Boring Technical Announcement Interesting (Using a Real Example)

Every founder eventually hits the same wall: they've built something genuinely significant, but when they try to announce it, it reads like a spec sheet. Acronyms nobody outside the team recognizes. Feature after feature, with no sense of why any of it matters to a reader who isn't already a customer.

The instinct at that point is usually to hire someone to "punch it up," add some energy, some urgency, maybe an exclamation point. That's not the fix. The fix is a specific, repeatable process for finding the story that was already there, buried under the technical language.

I'll walk through the process using a real example: a story I covered as a journalist at Cointelegraph in December 2024. Jiritsu, a verification network built on Avalanche, had just integrated with Franklin Templeton's tokenized funds. Jiritsu wasn't my client. I was reporting on the announcement, not writing it. But the story stuck with me, because it's a textbook case of a deeply technical announcement that almost nobody would have cared about at face value, yet contained a story any reader could feel once you knew how to find it.

The raw announcement

At face value, the news is this: Jiritsu integrated its ZK-MPC (Zero-Knowledge Multi-Party Computation) verification network with Franklin Templeton's BENJI token on Avalanche, enabling the creation of derivative tokens backed by the fund with cryptographic proof that no token is minted without proper collateral.

If you're not already deep in RWA infrastructure, that sentence does nothing for you. It's precise, accurate, and completely inert to a general reader. This is where most PR stops, and where the coverage stops too.

Here's how to turn it into a story.

Step 1: Isolate the densest, most technical claim and ask "why should anyone care?"

Take that sentence and ask the question directly: why should anyone care?

Not "what does it do." That just gets you a restated feature. "Why should anyone care" forces a value judgment.

The first answer you get back will almost always still be too abstract. Something like "it ensures tokens can't be minted without backing." True. But nobody forwards "ensures tokens can't be minted without backing" to a friend. You're not done.

Step 2: Don't stop at the first answer. Keep pushing.

Ask again: okay, but what does that unlock? What becomes possible now that wasn't possible before?

Answer: asset managers can issue derivative tokens backed by the fund, and retail investors can access them through a standard Web3 wallet.

Getting closer. But "derivative tokens" is still language from inside the building. Ask one more time, and get more specific.

Answer: right now, BENJI, the token representing shares in a Franklin Templeton government money fund, can only be held by registered asset managers. Regular crypto users can't touch it. This system changes that. Anyone with a Web3 wallet could eventually hold a token backed by US Treasurys, earning yield, without leaving the blockchain.

Now you have something. Not the full story yet, but the outline of one.

This is where I find AI most genuinely useful in the process: not to write finished copy, but as a relentless "so what" machine. It doesn't get bored, it doesn't accept a vague answer just to move on, and it will keep generating concrete examples until you have real material to work with.

Step 3: Find the moment a normal person would actually feel

Somewhere in that chain of increasingly concrete answers, you'll hit a sentence that isn't about the technology anymore. It's about a situation any reader has been in.

Here it's this: if you hold crypto and you're waiting for your next trade, where do you park it? Stablecoins. Which earn nothing. You're sitting in a parking spot that pays zero, losing time value every day you wait.

Now imagine instead: you park in a token backed by a Franklin Templeton US Treasury fund. It earns yield. You stay in your wallet. When the opportunity comes, you move.

That's the pivot point. You're no longer writing about ZK-MPC verification. You're writing about a problem your reader has actually felt: dead capital sitting in stablecoins. And the technology is simply the reason that problem is now solvable.

This is the difference between a press release that gets ignored and one that gets covered. Journalists aren't rejecting your announcement because the technology isn't impressive. They're rejecting it because nothing in it gives their readers a reason to care.

Step 4: Build the narrative backward from that moment

Once you've identified the human stakes, the structure is always the same:

1. The problem readers feel: you park crypto between trades, you earn nothing
2. Why it wasn't solved: Treasury-backed tokens existed, but only institutions could hold them
3. What changed: Jiritsu's verification lets asset managers issue tokens backed by those funds, with cryptographic proof that every token has real collateral
4. What's now possible: regular people hold yield-bearing Treasury tokens in an everyday wallet

That's four sentences. That's the whole story.

Notice what happened to the technical detail: it didn't disappear. It moved from the headline to the proof. The reader doesn't need to understand multiparty computation to trust the outcome. They need one sharp, specific detail, "cryptographically enforced, not promised," that makes the claim sound credible instead of like marketing.

The goal isn't to hide the complexity. It's to earn the right to state a big outcome by backing it with one real fact.

The pattern underneath all of this

Technical teams write from the inside out, starting with what they built and working outward toward why it matters. Readers experience it from the outside in: they need the "why it matters" first, or they never get to "what you built."

The Jiritsu announcement is a perfect example. The technology, ZK-MPC verification on an Avalanche L1, is genuinely impressive. But the reason it became a story worth covering wasn't the cryptography. It was the moment a reader realizes: my crypto parking spot could finally pay me.

That's not a feature. That's a story. And it was already there, buried under the technical language, waiting for someone to ask "so what" enough times to find it.

Most "boring" announcements aren't boring. They're just being told backward.

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Tom Blackstone is the founder of Promethean PR, a crypto and AI PR practice. He previously spent 2+ years as an investigations writer at Cointelegraph and served as Security.org's crypto safety expert.