KOLs, New Narratives, Marketing, Media, Mindshare, and Money KOLs, aka Key Opinion Leaders, have been riding the hype wave over the past two years. These KOLs invest their own money into projects in exchange for posting about them. In essence, it’s a smart strategy that can attract additional capital while organically “shilling” a project within the community. The shill becomes motivated, since the influencer has skin in the game. But from that point on, a lot of buts start popping up. Projects still follow the old playbook: find a big media, make them an offer, and wait for the results. The media does a basic Ctrl C + Ctrl V job The content ends up being boring for me as a reader, and even worse for me as a creator. It’s clearly low-effort stuff that completely fails to engage. Current KOL rounds are dead As someone who's been in both crypto and content creation for a while, I can confidently say the current environment is actively hurting projects when it comes to KOL rounds. So how do we fix it? Start by selecting quality KOLs with 3k to 5k followers. Their audience tends to be more trusting, and the project founder is probably reaching out to them for the first time — full of energy and ready to build. Smaller channels have significantly higher engagement because they’ve built local communities that actually care. When paired with thoughtful, native content, this generates real metrics that matter. You might think I hate big media and want to see them crash and burn. That’s not the case. Big media plays an important role: they bring in new users — the ones mindlessly grinding campaigns and pumping CEX volume. The average crypto user journey: Enters crypto → gets exposed to this kind of media → joins a centralized exchange → wipes out their account in 3–6 months → quits, disappointed. That’s a completely normal process. In fact, a lot of centralized exchanges survive thanks to this very user base. As painful as it is to say, the market needs people to buy Layer 2, Layer 3, Restaking tokens, and a bunch of other assets. You can't make money in this space without someone else losing it What truly sets smaller media apart is their focus on content that drives quality metrics — things like TVL, builders, revenue, etc. In this cycle, that’s far more valuable than raw transaction counts or speeds. With smaller creators, you're often getting the same or even better reach, for the same price — or maybe just slightly more. Boosting Mindshare The challenge is that these smaller creators struggle to stay afloat, especially in current market conditions. Just a year ago, even a Twitter account with 1–2k followers could make decent money by sharing insights on platforms like Kaito. And if you think @KaitoAI or InfoFi are dead — you’re totally wrong. For example, Kaito has generated over $400K in fees in just the past few days. Their revenue comes from pre-TGE or post-TGE marketing via their launchpad. One recent case is @AIWayfinder, which had its claim process hosted on Kaito’s infrastructure — with a $3 fee per claim. To give you an idea of how deep Kaito’s roots go: 20–25 projects are currently in the pre-TGE phase using Kaito’s marketing stack. Another player in this space is @noise_xyz — essentially Kaito’s twin, but with a twist: you can now trade attention linked to a project. It’s gone so far that you can literally trade attention towards Noise itself. I won’t sugarcoat it — this kind of concept could die off in a few weeks or months. But it also reflects the potential for smaller creators to actually earn in this market. Do you even need this? That’s a question a builder reading this text might ask. And honestly, it all depends on your goals. If your goal is to make a quick buck, pump the market, and ride off into the sunset — the old strategy works just fine. Build an MVP, pitch to some funds, raise capital, hire a half-decent marketer, and run a standard KOL campaign. Then the usual playbook: allocate tokens to your own wallets, start selling them, and watch the project slowly fade into irrelevance But… if your goal is to build a sustainable product with actual revenue and a real community — that’s going to take effort. So what’s the takeaway? I’ll leave the final decision to you. I can only share my personal view. Maybe my approach won’t work for every project, but at the very least, it’s worth testing — the cost is roughly the same. Let me also repeat: big media is necessary. But it needs to shift — even slightly — toward being more aligned with actual projects and communities. That’s the only way we’ll fix the broken state of KOL rounds and crypto marketing in general. What happens next - well, time will tell