The Web3 Marketing Gold Rush I Sat Out

Written in 2026, looking back at the year Web3 marketing was supposed to be the future, with the benefit of knowing how quickly that future emptied out.

For most of this year, the loudest room in marketing was the Web3 one. Everyone was suddenly a community manager for a token. Brands were minting NFTs. There were conferences, Discord servers with tens of thousands of people, and a genuine sense that if you were not building a marketing practice around crypto you were about to be left behind. Then, a few days ago, one of the largest exchanges collapsed into bankruptcy, and the room went very quiet.

The pressure to pivot was real

I want to be fair to the version of me who watched this happen, because the temptation was not silly. The energy was extraordinary. Money was moving. Clients were asking about it. There was a real fear, the kind that sits in your stomach, that the durable, unglamorous work I did, search, content, the slow channels, was the past, and that the whole industry was relocating to somewhere I was choosing not to go.

That fear is a bad advisor, but it is a persuasive one. “Everyone smart is doing this” is one of the most effective sentences in the world, and for a while it was being said about Web3 marketing constantly, by people who were not obviously wrong.

Why I stayed with the boring stuff

I did not sit it out because I saw the crash coming. I want to be honest about that, because hindsight makes everyone a genius and I was not one. I stayed with the boring channels for a duller reason: I could not find the person underneath the hype.

The work I trust is anchored to a real human doing a real thing. Someone searching because they have a problem. Someone reading because they want to understand. When I looked hard at a lot of the Web3 marketing, I could not locate that person. A lot of the activity seemed to be aimed at other people already inside the same speculative loop, marketing whose main audience was more marketers and more speculators. That is not a moral judgement. It just did not look like something with a floor under it, and I am temperamentally more comfortable building on floors.

What the crash taught me

The collapse this month did not prove crypto was fake or that nothing real was being built. Plenty of serious people are still doing serious work in that space. What it proved, at least to me, is narrower and more useful: attention is not the same as durability. A channel can be the loudest thing in the industry and still be resting on sentiment that can evaporate in a single week.

The boring channels I kept working through all of this are still here, unglamorous, unfashionable, and quietly attached to actual human need. Nobody threw a conference for “people still typing questions into a search box.” But the questions kept coming, the whole time the loud room was emptying out. I have stopped being embarrassed about preferring the durable thing to the exciting one. This year taught me the difference, at someone else’s expense.