Rebuilding crypto marketing after the AI layoffs.

The story Anthropic-era CEOs are telling in their layoff notes is the same story. We are integrating AI. We are getting more efficient. The team that emerges will be smaller, faster, and more strategic. The press release writes itself, and so does the Slack post, and so does the line about valuing every departing colleague.

Dan Eskow, who runs a crypto recruitment agency and is on the record in CoinDesk this month, called it directly: I see no real indication that these layoffs have anything to do with AI workforce replacement at scale. What is happening, he said, is that whole crypto sectors — restaking, DePIN, layer-twos — got over-staffed in the last cycle and have contracted. M&A activity is adding to the redundancies as acqui-hired employees displace legacy ones. AI is the cover. The thing under the cover is a normal cyclical reset.

That distinction matters, because the rebuild that fixes a cyclical reset is not the rebuild that fixes a tooling problem. If you treat the gap with another agency retainer or a Zapier flow, you will be hiring the same role at six-figure base nine months later. If you treat it as a structural rebuild, the org that emerges actually is smaller, faster, and more strategic — but for different reasons than the press release said.

Why marketing gets cut first.

In every crypto cycle reset since 2018, marketing is among the earliest functions trimmed. Three reasons, all of them visible from the CFO's seat.

The output is hard to attribute when revenue compresses. A treasury team that just watched fee revenue drop 30 percent quarter-on-quarter cannot easily defend a marketing line that took two quarters to read. Even when the marketing was correct, the read-time of the work is longer than the read-time of the panic. The cut is rational, even when it is wrong.

The senior marketing seat is unusually exposed. CMOs at crypto firms in 2024-2025 were typically hired during a budget expansion. Their tenure averages well under two years. They sit above an operating layer they do not own. When the budget contracts, the seat above the function is structurally easier to remove than the function itself. The team becomes orphaned. The doctrine they were running disappears with the seat.

The work is portable until it isn't. An exchange's marketing playbook lives partly in the heads of three to five operators who have run the gate-stack — compliance, legal, treasury, country counsel, the CISO when the SDK is involved. When those operators go, the playbook goes. The organisation that lays them off rarely realises this until campaign three of the next quarter and the post-mortem nobody can write.

The combination is what turns a reasonable cost-cut into a structural problem. The CFO trims the marketing line; the senior seat is removed first because it costs the most; the operating doctrine walks out with the senior seat; and the surviving team — usually capable, usually mid-career, usually still on the books — finds itself trying to ship the next campaign without a brief that compliance will sign.

What the wrong rebuild looks like.

The default rebuild path, in every cycle, is the same. Hire an agency to bridge. Wait for the recovery. Re-hire the senior seat at twelve to eighteen months out, usually at higher comp than the role you cut. The agency invoices clear; the function never quite re-coheres; the next CFO inherits a slightly worse version of the marketing org their predecessor cut.

The doctrine that ran the previous campaigns — the brief format, the gate-stack routing, the country-specific risk-disclosure copy library, the post-mortem template, the KOL routing logic, the campaign-pull authority chain — was a private artefact owned by the senior seat and executed by the team. An agency on retainer ships campaigns. It does not write the doctrine for an organisation it does not run.

So the surviving team continues to ship, but without the layer that made the shipping coherent. The CMO seat re-opens at month nine. The new hire spends their first quarter rebuilding the doctrine the agency was never paid to rebuild. The org spends another two quarters absorbing the new doctrine. By month fifteen, the function is back to where the layoff caught it, minus the institutional memory of the previous cycle. This is the path most crypto organisations are about to take. It will work eventually. It is the most expensive way to get there.

What the right rebuild looks like.

Five steps, in order. None of them are tooling. All of them are doctrine.

1. Write the brief format you actually use. Inside a week. Forty pages or fewer, structured around the gate-stack. Inputs from compliance, legal, treasury, country counsel, the platform team, paid-media policy review. Outputs that any campaign owner can fill in once and route through the gates without three rounds of clarifying questions. The brief format is the centre of gravity of the function. If you do not have one written down, you do not have a function — you have whoever is in the room that day.

2. Re-staff the post-mortem, not the seat. Schedule a real post-mortem on the last three campaigns the laid-off team shipped. Pull the comms, the internal Slack, the compliance routing, the metrics. Run it with whoever is left, plus a senior operator who has run post-mortems with legal in the room before. Write what worked, what got killed, what would ship differently. Put it in a doc. This is the operating doctrine in retroactive form. It is also what the next senior hire will need on day one.

3. Cut the agency stack to one external partner per layer. One PR partner. One paid-media partner. One creative partner. No sub-agency relationships. Each partner reports against the brief format from step one, in writing. The agency stack post-layoff is usually inherited and over-broad. Reset it before the next campaign ships. The cost line will drop materially. The campaign throughput will not.

4. Install the AI stack at the brief layer, not the campaign layer. The leverage AI gives a contracted marketing org is not in faster output. It is in faster brief-writing, faster compliance-routing, faster country-specific risk-copy generation, and faster post-mortem assembly. A solo operator with the right stack can do what a thirty-person team used to. But the stack lives at the brief, not the campaign. Most teams install it the wrong way around — they speed up output before they speed up the doctrine, and the gate-stack swallows the gain. The order matters.

5. Re-open the senior seat with a written job description, not a title. By month three, you should know exactly what doctrine the next CMO inherits, what the brief format looks like, what the agency stack does, what the AI stack does, and what the function still cannot do. That document — not the salary band, not the title, not the comp package — is what attracts the right hire and repels the wrong one. The hires you will be sorry you made are the ones who came in for the title and inherited a vacuum. The hires you will be glad you made are the ones who came in for the document and added to it.

Where the 90-day clock comes from.

The reason the rebuild fits inside 90 days, when most CMO searches take six months, is that you are not searching for the seat in the first 90 days. You are rebuilding the doctrine the seat will eventually run. The doctrine — brief format, gate-stack routing, agency-stack reset, AI-stack at the brief layer, post-mortem on the last cycle — is roughly twelve weeks of work for an operator who has done it before.

The CMO seat then re-opens with a job description that reads like an operating manual. The candidate pool that responds to that job description is materially smaller and materially better than the pool that responds to "we are hiring a CMO." You hire fewer interviews. You hire faster. You spend less on the search. The seat sticks.

The companies that get this right in 2026 will be the ones that, two years from now, look back at the March layoff and see the start of the function that actually worked. The ones that bridge with an agency and wait will look back at it as a hole.

The shorter version.

The AI-cited layoff is a cyclical reset wearing a tooling story. The right response is not another agency retainer. It is a written doctrine — brief format, gate-stack routing, AI stack at the brief, agency stack pruned to one partner per layer, post-mortem on the cycle that just ended. Twelve weeks. Then the seat re-opens with a job description that reads like an operating manual, and the next hire steps into something instead of into a vacuum.

Or you can hire an agency to bridge, wait nine months, re-open the seat at higher comp, and discover at month fifteen that the function is back where the layoff caught it. Your call.

— Jukka Blomberg, Helsinki, 27 April 2026