GM,
After a decade of marketing to itself, the industry is now focused on net new users and net new whales.
In this issue:
Crypto in mainstream culture
Overlooked whale events
The $50K PDF business - Company Spotlight 🔍
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Sui conference: Same day and venue as Token2049 Singapore
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📅 Events this month
🇯🇵 WebX, July 13-14, Tokyo - 72 side events
🇨🇦 Canada Crypto Week, July 20-26, Toronto - 43 side events
🇺🇸 Science of Blockchain Conference, July 26-30, Stanford
👀 New on our radar: Sibos Miami by Swift (Sept 28) after Swift just announced its blockchain ledger pilot with 17 global banks
Crypto has outgrown its own audience
Everyone at a crypto conference converted years ago.
This year, the industry's biggest marketing budgets went to mainstream stages:
🎧 KuCoin became Tomorrowland’s exclusive crypto partner with tickets and merch payable in crypto
👀 Est. reach: 400K IRL and 1.5B aftermovie views
🏈 🎬 Coinbase bought the Super Bowl and the Oscars ad - showing an NPC breaking out of a financial system he didn't build
👀 Est. reach: 125.6M for Super Bowl, 17.9M for the Oscars
The post-FTX era is over: Polymarket is getting into pop culture podcasts, OKX at the Tribeca Film Festival, Crypto.com's long-time F1 partnership, and many more in this year alone.
And the collective effort is paying off: the World Cup Polymarket volume grew from $138k to over $6B in 4 years:
But new money comes in two sizes: a billion people with a banking app, and the few thousand who can deposit 6 figures without effort.
In other words: Where do rich people hang out?
The oldest play in wealth management is to sponsor what rich people love, not what you sell.
Imagine building relationships in places the rest of the industry hasn't discovered yet:
🎨 Art fairs: Art Dubai - the Gulf's biggest art fair, lead-sponsored by Julius Baer, a Swiss private bank. Happens to usually take place right before TOKEN2049 Dubai.
🛥️ Yacht shows: Monaco Yacht Show - 70 superyachts worth a combined $2.9B. The average buyer is 47, self-made, with wealth from tech, finance, and private equity - not inherited. Crypto has little visible presence there.
⛳ Golf: Alfred Dunhill Links - for VCs, M&A execs, and founders of companies like Khosla Ventures and Qatalyst Partners.
🏎️ Cars: Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance - while next to Silicon Valley, the crowd is predominantly traditional wealth. Classic cars are already a tokenization target.
🏦 Family offices: Dozens of invite-only summits, from gatherings in the Hamptons, Zurich to the Global Family Office Investment Summit. They attract 500+ family offices and Gulf sovereign wealth funds and charge $5K+ to attend.
TLDR; Nobody deposits their first $20K because of a booth. They do it because someone they trust told them over dinner.
🏢 Company Spotlight: The $50K PDF business
We’re featuring one crypto company per issue that's still shipping — the mechanics, and what you can steal.
On July 1, MiCA regulation forced over 80% of Europe's registered crypto firms out of compliance, affecting Binance and pushing USDT off regulated EU exchanges.
The Move:
Every token traded in the EU needs a MiCA white paper to be listed. Law firms used to charge $50K per paper.
The MiCA Crypto Alliance turned it into a template with 24-hour turnaround.
Why It Works:
Regulatory deadlines convert skeptics in bulk. Companies that deprioritized MiCA for two years all became customers on the same day.
The companies that own the standard often own the market. Stripe did it for payments. DocuSign did it for signatures. Every new regulation creates a new default document. Whoever becomes that default owns the distribution.
What to copy:
📋 Find your own $50K PDF and productize it. Audit reports, legal opinions, privacy compliance, market-maker agreements. In an industry where the rules are still being written, solving a shared pain point can become your best customer acquisition channel.
📅 Regulatory deadlines are free GTM. MiCA's cliff dates were public since 2023. Deadline days deliver customers in bulk — the EU did their marketing for them.
From our interview with Aaron Sanchez, Director of Industry Engagement and a member of our community.
If you're building something worth breaking down - reach out. 👋
Member Updates
From our private community
Simon from Superteam Canada is hosting Solana Summit during Elevate Tech Week, Sep 23–24
We’re hiring an AI Transformation Lead on behalf of a crypto client
Who Are We?
We’re building cryptonomads.org—the go-to place to discover crypto events, companies, jobs, and professionals.
We also run a private club—a community of crypto founders and builders
