State of Crypto Marketing 2026.

Who markets crypto in 2026, who does the work for them, and where the money and the talent went. 27 companies — 11 exchanges, 8 foundations, 5 wallets, 3 other licensed firms — and 17 agencies, over the twelve months to 31 August 2026.

Four chapters — regulation, AI and talent, agencies, disclosure — each closing with our reading and what the record could not show. One rule throughout: if a claim could not be traced to a public source, it did not go in.

1. 1

   Two of 27 companies lost the right to win new customers in Europe on 1 July — Binance and HTX. Six licensed exchanges, four of them in this report, ran offers at the customers they left behind. p.4

2. 2

   Gemini left first, four months before Binance, cutting roughly 25% of its staff — and still holds a licence for 29 countries. p.4

3. 3

   Google turned the licence register into an advertising condition. No MiCA authorisation, no Search, YouTube or Display ads in the EU. p.4

4. 4

   The senior marketers did not stay to adopt AI — they went to work for it. Seven senior Coinbase marketers, including the CMO, joined OpenAI and Anthropic. p.7

5. 5

   Part of the AI-layoff story is the press’s. Nine of 26 cuts were framed as AI; five in the company’s own words. None named marketing. p.7

6. 6

   Seven of the ten companies any agency names are claimed by two or more agencies. KuCoin by three. Not one company has confirmed any of it. p.8

7. 7

   Eighteen of 27 have never put a number on their marketing. The three that do file it with the SEC; Coinbase’s 2025 figure is $1.06 billion. Binance publishes its compliance budget and nothing about marketing. p.10

• Public sources only. No interviews, no anonymous quotes. If it is not public, it is not here.

• One dataset. Every number comes from one frozen set of files and reconciles to the appendix.

• Silence stays silence. A job we cannot find is not an empty seat. An agency’s claim is not a contract.

• Limits. The largest exchanges’ careers sites cannot be read by our scan, so this report prints no job counts. The agency panel is crypto-native agencies only. Campaign pages were fetched from outside Europe.

Written by Jukka Blomberg, previously CMO of two international crypto exchanges — the essay that started it is here. The corpus, the canonical files and the claim ledger are public at the companion repository.

The report itself is free and ungated — no signup, in either direction. Give me your site and I’ll send one page, written by hand within a day: your line against the seven numbers, and the one thing I’d change first.