Unlock the strategies of crypto marketing with Oliver Carding, Head of Marketing at Tesseract. In an industry where innovation meets compliance, Oliver shares how Tesseract is revolutionizing the lending and DeFi vault market by becoming a MiCA authorized business in the EU. This is essential listening for marketers eager to understand the intersection of regulation and technology in the crypto space.

Oliver’s journey into crypto began in the early days of Bitcoin, navigating through the complexities of marketing in a rapidly evolving industry. He reveals how Tesseract's unique approach to dedicated client vaults sets them apart and why regulatory compliance is more crucial now than ever. With the recent changes in the European landscape, Oliver provides insights into how these regulations are shaping the future of finance.

Chapters:

• 00:44 — Paid in mining hardware: an accidental crypto origin story
• 06:47 — What Tesseract actually does: lending and DeFi vaults
• 07:31 — Why pooled vaults aren't compliant, and what a dedicated client vault is
• 09:41 — MiCA and CASP, explained, and what passporting unlocks
• 12:25 — Who Tesseract markets to
• 13:10 — The channel mix: PR, LinkedIn, email
• 14:56 — Why press matters more now than it did in the SEO-and-links era
• 20:55 — Case study: launching a product the market didn't know it needed
• 27:22 — Repositioning: from "Managed DeFi" to "Dedicated Client Vaults"
• 32:59 — The comparison table he learned from SaaS
• 37:18 — Is regulation a marketing advantage or disadvantage?
• 40:22 — Advice for marketers joining a regulated crypto business
  

Follow Oliver:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oc-marketing-manager-manchester/
Tesseract: https://tesseract.fi
Tesseract on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tesseractinvestment/

Follow Tyler:

X: https://x.com/tyler_fleischer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-fleischer/
Flowdesk: https://flowdesk.co/

Follow The Marketing Desk:

X: https://x.com/themarketingdsk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-desk-podcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingdsk

In this episode, Tyler Fleischer interviews Danny Carpentier Balough, Director, Product Marketing and GTM Strategy at the NEAR Foundation. They discuss the foundation's vision of integrating AI and crypto, the complexities of product marketing in a fast-paced environment, and the importance of a coherent narrative that resonates with various target audiences.

Danny shares insights on the recent product launch of IronClaw, the go-to-market strategy, and how the foundation addresses the needs of consumers, enterprises, and governments. The conversation emphasizes the significance of data sovereignty and the challenges of aligning product development with market demands. In this conversation, Danny discusses the intricacies of product roadmaps, the importance of flexibility in messaging, and the evolving role of AI in marketing. He emphasizes the need for a coherent vision and the significance of testing messaging across various channels.

Danny also highlights the friction that can arise between teams and the necessity of collaboration in shaping effective marketing strategies. Looking ahead, he predicts a convergence of product management and marketing roles, driven by advancements in AI and the need for agile responses to market changes.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Introduction to NIR Foundation and Its Vision
• 03:02 The Role of Product Marketing in a Fast-Paced Environment
• 05:47 Strategic Narrative Development for Complex Products
• 09:03 Recent Product Launch: IronClaw and Its Go-to-Market Strategy
• 11:49 Target Audiences: Consumers, Enterprises, and Governments
• 18:07 Connecting Product Development with Market Needs
• 27:06 Navigating the Gap Between Vision and Product Market Fit
• 29:44 Navigating Product Roadmaps and Flexibility
• 33:16 Testing Messaging and Content Strategy
• 36:56 The Role of Friction in Messaging
• 44:10 AI's Impact on Marketing Workflows
• 49:11 The Future of Product Marketing Roles
• 53:15 Adapting to Narrative Shifts in Marketing

Follow Danny:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-carpentier-balough/
NEAR Foundation: https://www.near.org/

Follow Tyler:
X: https://x.com/tyler_fleischer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-fleischer/
Flowdesk: https://flowdesk.co/

Follow The Marketing Desk:

X: https://x.com/themarketingdsk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-desk-podcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingdsk

Melissa Henderson spent her early career as a journalist in fashion media before she entered crypto. Now she runs growth marketing at the Interledger Foundation, where she argues that being the only non-technical person in the room is a superpower, not a liability.

We get into where the crypto Twitter playbook stops working, how to create content for developers without stripping out what makes the product real, what fashion media taught her about "taste" in tech, and why she thinks marketers with a core philosophy will stand out.

Chapters:

00:00 — Intro
01:00 — From fashion journalism to crypto systems builder
02:53 — What the Interledger Foundation actually solves
05:31 — The crypto Twitter playbook, and where it stops working
12:30 — Developer marketing: telling technical stories that land
20:48 — What fashion media taught her about “taste” in tech
25:59 — Marketing ops and the "marketing plumber"
30:22 — How AI rebuilt her reporting and deck workflow
37:16 — "Philosophy is going to eat crypto, AI, and software"
39:49 — Advice for newcomers: gamify everything
41:51 — Closing

Follow Melissa:

X: https://x.com/futurebymelissa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-a-henderson/
Substack: https://futurebymelissa.substack.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/futurebymelissa
Interledger Foundation: https://interledger.org
Violet Verse: https://violetverse.io

Follow Tyler:

X: https://x.com/tyler_fleischer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-fleischer/
Flowdesk: https://flowdesk.co/

Follow The Marketing Desk:

X: https://x.com/themarketingdsk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-desk-podcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingdsk

Running performance marketing motions in the digital asset industry means advertising under platform restrictions, building attribution models on broken data, and still walking into a leadership meeting with an ROI number.

Jake Langer has been doing exactly that throughout his career, and now as a marketing consultant at the NEAR Foundation. In this episode, he gets into all of it.

We cover the real state of paid media in digital assets: which channels actually work, the spray-and-pray reality of crypto audience targeting, and how to make the ROI argument when the attribution data doesn't tell the full story.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to NEAR Foundation
• 01:15 The Vision of NEAR
• 01:47 The Journey to Performance Marketing
• 03:29 Performance Marketing at NEAR
• 06:41 Navigating Platform Restrictions
• 09:16 Challenges in Paid Advertising
• 11:26 Justifying Marketing Spend
• 15:09 Attribution Challenges in Crypto
• 19:56 The Future of Performance Marketing
• 22:19 Undervalued Marketing Channels
• 28:03 Value of In-Person Events
• 31:51 The Attribution Model

Follow Jake:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakelanger/

Follow Tyler:
https://x.com/tyler_fleischer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-fleischer/

Follow The Marketing Desk:
https://x.com/themarketingdsk
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-desk-podcast
https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingdsk

How do you market stablecoin infrastructure when the exciting applications are built on top of it? Jay Kurahashi-Sofue, CMO at Eco, has been figuring that out for the past two years.

Eco is the stablecoin network making money programmable across every major blockchain. Jay joined as CMO in June 2024, and has been building the marketing function ever since. Before Eco, Jay spent four years leading marketing at Ava Labs, growing Avalanche into one of the most recognized L1 brands in crypto.

In this episode, we get into the tactical, unglamorous reality of marketing stablecoin infrastructure: how you build channels when you're a lean team, how you measure what's working without an analytics team, and how you tell a compelling story when your product is the layer underneath the application people get excited about.

We cover:

• What Jay walked into when he joined Eco (a consumer fintech app and a Venmo-style wallet, now pivoted to pure B2B infrastructure)
• The plate-spinning approach to building a marketing function channel by channel
• Why the stablecoin narrative tailwind is real, and why it's also a distraction if you're not careful
• Eco's positioning play for agentic payments before the market finds product market fit
• The AI-powered SEO workflow Jay built in Claude that generates, publishes, and ranks content on page one, without an engineering team

Chapters:

• 00:00 — Intro
• 00:15 — What Eco does and why programmable money matters
• 04:15 — Jay's path: Ogilvy, Aeroswap, Avalanche, Eco
• 09:54 — What he found under the hood at Eco in 2024
• 14:19 — Day-to-day: running marketing as a team of three
• 19:49 — How to build measurement without an analytics team
• 25:52 — Who Eco actually markets to
• 28:48 — The stablecoin narrative: tailwind and trap
• 35:10 — Positioning infrastructure inside a consumer narrative
• 40:03 — Agentic payments: marketing a category before it exists
• 43:47 — The AI workflows Jay would miss if they disappeared tomorrow
• 47:50 — Advice for marketers new to digital assets

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Follow Jay:
https://x.com/jayks
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayksofue/
https://eco.com

Follow Tyler:
https://x.com/tyler_fleischer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-fleischer

Follow The Marketing Desk:
https://x.com/themarketingdsk
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-desk-podcast

In the inaugural episode of The Marketing Desk, I sit down with Jordan Achilli, VP of Brand Design at Forge, a private securities marketplace recently acquired by Charles Schwab.

We talk about what it actually takes to build a brand that earns trust in digital assets.

Jordan has been building brands in this space for years, from Bloomberg, to The Tie, to Forge, and his take cuts through the noise: in an industry where everyone is yelling, the quietest brand in the room wins.

We get into the full process of building a brand from scratch, why rushing it is one of the most common and costly mistakes in crypto, and why trust — not awareness, not engagement — is the only brand metric that actually matters in financial services.

We also dig into the difference between building for institutional vs. retail audiences, whether founders should be the face of their company, and what the Forge-Schwab acquisition looks like from the inside of a brand team.

If you're a marketer, founder, or designer building in digital assets, this one's for you.

Topics covered:

• How to build a brand from scratch in crypto
• The biggest brand mistakes in digital assets
• How to build trust as a brand in financial services
• Institutional vs. retail brand building
• Personal brands vs. company brands
• What happens to your brand during an acquisition

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Follow Jordan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanachilli

Follow Tyler:
https://x.com/tyler_fleischer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-fleischer

Follow The Marketing Desk:
https://x.com/themarketingdsk
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-desk-podcast