I was talking to a founder last week who had just hired a “Web3 marketing lead” — someone whose entire playbook was KOL shills, Discord giveaways, and airdrop farming. He was confused why I did not immediately nod along. The truth is, that playbook has been dead for years. A lot of Web3 teams just have not noticed yet.
Web3 marketing is going through something the broader tech world went through a decade ago: the shift from growth-at-any-cost to sustainable, measurable strategy. The difference is it is happening faster and under more pressure, with compressed VC budgets, tightening regulation, and an AI-driven discovery layer that did not exist for the last cycle’s winners.
What happened to the money?
The Galaxy 2023 Crypto VC report put it plainly: 2023 “finished the year with only 1/3 of the crypto VC investment than each of the prior two years.” Those prior two years, 2021 and 2022, were the banner years when teams burned cash on influencer campaigns, Super Bowl ads, and stadium naming rights without much scrutiny.
The recovery has been lukewarm. Q2 2024 saw $3.2bn invested across 577 deals, up from $2.5bn in Q1, and median pre-money valuations surged from $19m to $37m. But by Q3 2024 the headline read: “After three quarters, venture capitalists have invested $8bn in crypto startups, putting 2024 on track to meet or slightly exceed 2023.” Not a recovery. A stabilisation at roughly a third of 2021-2022 levels.
When the money tightens, marketing budgets get line-item scrutiny. The teams that once spent $500K a month on paid shills are now running lean content operations. And the surprising finding is that many are seeing better results.
The influencer mirage
The assumption that is costing Web3 teams the most money: “KOL shills still move tokens.” They do not. Retail investors have been burned by paid endorsements too many times. The data from Friend.tech makes the point starkly: when key influencers left the platform, its weekly active users collapsed from around 100K to well under 1K. The audience was not theirs. It was rented.
Discord and Telegram giveaways are worse. Industry benchmarks suggest retention from giveaway-acquired users sits below 5% after 30 days. You are paying for bots, not community. The “viral growth” that worked in 2021 was a function of a bull market where new entrants flooded in daily. That environment is gone.
What is actually working in 2026
The teams outperforming right now are running what looks like B2B SaaS marketing with a crypto accent.
Uniswap’s blog publishes educational content: explainers on liquidity provision, automated market makers, and DeFi basics. All designed to rank for search terms and pull in users who are researching rather than chasing hype. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report confirms the wider trend: website, blog, and SEO are now the top channels driving ROI for B2B brands. Web3 teams are catching up to what the rest of tech realised years ago. Owned content compounds. Paid reach evaporates.
Pudgy Penguins offers the counterpoint from the NFT side. When speculative trading volume dropped around 95% from 2021 highs, they did not double down on “floor price” messaging. They put plush toys on Walmart shelves and built a real brand. It is the template for moving from hype marketing to something durable, and it has nothing to do with crypto-native tactics.
Stripe’s early playbook is instructive here. Paul Graham wrote about the “Collison installation”: when someone agreed to try Stripe, the founders would say “Right then, give me your laptop” and set them up on the spot. That is the same energy that works in Web3 today. Manual, high-touch, one-user-at-a-time acquisition beats spray-and-pray every time.
Regulation forces the shift
EU MiCA came into full effect on December 30, 2024. The regulation, available in full at the EUR-Lex database, requires that crypto-asset marketing communications be “fair, clear and not misleading” and consistent with the information provided in the white paper. The liability attaches directly to the content of marketing materials, not just the white paper. The old playbook of aggrandising token promises and “moon” language is now legally risky, not just ineffective.
The UK FCA’s Policy Statement PS23/6 established a parallel regime requiring all crypto financial promotions to be approved by an FCA-authorised person. The SEC continues its enforcement actions against unregistered securities marketing. Between these three regulators, the compliance burden for Web3 marketing has fundamentally changed the game.
The practical effect: marketing teams can no longer rely on disclaimers as a shield. If the body of your promotional content makes claims that would not hold up in a regulated financial promotion, a small-print disclaimer will not save you. This is pushing Web3 marketing toward the same standards as fintech and traditional finance, where claims must be substantiated, risks must be communicated, and the audience must be appropriately targeted.
AI search changes the discovery layer
This is the one most Web3 teams are missing. Google’s Search Generative Experience and AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are rewriting how users discover Web3 products.
“Best crypto wallet” no longer returns ten blue links. It returns one AI-generated paragraph citing a handful of sources. The same applies to queries like “how do I bridge to Base” or “which DeFi protocols are audited.” If your technical documentation, architecture explainers, and product descriptions are not structured for AI citation, you will not appear in those answers.
This is what people call Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), a discipline distinct from traditional SEO. Traditional SEO optimises for keyword matches and backlinks. GEO optimises for content that AI models cite as authoritative: clear definitions, structured data, cited sources, and original research. The Web3 projects that invested early in technical documentation and public specifications are the ones being cited. The ones that only invested in Twitter presence and Discord bots are invisible.
The content marketing flywheel
The teams winning in 2026 share a pattern. They publish consistently on their own channels. They document their architecture publicly. They treat every blog post and spec page as a discovery asset that works 24 hours a day, regardless of market conditions.
This is not glamorous. It does not produce the dopamine hit of a viral tweet or a celebrity endorsement. It compounds slowly. But the teams doing it are building an asset that cannot be taken away by an algorithm change or a platform policy shift. Owned channels are the only durable marketing investment in Web3.
Email newsletters, in particular, are undervalued in Web3. While the space obsesses over Telegram groups and X followers, the teams building direct subscriber lists have a distribution channel that cannot be deplatformed.
What this means for Web3 founders
The teams that survive the current cycle will not be the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They will be the ones that stopped treating marketing as a bull-run expense and started treating it like product development: building content that earns attention, documenting publicly, and optimising for discovery by both humans and AI.
The 2021 playbook is over. The replacement works better, but it requires patience, consistency, and a willingness to look boring while your competitors shout into an echo chamber.
If your team is navigating this shift and needs help building a marketing strategy that works for the current market, get in touch.
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