Background & Biography
Izabella Kaminska’s route into digital-asset journalism began with a broader career in financial reporting. Her professional background includes work as a Reuters graduate trainee, a producer at CNBC and an associate editor of BP’s internal magazine. She studied ancient history at University College London and journalism at the London College of Printing. Those qualifications are recorded in the biographical statement accompanying her 2018 parliamentary submission.
Kaminska spent 13 years at the Financial Times, including a period as editor of FT Alphaville, its markets and finance publication. By 2018, she described her cryptocurrency coverage as extending back to 2012. Her approach connected the claims made for new financial technologies with questions familiar from banking and payments: what a customer owns, which institution bears a liability, and how a transaction is completed.
She founded The Blind Spot in 2022, covering finance, markets, media and geopolitics. She subsequently worked as a senior finance editor at Politico while continuing the publication. In December 2025, she announced that her Politico affiliation was ending and that The Blind Spot would operate independently again from January 2026. Her current professional base is London.
A more specialized publication developed alongside that broader work. Cash Equivalence began formal operations in September 2025 and was renamed The Peg in November. It focuses on stablecoins, central-bank digital currencies and related monetary instruments. Kaminska is the founder and editor of both publications, combining editorial management with reporting, analysis and interviews.
Notable Contributions
A recurring contribution is Kaminska’s use of monetary history to interpret digital assets. Her 2017 FT Alphaville column, Crypto Tethers as the New Eurodollars, connected a crypto-market instrument with the longer history of offshore dollar claims. In an April 2026 interview with Currency of Power, she returned to that comparison and explained how her interest in eurodollars informed her stablecoin reporting. This is an analytical framework for examining issuers, liabilities and redemption, rather than a claim that every stablecoin has the same structure or risks as an offshore bank deposit.
The column also appears in Nic Carter’s stablecoin reading syllabus. That provides a concrete example of her journalism being used as background reading within the digital-asset field. It complements, rather than substitutes for, the public record of her policy engagement.
On June 20, 2018, Kaminska appeared before the House of Commons Treasury Committee during its digital-currencies inquiry. She questioned how effectively cryptocurrencies performed familiar currency functions and discussed the trade-off between secure storage and ready access to funds. She also urged attention to advertising and argued that new financial businesses should face accountability comparable to established institutions. These were her positions in a contested hearing with industry representatives, not findings that the committee had automatically adopted.
Her written submission with Martin Walker, dated April 12, 2018, proposed a more evidence-based approach to evaluating distributed-ledger projects. The authors called for identifying the problem a system was meant to solve, establishing performance baselines and comparing alternatives. They explicitly presented their views in a personal capacity. The committee’s subsequent Crypto-assets report cited their submission in its discussion of crypto-asset history and financial-sector applications, documenting an identifiable route from their analysis into parliamentary deliberation.
Kaminska returned to Parliament on June 29, 2022, as a witness to the Science and Technology Committee’s blockchain session. She distinguished enterprise projects from public cryptocurrency networks and challenged assumptions that a distributed database would necessarily improve an existing service. Her evidence emphasized costs, complexity and the economic setting in which a technology operates. She also acknowledged possible uses where trust in conventional institutions is weak. The exchange placed her skeptical assessment alongside contrasting testimony, illustrating her role in testing technology claims through public discussion.
The Peg makes stablecoins a sustained editorial subject rather than an occasional part of broader cryptocurrency coverage. Its stated remit includes market structure, tokenized finance and the relationship between digital money and geopolitical power. Kaminska launched its daily news roundup in December 2025, explaining that it would combine recently surfaced material with relevant older links. The format brings original commentary and source aggregation into the same publication, while individual articles and interviews allow more focused examination.
One example is her March 2026 interview with Qivalis chief executive Jan Sell about a bank-led euro-stablecoin initiative. The reporting examined the relationship between private European token projects, dollar-denominated stablecoins and the proposed digital euro. It recorded an issuer’s strategy and ambitions; the interview’s publication did not itself establish that planned products had launched or achieved adoption.
Her September 2026 writing continued to engage with the conceptual distinctions behind digital money. In a September 22 column, she discussed research by George Pantelopoulos and Paul Wessels on the difference between exchanging at a fixed rate and being interchangeable in practice. The topic reflects her interest in the institutional conditions behind a monetary instrument, extending beyond its quoted price or technical format.
Kaminska also works in conversational formats. Noelle Acheson announced a pilot podcast collaboration with her in June 2026, focused on changes in finance and payments associated with stablecoins. The July 14 edition of Monetary Forces included discussion of a trust-charter business model and SWIFT’s blockchain plans. Separately, a January 2026 ByteTree interview brought her views on Bitcoin and gold to an investor-facing audience. That appearance accompanied a commercial product launch and should be understood in that context, without implying her endorsement of the product.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Izabella Kaminska
Katharos.ai follows Kaminska because journalism is one route through which digital-asset proposals receive scrutiny outside their sponsoring organizations. Her record spans specialist financial publishing, parliamentary evidence and a dedicated stablecoin service. This combination creates opportunities to compare industry explanations with financial history and policy concerns.
Her work is particularly relevant where the language of technological innovation overlaps with familiar questions about money and banking. The value of following that work lies in its arguments, reporting and questions, while allowing room for disagreement and for her assessment to change as the market develops.
Areas to Follow
Areas to follow include The Peg’s reporting on stablecoin issuers, tokenized bank money and the interaction between private payment systems and public monetary institutions. Interviews can reveal how participants explain their business models, while subsequent developments provide a way to test those explanations.
Further points of interest are Kaminska’s comparisons between digital money and offshore financial markets, her collaboration with Acheson, and any additional published evidence to policymakers. The distinction between a proposal, a working service and meaningful adoption remains important when assessing the developments she covers.
Reporting Scope
This profile covers Kaminska’s public professional roles, published journalism, editorial projects and parliamentary contributions. It treats statements about markets and institutions according to their source and context, distinguishing reported facts, interviewees’ claims and the author’s own analysis.
Her testimony is evidence of participation in policy discussion, not government authority or sole responsibility for a legislative outcome. The profile does not infer audience size, investment performance or financial-market impact from publication credits and appearances.
Areas of Influence
Kaminska’s documented areas of influence are financial journalism, stablecoin and payments analysis, public education about digital money, and scrutiny of blockchain proposals. Her professional base is the United Kingdom, while her reporting addresses international monetary systems and cross-border markets.
Katharos.ai publishes this profile for information, based on the sources listed. Inclusion is not an endorsement of the individual, their organizations, or any investment product.
Source notice: Information and images are attributed to the external sources listed. Katharos.ai does not endorse the subjects or claims described and does not independently certify the authenticity of every source statement or image.
Photo attribution: Izabella Kaminska at Horasis Global Meeting, Liverpool, 2016 (exact capture date unknown). Horasis / Richter Frank-Jurgen, via Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/horasis/27797483391/). Cropped, downsampled and pillarboxed; original and derivative CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).