During 2023 and 2024, I received variations of the same request almost every week.
A Web3 project wanted Vietnamese users quickly. The team had a token launch, an airdrop, a new chain, a game, or an exchange campaign. They had a short timeline and a list of numbers they expected an agency to produce: KOL posts, Telegram members, X engagement, article placements, registrations, and sometimes deposits.
The brief usually sounded straightforward. Find twenty KOLs. Publish fifty articles. Run a giveaway. Fill the community. Make the project look active before the next announcement.
BlockPR could have built a large part of its business around that demand. There was money in it, and the operating model was easy to understand. Buy attention cheaply, package it as distribution, and report the visible numbers.
I chose not to take BlockPR in that direction.
The market rewarded activity
Vietnam had one of the most active retail crypto communities in the region. Projects understood that a Vietnamese campaign could generate fast engagement at a cost far below larger English-speaking markets. A few local channels could move thousands of people into a Telegram group. An airdrop task could create a sudden wave of wallets, follows, reposts, and referral activity.
The numbers looked convincing in a campaign report. A community might grow by ten thousand members in a week. KOL posts could generate hundreds of comments. Dozens of small publications could repeat the same announcement across search results. For a team preparing for a token launch or investor update, this created the appearance of momentum.
The problem was that activity and belief were being measured as the same thing.
Many users were following the reward rather than the project. They joined because an airdrop required it. They commented because a giveaway rewarded engagement. They repeated the campaign message because someone had paid them or because they expected an allocation. Once the incentive ended, the attention moved to the next project.
This did not make every campaign dishonest. Airdrops can distribute ownership and help users experience a product. KOLs can explain difficult ideas to communities that trust them. Smaller media can reach specialised audiences that larger publications ignore. The problem began when these tools were used to manufacture proof that the market cared.
Cheap reach created expensive assumptions
The strongest Web3 campaigns of that period often looked weakest several months later. Projects had large communities but few real users. They had hundreds of articles but no publication that serious investors, partners, or prospective employees recognised. They had KOL coverage, yet almost nobody could explain what the product did without repeating the campaign script.
This created a dangerous internal assumption. The project believed it had already built awareness and community, so any failure must have come from the product, the market, or the token price. In reality, the campaign had often measured people’s willingness to complete a task, claim a reward, or speculate for a short period.
A research study published in 2023 examined hundreds of NFT promotion services and found that a substantial share of the projects they promoted were fraudulent. Much of the visible engagement came from bots that inflated likes, follows, and reposts before real users arrived. The specific market was NFTs, but the mechanism was familiar across Web3: synthetic activity attracted genuine attention by making a project appear more popular than it was.
Influencer transparency was also becoming harder to ignore. Research using more than 100 million posts estimated that most sponsored influencer content on X was not disclosed, while many users could not reliably identify paid promotion without clear labels. Other field research found that explicit disclosure could improve audience favourability by making the commercial relationship clearer. The old assumption that hidden sponsorship protected engagement was becoming less convincing.
For me, the commercial problem was simple. A client could spend less and receive more visible output, but the output often told them very little about whether the market trusted them.
Why I chose media quality
BlockPR began putting more weight on credible media placements, especially publications with editorial standards, recognised audiences, and relevance beyond the immediate token community. This was a harder offer to sell.
A Tier-1 placement costs more than a package of thirty small articles. It takes longer. The publication may reject the story, ask difficult questions, remove unsupported claims, or decide that the announcement is not newsworthy. The client also receives fewer links, which can make the final report look less impressive.
Those constraints were the reason I valued the work.
A serious publication creates friction between the company and the claim it wants to make. The project must explain why the story matters, provide evidence, clarify its position, and accept that it cannot fully control the result. That process often reveals weaknesses before the market does.
The value of the placement also travels further. A credible article can support investor conversations, business development, hiring, search results, due diligence, and future media outreach. It gives someone outside the project a reason to take a closer look. It cannot guarantee trust, but it creates a stronger piece of evidence than another sponsored post repeating the company’s own language.
By 2024, crypto media itself was under financial pressure. Traffic had fallen across several industry publications, and the collapse of major companies had damaged confidence in the relationship between crypto businesses and the outlets covering them. This made editorial credibility harder to obtain and more important. Publishing anywhere was easy. Being examined by a publication with something to lose was different.
The decision cost us work
I do not want to make the choice sound cleaner than it was. BlockPR still worked with KOLs, community campaigns, press-release distribution, and smaller industry publications. These channels were part of the market, and clients often needed them.
The difference was that I did not want volume to become our central promise.
That decision cost us deals. Some prospects compared the number of placements and concluded that another agency offered more. Others wanted guaranteed KOL reactions or community numbers that we could not honestly promise. A few only needed the appearance of a campaign before a token event, so a longer discussion about credibility had little value to them.
There were times when I questioned the decision. An agency has salaries, contractors, tools, and cash-flow pressure. It is easy to speak about standards when the pipeline is full. It is harder when a low-quality campaign can cover a month of operating costs.
But every agency teaches the market what to hire it for. If we kept accepting work built around cheap volume, we would become better at producing cheap volume. We would hire for it, build supplier relationships around it, and attract more clients who valued it. Eventually, the work we accepted for short-term revenue would define the company.
What the downcycle made visible
The market decline after the 2021 boom exposed the difference between rented attention and accumulated trust. When token prices stopped doing the persuasion, many projects had little left. Their communities had been assembled around rewards. Their media presence consisted of duplicated announcements. Their KOL relationships disappeared when the campaign budget ended.
The projects that survived were not always the loudest. They had products people continued to use, founders who remained visible during difficult periods, partners willing to stay associated with them, and a body of credible information that people could examine. Communication supported those assets. It did not replace them.
Vietnam’s Web3 market was also becoming more mature. The country remained highly active in crypto adoption, but users had already lived through failed games, token collapses, hacked projects, delayed launches, and promises that disappeared with the market cycle. The audience was still speculative, but it was less innocent. Coin98’s 2023 market report described a large and active Vietnamese crypto market entering 2024, while later research continued to show high awareness alongside concerns about trust and privacy.
More activity therefore created more scepticism. A large campaign could attract attention, but it could also trigger immediate questions about investors, token allocation, licences, founders, withdrawals, audits, and past projects. Marketing could no longer rely on novelty alone.
The positioning I believe in now
The lesson from 2023 and 2024 shaped how I now think about BlockPR. We help Web3, fintech, and technology companies build trust and the communication infrastructure that supports it. Media is one part of that work. Content, community, local judgment, message discipline, and operational consistency matter just as much.
Tier-1 media remains useful because it creates a stronger credibility signal. It also has limits. A good article cannot repair a bad product, hide weak operations, or turn temporary attention into lasting demand. Trust forms when the claims people read continue to match what the company does.
I still see projects buying the old package: dozens of KOLs, hundreds of community interactions, a wall of publication logos, and an airdrop designed to move every visible metric at once. Sometimes the campaign works on its own terms. The charts go up, the report looks busy, and the market appears to respond.
I have simply stopped confusing that response with trust.
BlockPR’s current position began with the work we refused to make our identity. We chose fewer placements with more consequence, clearer claims, and campaigns that could still make sense after the incentive disappeared.
Volume can make a project visible for a week. Credibility gives people a reason to look again.
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