When a descendant of Britain’s oldest money and media printing dynasty backed Bitcoin and digital publishing, the establishment was outraged. Some accused him of believing in a magic money tree, and most people dismissed him as a crank.
His bid to buy back the family business and bring the old and the new together collapsed, and his investigative journalism network, led by award-winning journalist Nate Thayer, folded in the midst of a mysterious class action lawsuit with no complainants.
It is perhaps no coincidence that during that period, Daniel Mark Harrison, scion of The House of Harrison, and his magazine broke several major and highly controversial stories, including an exposé of an FBI agent who doubled as the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, an investigative report into human trafficking in Asia involving a leading automaker, and numerous articles on Bitcoin when it was still considered a fringe asset.
But now, while his own star has risen as both an established media entrepreneur and blockchain success story, riding the wave and looking to the future, the physical money business that built the Harrison empire is vanishing and newspapers are in crisis, just as he predicted. And ironically, as Daniel Mark Harrison this week launched his own currency, the Harrison coin by typing a single command into his X account, he sees the future salvation of both media and money in the success of each other.
His attempts to master both worlds mimic his ancestors when they founded Harrison & Sons in 1750. The firm would go on to print everything from British banknotes to postage stamps, royal documents, and newspapers like The London Gazette and Burke’s Peerage. For over two centuries, the family’s name was stamped on a firm that shaped the world’s money, and its media.
But in 1979, after seven generations, the family sold the business to controversial tycoon Tiny Rowland. Two decades later, the firm was snapped up by British banknote printer De La Rue, which inherited not only Harrison’s contracts, but much of the technology that underpinned British security printing for the next 25 years.
Years later, when Harrison tried to buy it back, preaching blockchain and digital media, he was mocked. When he announced his intention to take over De La Rue, shares briefly spiked, before settling back down after the Financial Times ran a piece openly making fun of the idea. His offer never materialised, and the bid faded.
Undeterred, he turned his attention to the digital money he claimed was the future, and digital media. In 2015, Harrison became one of the first in the world to tell a panel at a Mekla Media conference in Hong Kong that Bitcoin would one day go higher than $10,000 a coin when at the time it was just $200 per Bitcoin. The speech which is on YouTube under the title “FactoryBanking: What’s A Bitcoin Worth?” has become legend among Bitcoin buyers who have seen their coins rise to $110,000 each this year.
In 2017, he launched Monkey Capital, a blockchain venture that many considered years ahead of its time. The project aimed to create a decentralised hedge fund using two tokesn called Coeval and Monkey, which were intended to give early holders governance rights and access to a wider ecosystem. It drew widespread attention for its bold vision, but also criticism. The Financial Times published a widely shared article labelling the project’s White Paper as “complete gibberish.” The main token launguished, and the project was eventually shelved. But in hindsight, its legacy has proven prophetic. Many of the concepts Harrison pioneered, tokenised governance, decentralised funding, and the cultural packaging of financial assets, later became core pillars of NFT projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club, which borrowed heavily from Monkey Capital’s aesthetics and marketing mechanics. What was once laughed off is now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar market.
“I launched a coin in 2017 that became one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, with a value of £1,200 a coin,” Harrison said later. “Back then, most people had no idea what they were looking at.”
At the same time as pioneering blockchain change, he was building his career in journalism, writing for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TheStreet.com, and Forbes, often about innovation, finance, and the strange new frontier of crypto.
This week, when he launched his own currency, Harrison Coin, on the Solana blockchain, it is a far cry from the days of hot metal printing presses, powered by a cutting-edge AI and blockchain automation platform called Agent Nyla. It’s the same platform he used to mint the coin, making the launch itself an example of the technology’s power.
“What’s incredible,” he said, “is with a simple tweet saying Activate anyone in six seconds can now own a Solana blockchain wallet. What’s more, with Agent Nyla’s software, they can receive funds as long as they have an X account and they can set up the wallet later. Agent Nyla will end up doing for blockchain what Oracle did for the internet – which is everything, basically. The engineers behind it are some of the world’s best in the business.”
Agent Nyla, like many of the projects he’s now involved in, is far more than just a coin launcher. Built by a team of elite developers, it allows users to carry out any Solana blockchain transaction, from setting up a wallet to sending tokens, simply by posting a command on X (formerly Twitter). But what’s really turning heads is what it enables.
At the heart of a new wave of blockchain-media innovation, Nyla powers a decentralised archiving system that lets users permanently store tweets, articles, and digital content on the blockchain. Now linked with the Harrison coin, the result is a tamper-proof, censorship-resistant record of who said what and when, a digital safeguard for truth in an era of disappearing posts and rewritten history.
Harrison is willingly the public face of it all, hosting regular Spaces on X to demonstrate the tech, answer questions, and spotlight real-time demos. While juggling his other ventures, he sees parallels between Nyla’s mission and his own, which includes promoting the synergies that could be made with blockchain and media.
He is also hoping to steer a network of traditional newswire agencies in a partnership to turn stories into meme coins with the British community interest company newsX CIC, a form of limited company that sits between a regular for-profit limited company and a charity, and where purpose replaces profit as the primary driving factor.
The newsX registered purpose is independent reporting, and it comes with a bespoke virtual newsroom software now being used in over a dozen agencies feeding content to a global network of some of the biggest publishers including Mail Online, New York Post and the Telegraph. Harrison said: “With this network, we have all the advantages of being a major legacy publisher with none of the costs.”
The network mixes in-depth investigations with tabloid content, which many incorrectly see as a conflict with the tabloid content devaluing the worth of investigations and documentaries. He said: “The tabloid brings eyeballs and revenue, the quality brings reputation and change. I don’t see this as a contradiction to the traditional family values, in fact Harrison & Sons right from the start used to print scandalous pamphlets and penny dreadfuls, a kind of trash novel that was just as much a part of what they did as Burke’s Peerage and the rest.”
That philosophy of mixing tabloid and quality is also reflected in his new website DailyGoat.com, which merges blockchain and media by turning major stories into tradable meme coins. It’s part of a bigger push to unite media and blockchain empires in the white-hot memecoin marketplace. Earlier in the year, when Harrison and NewsX launched DailyGoat.com it was also given its own coin, which shot up to a $1.2 million market cap on the day it launched.
The Harrison coin trades under the symbol DMH, and the coin will fuel a unique media archiving system on blockchain built by Agent Nyla, the group of software engineers tasked with developing enterprise solutions for Solana’s network, particularly via X.
Once a news story is published online, anyone can use Harrison Coin to make a permanent digital imprint of it.
The coin was launched on a blockchain platform called Bonk.fun, a launchpad created by the team behind the multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency BONK. Harrison was among the first tokens created using Bonk’s tools and Nyla’s X-integrated technology, which he says gives it a unique edge as both platforms are attracting thousands of users daily.
He said: “In the last decade in particular, misinformation has run riot in many cases to the detriment of society. This is a problem that can easily be solved with a blockchain archiving system, just like a library used to do. People can go back and check what was said and written, even if something is deleted.”
“Harrison is bringing the world of blockchain and media much closer together, which is an inevitable and needed occurrence. As both a memecoin and a core technology for media professionals around the world, Harrison will be invaluable. All this was made possible thanks to the incredible support of the engineers at Agent Nyla, some of the world’s leading experts in media, data, and AI.”
Harrison said the timing of the Harrison Coin launch, just as his family’s former business was sold off abroad, was no coincidence.
“As one chapter closes, a new one starts. This is the start of a new era of Harrisons after 350 years,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve made very many conscious decisions about this,” he said, reflecting on his career arc. “I’ve just worked with great people I trust, followed the innovation, and stuck to the values I inherited. Never say never, right?”
He added: “Too much of blockchain reporting is about hype, and there is definitely a market for a more critical approach to coverage in this space. We are going to bring this all into being.”
To find out more about the author, editor or agency that supplied this story – please click below. Story By: MJ Leidig, Sub-Editor: Simona Kitanovska, Agency: Newsflash
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