stop doomscrolling I love you

Neobank transaction volume is heading toward $333B by end of 2026. 386 million users projected by 2028. The distribution problem is largely solved. @Revolut @nubank @Chime spent a decade earning the trust that traditional banks assumed was permanent. They were right that it wasn’t. But the next question is harder than the first one. What do you build on top of 386 million users who’ve already proven they’ll move their money if the product is better? The neobanks that figure that out won’t do it with another feature. Settlement, FX, compliance, yield. The infrastructure nobody talks about in the press release but everyone feels it in the product. That’s where the next 10 years gets decided and we’re seen the change happening now. So where do you put your money now?

Stablecoin rails change the denominator. Near-zero settlement cost. No intermediary spread. Programmable compliance baked into the transaction layer. For the first time the neobank can price in ways the incumbent physically cannot match without dismantling its own revenue model. This isn’t theoretical anymore. @stripe added stablecoin payouts to 101 countries last year. @Visa is settling transactions in USDC on Solana. @PayPal launched its own stablecoin and quietly processed over $1B in volume. The ones building on top of it now aren’t doing it for the crypto narrative. They’re doing it because the margin difference is too large to ignore. Cross-border payment costs dropping from 3-6% to under 0.5%. Financial restructuring is happening globally.

Neobanks proved people would leave their bank for better UX. @Revolut @monzo @StarlingBank proved it at millions of users. Stablecoin infra is the first time the unit economics actually support giving those users something the old banks structurally cannot. The bank or fintech startup that moves first doesn’t win on features. It wins on a cost structure its competitors spent 150 years building as a moat.

Stablecoin infra builds margin. @Revolut, @nubank, @Chime built distribution. The merger of those two things is the most undermarketed story in financial services right now.

Hot take: most crypto marketing teams are one campaign away from a lawsuit and don’t even know it. Jurisdiction matters. A stablecoin that’s legal to promote in one market can get your company dragged into a legal case in another. Know the rules before you write the copy.

The market feels less euphoric than prior cycles. Structurally more complex. We’ve moved from bearish to mature. And maturity is harder to market than euphoria. In 2021 you could post a cartoon ape and build a community of 200K overnight. Which just doesn’t hit the same today. The tactics that built this industry are quietly killing projects that haven’t evolved. Euphoria markets reward hype. Mature markets reward clarity. Most crypto marketing teams were trained to sell momentum. Not value. The projects that survive multiple cycles can explain their value without referencing the price. Not “we’re up 400%.” But “here’s the problem we solve and here’s who has it.” Institutional money doesn’t respond to Discord hype. Track record. Regulatory clarity. Counterparty trust. Completely different GTM motion. Most teams know this. Few have restructured around it. The next cycle won’t be won by the loudest project. It’ll be won by whoever did the unglamorous work while everyone else waited for euphoria to return. Build accordingly.

Bitcoin is back above $80K and everyone’s calling it a rally. It’s not. It’s institutionalization. ETFs pulled $532M in a single day last week. The retail narrative is over. This is a different market now.

If your community manager is the one handling regulatory questions on X, your comms strategy has a gap that no growth budget will fix.

Lose talent but have a headcount.

Got asked to do crisis comms for a project mid-hack in 2021. No playbook, wrong timezone, 40 minutes to the first press call. Three things I learned that no marketing course teaches you: 1. Over-communicate, even when you have nothing. Silence kills you faster than the hack. Partners and clients don’t expect all the answers at hour one. They expect to hear from you. Be reachable. Be honest about what you know and don’t know. Going dark is a choice, and everyone notices. 2. Internal comms breaks before external comms does. By the time your community is panicking, your team already has been for two hours. If people inside don’t know what’s happening or what to say, nothing you put out publicly will hold. 3. “Who owns this?” is a question you can’t answer for the first time during a crisis. Not the hack response. Not the client calls. Not the statement. Ownership has to exist before everything goes wrong. The projects that recovered fastest already knew who was in charge of what. Crisis comms isn’t a communications problem. It’s an organizational problem that comms exposes.

If Steve Jobs were still alive, he would have the moral authority to face and maybe even to solve this problem. But I doubt anyone in the phone business now does.

“Go where the community is.” But whose community? The one already in crypto won’t make you mainstream. At some point you have to go somewhere uncomfortable.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Outside of the usual suspects bubble.

Localization in crypto is understanding why Southeast Asia buys on trust networks, Latin America buys on inflation hedges, and Europe buys on regulation clarity. Same product, three completely different GTM plays.

Our EthCC panel is stacked! @jack__sanford CEO of Sherlock @wraitii CTO and Cofounder of @hyli_org @th3m477 Head of Product of @Lombard_Finance @P3b7_ CTO of @Ledger This is going to be a big one.

Spending some time at @stable_summit @EthCC @Vault__Summit 🏖️ Let’s meet, hit me up. I’m all about privacy, stablecoins, RWA and a trader at heart 🖤

I should just change my bio to RWA & stablecoins

If you feel the need to show a crack to win impressions your marketing skills are ghetto. You know what I’m talking about.

Who’s going to EthCC? 👀 On April 1 from 7:00–10:00 PM, Sherlock is hosting an invite-only side event in Cannes with @Lombard_Finance and @hyli_org. Founders, leading protocol teams, senior researchers, and top auditors coming together for a night of sharp conversation, drinks, and a panel worth showing up for. If you’re in Cannes for EthCC, request to join here: luma.com/397vh9td

See you in Cannes ⛱️

Ethereum will never be lean. EVM can be.