Why marketing isn't enough anymore

Transcript

Hello everyone. First of all, I would like to apologize for my voice. I've been here since Thursday and it's really hard to talk to lots of people, especially when there is lots of noise around. So, I lost my voice on the second day. Still not recovered so Uh the second thing I would like to say is to thank you all for showing up at 10:00 a.m. after the first opening party yesterday. So, it's a pleasure to be talking here for the first time at ECC. I used to talk at some side events, but here it's like you know, like accomplishment for me. And when I was choosing the topic, I was thinking about maybe talking about some L1s, maybe some L2s, maybe talk about what's happening in the industry.

And then I thought it would be too depressing, so I decided decided to go for marketing instead and talk a little bit more about why marketing is not enough anymore. And just to understand a little bit how we got here. First of all, for people who who are not familiar with with what marketing is, I drew up some definitions, but essentially it's a way to make people believe something you want to believe through deceptive technique deceptive deceptive techniques that are taught in business school. Um so, here you have some other definitions as well.

Essentially, when you hire marketing team, it means that your organic growth is not enough anymore and you actually have to present your ideas to a bunch of people that might not care about it. The goal of marketing is to make you care. And if you look at crypto, there are a bunch of things that people are looking for. So, first of all, for protocols and chains, your TVL is a true reflection of the adoption that you have and of the impact you're having in the industry because essentially, when you go on Twitter or any analytics data websites, uh the first thing you're seeing is TVL.

So, what you want to have is to have sticky capital. Uh essentially, what we have seen in the past few years um is that we mainly have mercenary capital. People that come on your chain or your protocol just to farm the rewards and then they leave for a new shinier thing. Uh with a span of attention which lasts for 1 to 2 months before something new pops up. So yeah. Uh then you can also opt for growing revenues because once again it shows the strength of your protocol and it shows that you are actually a business. You're not a con man and you're not only financing yourself through token sales or um but basically paying KOLs. So, uh this allows you to invest in new

ventures. As we have seen a few acqui-hires in the past few years uh in crypto where projects would just buy another team, uh hire them, dismiss completely the token, and add a new business venture. Uh social engagement, product and brand awareness, and good metrics it's also falls in the same category uh about just hyping up your project, about showing that people actually care about what you're building. And in the past few years we have seen several techniques being used. So, we had KOLs, uh we had commissioned research, uh ambassadors, infify, uh sponsoring the media, podcasts, events, and also token incentives.

All of them fall in really different categories. So, KOLs it would mainly be hyping up your protocol on Twitter. For commissioned research, uh your goal is to get your tech in front of the people and explain to them what this technology you're building is. Ambassadors is quite a new thing. Uh I think in the past few years it kind of has changed a little bit because at first the ambassadors were people that were involved with your project. Now it's essentially people you don't pay uh and you just hire them to give them visibility, pay them in views on Twitter.

Um infof uh is something that has completely failed uh because that's how we got to the AI slop everywhere and where uh a lot of people from third world countries were able to make a lot of money at first, but then Twitter killed the API and it's no more available. Uh for media, podcasts, and events, even though those are different categories, I thought that I would put them together because it's essentially brand awareness. You are not getting any users through this, but it shows that your brand is strong, that you're making revenue, and that you're actually able to support these initiatives.

And finally, talking incentives, uh it's something that um has been quite popular. Uh essentially, you're giving your supply to people just to use your protocol, just to use your project. And uh essentially, your token go to zero after that. And in all of those initiatives, I would guess one of the main problems is that you never ever finance anything that you're doing by yourself. So, you're financing KOLs to produce their own content. You're financing commissioned research to write stuff about you. You're uh recruiting ambassadors so they can work for free and you can uh give money essentially to get visibility on uh either uh in real life events or

uh on Twitter. And I guess there are a bunch of things that worked and a bunch of things that didn't. For example, uh Celestia has uh successfully made us believe that we would make a lot of money by just taking their token through airdrops. Donald Trump made you believe that you're going to be rich and you will get tired of winning. And Ethereum made you believe that there there was an alt another alt season coming. Um all of those things have kind of been a deception for uh all of us and I think one of the things that I want to kind of say before I go into this presentation is the fact that whatever I'm going to say, a lot of people that might be smaller than me have already tried to resolve the

problem of growth and of marketing. Um my goal here is to talk about what I have seen throughout the last 6 years in crypto. Uh give maybe some advice that you're free to listen or not to listen to. And essentially just give you some ideas and some case studies where marketing actually worked. Sorry, wrong slide. Um so first of all, one of the methods of communications that have worked in a good way it's when you can actually identify the founder. Uh because this person will represent your brand because this person will be the one who will essentially communicate and have a higher impact that your own communications because people care about people. Uh they don't care about your

company. They want to connect to someone. They want to value someone. And here I give two examples and two very different types of communications. On the left we have Vitalik who essentially has kind of steered the direction in which Ethereum has been going for the past few years and who has also given directives to the Ethereum Foundation about what he cares about and then after that the road map for Ethereum gets updated with the new things coming up. And on the right you have Guy Young from Athena who has been the voice of Athena since the beginning. Uh either at events, podcasts, wherever he went, he was the one presenting things. And I think his communication, and especially for big Athena announcements, uh it has never

been through the company account. It was always through his own personal channels or his personal involvement in communications. And it has also had a higher impact. But at the same time when you appoint a person to be your main point of communication when you are the one who appear to be leading a project and I can also give the example of Brett for example for me that is The thing you have to accept is that you will also get all the for whatever happens. If you don't succeed or if you stole or if your communications are not enough or not impactful enough. People will get back at you. So it's something that

has it's ups and downs but I think it's something that is important and most people forget about it but your founder or your person of contact should be the one who could be the one at least communicating about your project and doing your marketing for you. This is something that you can create. This is something where you don't have to pay KOLS for. This is something that has actually worked in the past. Then I want to talk about Maple Finance. Maple Finance is a protocol that essentially lets you borrow crypto for crypto.

They mainly operate in something private so they work with institutions with more institutional entities and essentially we met with Maple a little bit more than a year ago and what they did back then is they have started an ambassador program. I know that I have talked about it already but I think their case study is about efficiency. This program has been running non-stop for the past year and a half almost. And they have actually grown their TVL. They have actually grown their number of users and they have actually grown brand awareness to the point where today when Maple Finance wants to partner with a protocol, when they want to BD with a protocol, people know about

them. When they see their metrics, they are happy to be working with Maple. And I think their ambassador program has contributed a lot to this because you would see people who actually cared about every single announcement that they would put out. that they would analyze it that they would put uh they would talk about it on podcasts on uh wherever they would go. And you can see the growth on their Twitter account as well because I think once again your socials reflect a little bit the success of your protocol. Then there is another case study which involves less of a marketing but more of a a partnership that benefits everyone.

Uh I believe it was in 2025 in the month of uh August that Aave announced a partnership with Ethena and Pendle. Essentially Aave is the biggest lending protocol. Um Aave was the fastest growing synthetic dollar not to say stablecoin. And Pendle was uh a way for people to essentially guarantee their yield and have a fixed yield on some of the products. This partnership made sense and it actually created lots of value for each of the companies I've listed here.

Essentially for USDE it has had a meteoric growth uh for um for its synthetic dollar by usage on Aave on Pendle and essentially the yield would go uh several uh it would go in the double digits so we could have some yield around 30 or 40% which is essentially the best marketing tool. Uh for Aave if you didn't know Aave makes money by from people lend uh borrowing not lending. So when you have increased borrows you have looping of the assets.

Essentially Aave made even more money. And finally Pendle uh it allowed them to increase their TVL and even still to this day um Pendle has around 70% of assets listed on it from Ethena or Ethena related. So it's it's one of these things where you could think it's more of a BD thing but uh here, a real way it's also marketing because you increase your awareness and you also actually attract sticky capital. If we look at the industry today, so here we have a bunch of tokens that launched in 2025.

And essentially, before when you you would launch a token, the token would go up because you got a bunch of VCs backing you up because uh you would create some hype on socials and because it was the most important day in the story of the protocol, it's when you TGE. But here are the performances of the most hyped protocols throughout 2025. And you can see that essentially, everything went down. Like we are talking about well, from minus 22% but it's not the main case, it's mostly concentrated around minus 80 to minus 95%. Uh and so this was like the point of my presentation. This is why marketing is not enough anymore. Before when you

would launch a token, you would hype it up, it would go up and at least perform for some time. Now we are seeing that people have a way to see through your that you would pull be able to pull from the previous cycles and that today it's it's it's not by paying chaos that your protocol will succeed. I guess at the end of the day, talking about marketing and talking about communications the the goal here is to build a product which is pretty cool and people would actually want to use, not just to farm incentives.

It's achieve brand awareness for uh in an in an industry where the life the attention span is the same of a goldfish. Get lots of TVL and revenue so you can actually show that you are a successful businessman and that you know what you are doing. You have a token that actually has value, that you have decided to attach to it with tokenomics that are not predatory towards um crypto people or crypto investors and build a moat. Moat is something that differentiates differentiates you from all the other people, and I think this is the hardest thing to do, but one project actually succeeded to do this, and this is Hyperliquid. I'm sorry to talk about Hyperliquid at a at a crypto conference where we are supposed to talk

about ETH and the future of ETH, but I think it's one of these use cases where you we have not seen something like this before. And I think that many people believe that they can actually um reproduce what Hyperliquid has created, but at the same time not all of the founders have millions lying around that are able to finance the initial stages of growth of your protocol. And so you have to take into account that people will have to create shortcuts, but I think it's a great example of a person that wanted to build a business that actually attached all the value to the token itself, and that has actually created something that people get excited about and where we are seeing lots of adoption even in the TradFi

circles. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit more about something that we can do um as protocols, projects uh in order to make your marketing more efficient. Uh first of all, you have to have data. You have to have data that backs your claims that you're able to open source to people, use it in your communications, share with investors. This is something which is really important that most projects dismiss. Uh it's have data dashboards that can actually show the progress you're making with numbers.

Also, your transparency is really important because I guess most of the protocols kind of assume that because blockchain is public, every everyone can check whatever's happening. I think uh one of of best things that has happened to crypto Uh we have that we have taken from Chatfy are, for example, quarterly results or monthly results. Either in revenue, where the money goes, in what is actually happening uh with your protocol. I think it's something important and once again, because we are a young industry, we tend to take lots of shortcuts uh on this.

And then I would I would say for the three uh other points that I mentioned here, it's basically be efficient in your communication and be clear in where you're going, how you're going to get there. Um building your own hype and around short-term lived uh cycles where people get excited and then forget about you. It's not It's never going to work, but it's by maintaining consistency in your marketing, in communications, by providing the most clear and the best milestones for the people that follow your protocol are the most important things.

Also, if you look at the previous cycles from 2020 to 2021, the only thing you had to do is say, "Hey, I have a Brazilian TPS on my chain. My ZK algorithm is the most secure and we are actually going to to the moon because we have the best tech." The true thing is and the problem with the whole technical narrative is that most BD teams never make it most technical teams never make it because they only care about the tech. They don't care about the understanding of their product. They don't care about the community. They don't care about BD doing BD because they think they are the best.

And they also kind of stay enclosed in their own product that they have they have imagined without ever trying to make something different or trying to expand their product. And I think this is what's missing from the most technical teams today. Um well, this slide kind of speaks for itself. So, I'm not sure if I even have to explain uh anything here because it's something that has worked in the past, but it doesn't anymore. So, don't just don't pay KOLs, please.

And um I want to talk about Ethereum because we're at an ETH conference, and so it's quite important to talk about Ethereum and its moat, how it has built its way of being different from the others. I think first of all, Ethereum was the first one. So, it's always easy to have the first mover advantage when you're in an industry where people trust your reliability and your uh success in the previous years. So, if it's pretty easy today to for serious protocols to come and build on Ethereum because that's where the TVL is, that's where the capital is, and this is what has mattered in the past.

Second biggest asset in crypto is basically get people from TradFi excited and some retail investors when they get into crypto. And of course, being technical here with uh 100% uptime being battle-tested, uh and I think it's it kind of speaks for itself. Um and you can actually recognize the consistency of Ethereum. Uh so, I think this has helped it a lot. And now I want to talk about the conclusion here and uh kind of conclude this presentation because marketing is not enough anymore. You have to invest into actually building your brand, and actually caring about

what people think about here and where you are going to go. I think um because it has worked in the past, because we were a young industry, we were essentially PVPing each other, the rules have kind of changed now. So, you uh what has worked in the past will not uh don't doesn't anymore. I guess we whatever I said here, uh, if you try to apply the every single thing, you'll also make mistakes. So, even though you have a great BD team, great tech, great marketing, doesn't essentially mean that you will make it.

So, once again, people make mistakes, but it's the consistency and the way you approach them that changes. Nothing is financial advice. Obviously, all the protocol all the tokens that I mentioned, some of them I hold, some of them you should not hold. Um, and yeah, just don't fall for whatever you see on CT. Thank you very much. Oh, sorry. I have last slide. If you want to get in touch with us or if you want to uh, basically connect or ask questions.

There you go. Here you have everything if you want to get in touch. Put LinkedIn as well because I know that some tradfi people are around and they don't have Telegram. Nice here. Um, and yeah. Thank you very much.