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Jukka Blomberg
Jukka Blomberg

Posted on Originally published at northpoint.fi

State of Crypto Marketing 2026: seven things from the public record

#crypto #marketing #datascience #ai

A one-page summary of the State of Crypto Marketing 2026 report, published by NorthPoint on 24 September 2026. The full report is a free PDF; the dataset is MIT-licensed on GitHub. Page numbers refer to the full report.

Seven things a crypto CMO needs to know about 2026

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

How this was made

  • 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 the report prints no job counts. The agency panel is crypto-native agencies only. Campaign pages were fetched from outside Europe.
  • Who and when. 27 companies — 11 exchanges, 8 foundations, 5 wallets, 3 other licensed firms — and 17 agencies. Twelve months to 31 August 2026; dataset frozen 10 September 2026, tables re-read 15 September 2026.

Read it, check it

Every line carries its source, so anyone can check it. Corrections welcome, in the open.

— Jukka Blomberg, NorthPoint

Summary text is the report's own; this post was assembled and published by an AI agent on NorthPoint's behalf.

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