Crypto tech projects shouldn’t settle for shallow marketing | Opinion
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Crypto is a highly technical, engineering-led category built by people who are solving really hard math, cryptography, software engineering, and logical problems. However, as the industry prepares itself for a wave of optimism and friendly regulation in 2025, the projects that rest on their technical laurels will be doing themselves a disservice.
I don’t blame technical crypto teams for being skeptical of marketing. In this category, you’ll come across many self-branded “web3” or “crypto” marketers who are often promoting a kind of marketing that is not rooted in fundamentals or a comprehensive strategy. Instead, they’re usually signaling a close association with specific crypto projects or kinds of tactics, such as paying key opinion leaders (KOLs), managing influencers, knowing how to shitpost on X, or having a pulse on the crypto meme-du-jour. (To be fair, there’s a place for all of that.)
Crypto marketing is different and comes with unique challenges
But these “crypto marketers” are also onto something. They’re onto the fact that crypto is not a typical industry and that it requires understanding a unique set of dynamics not found in traditional markets.
Since 2021, at Blokhaus, we have supported a range of crypto clients, from layer-1 to layer-2, DeFi protocols, and web3 gaming and social apps. We’ve seen firsthand the challenges facing these projects and the lack of marketing infrastructure, talent, and support that prevents them from reaching their potential. It’s a complex landscape that very few individuals and teams are able to navigate effectively.
Crypto projects looking to stand out in what is sure to be a noisy year ahead should be ready to step up their marketing efforts and not settle for shallow tactics. When onboarding marketing roles or agency teams to support your project, here are some key skills you should be looking for:
1. The ability to navigate decentralized ecosystems effectively and be a key point of integration
Crypto ecosystems operate fundamentally differently than other sectors. Projects often have decentralized global teams, distinct organizations driving aspects of governance, tech, and business development, and vibrant communities that are not just consumers but active participants in the ecosystem’s evolution.
When marketers come to crypto from traditional, centralized organizations, they need a major mindset shift. Rather than dictating and executing a top-down strategy, marketing in a decentralized setting requires the ability to listen, observe, synthesize, and reflect ideas back out into the world that was already there to begin with.
In practice, this means you should look for marketing talent who can maintain strong relationships and lines of communication with a multitude of community organizations, ecosystem projects, and stakeholders. Your marketing team should become a key function for integration and alignment and be able to see connections that translate into insights for technical teams—who might be too busy building in decentralized silos to see the big picture.
2. The ability to deeply understand the tech while helping you crystallize the story
It’s no mystery why crypto has not yet achieved mainstream adoption—there is little else for the average consumer to do other than speculate on the potential success of various projects. The crypto category is still working out the plumbing (layers and layers and layers of plumbing) of an entirely new infrastructure.
Marketers in crypto need to be skilled in a very important way: they need to understand the tech with enough depth and nuance to devise tactics for a range of audiences, from experienced developers to crypto-curious consumers. And they need to be able to do this while helping technical teams crystallize a big-picture vision and story.
I encourage crypto teams to view marketing not as a set of nice-to-haves or gimmicks but as an essential function that extends and completes the engineering cycle. Marketing isn’t just about getting clicks and eyeballs; it’s about building a product that fulfills market desires, which requires a continuous feedback loop between developers and marketers.
3. The ability to move as fast as the industry requires while getting out of ‘react’ mode
Crypto is volatile and fast-moving, and as a result, many teams in the category are in a constant state of reactivity—understandably so. But it’s one thing to be nimble enough to react and another to not have a clear strategy.
It’s also really hard to get away from the pressure of “price goes up,” which leads to the industry’s overreliance on KOLs or influencers to shill tokens. These tactics are not a substitute for a robust marketing strategy centered on solving problems and driving meaningful audience engagement and activity. Effective marketing requires a shift away from token-centric narratives and towards building sustainable ecosystems that users care about.
Crypto teams should avoid being so fixated on short-term token price increases that they forget to build a solid strategy that sustains them for the long term. Often, these projects’ technical roadmaps are years long, acknowledging the time and effort required to achieve their engineering vision—this same thinking should be applied to marketing efforts.
Yes, the best tech still needs good marketing
For crypto to achieve mainstream adoption, marketing must not be viewed as a token price booster or an afterthought. It needs to be an integral component of the process, driving innovation, user adoption, and long-term growth.
The technical teams that succeed in breaking through the noise of 2025 and beyond will be the ones that invest in marketing as a strategic function, not a peripheral activity. And while it is certainly challenging to find talent and teams that are as comfortable engaging in technical debates about rollup frameworks as they are making beautiful creative assets, they are out there.
