Web3 marketing finally gets a seat at the table!
I was at Permissionless III in Salt Lake City from October 9-11, and I came back stoked. Blockworks really outdid themselves with this one. I’ll kick things off with my favorite part: the marketing track. The first of its kind at a crypto conference, hosted by Safary.
The panels zeroed in on key aspects like focusing on community, building personal brands, understanding the ecosystems we work in, bringing fresh ideas to the table, and the need for better marketing in Web3.
I walked away from the marketing track feeling inspired after hearing the CMOs of some of the biggest names in crypto, people who are right in the middle of it all, constantly engaging with founders, foundations, users, and clients.
Btw, shoutout to our CMO, Arturo Pfeiffer, who is always juggling countless things at once, connecting the entire company, and building our marketing department from scratch – a huge challenge considering CoinFabrik has been around for 10 years, but the marketing team is only 1.5 years old!
We reached out to Safary co-founder Justin Vogel to get his take on why marketing hasn’t been a bigger focus in Web3 conferences and what Safary’s plans are for future events:
“Marketing has often been overlooked in Web3, with conferences focused on tech and infrastructure. Conferences operate via a sponsorship model, which has prioritized giving founders the stage to promote theoretical products, leaving little room for marketers to share how they’re actually driving adoption. But as more consumer apps launch, the need for strategic growth is undeniable. Since February 2022, Safary has hosted weekly discussions with top marketers in our exclusive community. We took it IRL at Eth Denver this year, where the first ‘Safary Summit’ featured 25 marketers across 11 panels. The demand was clear – 1,500+ RSVPs for a room of 100. The Blockworks team saw the potential, leading to the marketing track debut at Permissionless. And we’re just getting started. Our goal is to bring these insights to bigger stages, making growth strategies and the leaders behind them central at every major crypto conference.”
Knowing that marketing will have a bigger place at future events honestly feels like a breath of fresh air for Web3. Personally, I think we need to pay more attention to the fact that marketing strategies within the crypto industry can’t be one-size-fits-all. A marketing strategy for a dApp, for example, should be very different from one for a chain or a service provider like a security auditing firm, like we are.
If we don’t start recognizing these differences and adjusting our approaches accordingly, we’re setting ourselves up to fail. Yet, most conversations around crypto marketing tend to lump everything together and assume that we’re all just selling a product or token. This lack of distinction, IMHO, is a major gap in how we talk about marketing in the space.
A new launch and the general sentiment around L2s
On the last day of Permissionless, Paradigm’s CTO, Georgios Konstantopoulos, took the main stage to introduce Ithaca, a new company focused on accelerating crypto development, alongside its first project, the open-source Layer 2 testnet Odyssey.
This comes at a funny time because everyone I talked to at the event, as well as on CT, is sick and tired of hearing about yet another L2. But despite this growing sentiment, Odyssey, built with the Reth SDK and featuring forward-looking Ethereum upgrades like EIP-7702 and RIP-7212, wants to stand out by delivering high performance and frictionless onboarding, removing the need for custom RPCs, bridging ETH, or browser extensions.
My take here is that, even though a lot of people are saying we definitely don’t need another L2, Ithaca’s combo of existing L2 infra (like the OP Stack and Conduit) and its contributions to zk-rollup development could actually make it a more future-proof solution, so it’s worth keeping an eye on. If you see me yapping on X, you already know that anything that seeks to simplify blockchain UX and fix liquidity fragmentation issues is a win in my book.
The zk era at its peak
And further getting into the zk space, Victor Estival, Head of Product Marketing at Polygon, commented on how the technology is gaining momentum at the ‘Pushing the Frontier of zk’ panel during the AggDay event at Permissionless.
Something that Victor shared that resonates entirely with how we see the industry is how excited he’s been to witness a spike in zk projects over the past 9 to 12 months, with devs moving beyond just migrating existing dApps and starting to create entirely new use cases.
He mentioned how teams like Polygon and zkSync are working to engage wider developer communities, breaking down misconceptions about zk being too complex or expensive, and he also stressed the need to expand beyond Web3 to boost zk adoption.
He also pointed out the growing participation in zk hackathons and encouraged everyone in the space to keep pushing these initiatives forward, and the minute I was hearing those words I couldn’t help but think that at CoinFabrik, we’ve seen this trend firsthand. Our DevRel, Arturo Beccar Varela, and his team won first place in the zk/privacy track at the Ethereum Argentina Hackathon with their work on privacy, cryptography, and security – areas we love seeing as core tracks in hackathons.
Then, just weeks later, Arturo and his team won first place in the Filecoin Foundation, zkSync, and Protocol Labs tracks, and even secured the runner-up prize in the Polygon track at the Aleph Hackathon. Needless to say, this makes us super proud, and it’s a clear reflection of why Victor’s takes hit home for us.
Meridian 2024 left our team fired up
On October 15-17, our team traveled to London for Meridian 2024, Stellar’s annual conference. As the network keeps growing, with more addresses and asset issuances, Soroban smart contracts were highlighted at the event for their ability to support new decentralized financial tools.
And amid this atmosphere, we had the perfect chance to pitch Scout, our static analyzer for Soroban smart contracts. The feedback from the Stellar community was incredible- projects using Scout have really benefited from it, and it was exciting to connect in person with an ecosystem that values security as much as we do.
Tomer Weller, Chief Product Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation, even gave us a shoutout on X:
