Two of the four largest crypto exchanges by user base will be running marketing in interim mode at the same time this summer. Bybit confirmed the cost-side. Lunar Strategy’s founder confirmed the agency-side. “Interim” is no longer a placeholder — it is the new shape of the function.
For about forty-five days this summer, the two largest crypto exchanges by user base will both be running marketing without a permanent CMO. Binance hands the chair to Eowyn Chen on 15 June. Crypto.com hits the Kalifowitz cliff on 30 June with no successor named. The overlap window opens on 15 June and runs until at least the back half of July. Inside that window, the closest comparable to either company is the other one — both being run by an interim seat, both shipping marketing under it, both writing the next-shape brief while they are sitting in it.
The interesting question is not who fills the chair next. The interesting question is why both seats are interim at the same time.
The first signal is Binance and Crypto.com themselves. The previous CMO at each exchange held the seat for almost six years (Kalifowitz) and three years (Conlan). Both ran the seat under the brand-pyramid model — F1, LeBron, Cristiano, Mr. Beast, the stadium. Both exits are happening within two weeks of each other. Neither successor is named publicly. The internal calculus on the successor brief is not who continues the work, because the work itself is being repriced. That is what produces the interim chair. The interim chair is what you put in when the seat-shape is being rewritten and you do not want the search firm to start sourcing yet.
The second signal came last week from the third exchange. Ben Zhou, the CEO of Bybit, said in an interview that he will not be renewing the company’s F1 sponsorship and is looking for deals with better commercial value. Bybit is not in CMO transition the way Binance and Crypto.com are. Sandy Peng is still in the seat. But the message Zhou is broadcasting is the same one Crypto.com and Binance are broadcasting through their interim chairs: the big-ticket sponsorship era is closing. The marketing function is going to be priced and structured differently going forward. That is the cost-side confirmation of what the seat-shape change implies.
The third signal came from a place that should be impossible to get a confession out of: a crypto growth agency CEO. Tim Haldorsson at Lunar Strategy, in a DailyCoin interview reprinted on Bitget, said that for startups operating with limited budgets, founder-led or team-led organic marketing “stands above the rest in 2026,” and that he is now advising projects to prioritise direct visibility — interviews, podcasts, op-eds, community discussions — over influencer or KOL spend. A crypto growth agency CEO is telling his own market that they should be doing less of the thing his agency sells. The agency-side, in other words, is publicly conceding the same point the exchange-side is publicly conceding: the previous model is not the model. Volume is no longer the deliverable.
Three signals from one fortnight. One is the operator-side (Binance / Crypto.com saying the seat-shape changed). One is the cost-side (Bybit saying the spend-shape changed). One is the agency-side (Lunar saying the deliverable-shape changed). Reading them as separate stories is the trade-press habit. Reading them as one signal is the operator’s job.
The 2022 interim CMO was a placeholder. A board would put a head of communications or a CFO designate in the seat, the search firm would run a sixty-day mandate, a permanent CMO would be hired, and the interim chair would either go back to the previous role or move on. The function continued on the same operating model under interim leadership as it did under permanent leadership. The job of the interim was to keep the lights on until the permanent arrived.
The 2026 interim CMO is doing something else. Eowyn Chen is not arriving in the Binance chair to keep the lights on. She is arriving to define what the function is now, ship marketing under that definition, and hand the next permanent CMO a written operating model rather than an empty seat. Whoever takes over at Crypto.com on 1 July — whether that is an internal lift or a named external successor — is going to arrive into a marketing function that has been actively redefined during the transition window, not preserved through it. The interim chair is the rewrite chair.
That is the structural change. “Interim” in 2022 meant caretaker. “Interim” in 2026 means the operator who defines the next shape of the function while running the function against the new shape.
Four conditions had to hold for the permanent CMO model to work. The board had to be willing to underwrite a multi-year brand line as a fixed cost. The CFO had to read marketing as a leadership cost rather than as a discretionary AI-cost-eligible line. The agency book around the CMO had to be running on multi-quarter retainers with the CMO as the senior buyer. And the regulatory perimeter had to be loose enough that a single CMO seat could carry the gate-stack risk without an in-built compliance function.
All four conditions have flipped inside the last twelve months.
The board now reads brand as a discretionary cost-of-AI-restructuring line. Crypto.com’s March layoffs were framed as an AI restructuring, and the CMO seat went next. Gemini cut thirty percent. Algorand cut twenty-five percent. OP Labs cut twenty. The CFO has the air-cover to ask why the brand line is fixed when every other line is being rewritten under AI discipline. The agency book is running on retainers that the CMO who signed them is no longer in the room to defend. The compliance perimeter has tightened — MiCA cliff on 1 July, FCA financial-promotions enforcement live, SEC retail communication reviews live, VATP rules in the Gulf — and the gate-stack risk a single CMO seat now carries is materially larger than what the seat carried in 2024.
Under those four conditions, the permanent CMO model does not produce the function the business now needs. The interim CMO model does, because the interim is hired specifically to rewrite the function’s shape during the transit. The interim is not a placeholder. The interim is the design phase.
Almost nothing. The MEXC top-ten ranking published this month still leads with Bond Finance, Coinbound and NinjaPromo — all subscription, retainer or volume models. Coinbound updated its L1 / L2 protocol marketing playbook on 4 May and its Web3 Marketing 2026 definitive guide last week, while its named retainer client Sui Foundation has five marketing seats open in public on the same careers page. The agency that is supposed to be running Sui’s marketing has published nothing on the agency-to-in-house transition Sui is openly executing. RZLT productised “RZLT AI as a Service” this quarter. ICODA published a strategy team op-ed on AI search. Both moves consolidate the vendor frame. Neither move addresses the seat-shape question.
The two voices in the agency category that are answering adjacent questions — Amanda Cassatt at Serotonin on marketing-as-infrastructure, Mike Ermolaev at Outset PR on the next chapter being written by products rather than PR — are answering on the agency-side surface. They are nearer to the operator frame than the rest of the category, but they are still not in the room when the chief of staff at Binance or Crypto.com decides what the new seat does. The operator work is one layer inside that.
Tim Haldorsson’s admission is the most honest piece of agency-side commentary on the market this month. He is right in direction. He is incomplete in solution. Founder-led marketing works when the founder is a marketing operator. Most crypto founders are not. The leadership gap Haldorsson describes does not get closed by handing the founder a podcast slot. It gets closed by putting an operator in the seat for sixty to ninety days who can ship the function under the new shape and write down the operating model for whoever comes next. That is the bridge-CMO product. That is the structured, accountable version of what Haldorsson is describing.
“Interim” in 2022 meant caretaker. “Interim” in 2026 means the operator who defines the next shape of the function while running the function against the new shape.
If you are at the chief-of-staff or CEO level at one of the exchanges in this picture — Binance, Crypto.com, Bybit, Sui Foundation, Bitget, the Tier-2 and Tier-3 names one quarter behind — the practical implication of this week is that the interim seat is not a temporary problem you need to close. It is the design opportunity you have been handed. The retained search you are about to brief is going to source against a job description that is still anchored to the 2024 seat. The candidate slate that comes back will be 2024 candidates. By the time the slate is on your desk, the function will have moved further away from the brief than the slate.
You have two clean moves. One is to delay the search by sixty to ninety days, rewrite the brief during the delay, and accept that the function ships nothing strategic in that window. The other is to put an operator in the seat for those sixty to ninety days, ship the function under the new shape, and have that operator write the brief the search firm sources against on the second pass. The candidate slate that comes back the second time fits the seat, because the seat has been defined by the time the slate is on the desk.
That is the bridge-CMO move. I wrote the week-by-week version of it earlier this month. The pattern is going to be the dominant senior-marketing pattern at exchange scale through 2027. The exchanges naming it first — Binance via Chen, Crypto.com by default, Coinbase by structure — are running ahead of the market. The exchanges that haven’t named it yet are running into it inside the next two quarters.
Three NorthPoint products map onto the three operating-model situations now live in the market. The Fractional Crypto CMO seat (€15k per month) is the sixty-to-ninety-day bridge for an exchange whose CMO seat just changed shape and whose successor brief is being written during the transit. The CMO Operating System install (€55k for ninety days) is the full operating-model build — the in-house equivalent of the Coinbase AI-native-pods structure, productised for a Tier-2 or Tier-3 exchange that wants the operating model without the layoff cycle. The AI Crypto CMO subscription (€2.5k per month) is the always-on layer for an operator who has already crossed the operating-model line and needs the AI stack with an ex-CMO review on top.
The three are not three price points for the same engagement. They are three different operator interventions for three different operating-model situations. The buyer’s decision is not how much do I spend. It is which shape is my function in this quarter. The interim window at Binance and the cliff at Crypto.com are both Fractional-shaped situations. The Sui Foundation in-house build is a CMO-OS-shaped situation. The Coinbase pods are already past the install line and an AI-Crypto-CMO-shaped situation, if Coinbase wanted external review at all (they don’t). The same three exchanges are sitting in three different boxes on the same operating-model grid.
The interim CMO is the new permanent CMO at exchange scale, not because the boards have given up on permanent CMOs, but because the function is being redefined and the only seat that fits a redefinition is the seat that is consciously interim. The exchanges running ahead of the market have already put operators in those seats. The exchanges that haven’t are about to. The agency category has been silent on this for two weeks. The most honest agency-side voice in the market this month is publicly redirecting clients toward founder-led organic, which is the same direction the operator move points in, only without the operator.
If your exchange is in this picture — Tier-1 with the seat in transit, Tier-2 with the function in design, Tier-3 with the operating model still to be built — the practical move this quarter is the same move. Put an operator in the seat. Ship the function under the new shape for sixty to ninety days. Hand the next chair a written operating model. The seat that arrives second is the seat that fits.
— Jukka Blomberg, Helsinki, 19 May 2026
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