The world of cryptocurrency has been through ups, downs, booms and busts in a staggeringly short period of time.
Just two years ago, the Super Bowl was awash with ads for various players in the space: Crypto.com, Coinbase and FTX. Crypto.com even enlisted Lebron James to star in its spot.
In the years since, the sector has perhaps gone off the boil with regard to public interest. It has also been beset by a series of high-profile scandals.
For instance, Sam Bankman-Fried founded the FTX crypto exchange in 2019 but by March 2024, he had been sentenced to up to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion ($AU16.54 billion). Former Coinbase product manager, Nikhil Wahi, was sentenced with insider trading in January last year.
Operating in the space as a marketer would likely prove challenging, even for the most hardy. But Rachel Conlan, global CMO of Binance told B&T in an exclusive interview that crypto’s reputation as a wild west was firmly behind it.
“We’re the healthiest we’ve been since I started in terms of our positioning as an industry and a brand,” she said.
“The industry itself has suffered more recently from low trust. Our trust quotient as an industry is low and Binance being the largest amongst what I would describe as the general population, we’ve definitely had the biggest challenges from that perspective. But on the flipside of that since the beginning of 2024, we’ve added nearly 60 million users.”
Binance, for the unfamiliar, is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. It was founded in 2017 in China but quickly moved its operations to Japan and then Malta. It currently has no fixed headquarters. Conlan herself is based in the UAE, though originally from Ireland. Binance currently has 240 million account holders—or nearly half of everyone involved in crypto currencies.
It is not without its share of controversy, either. While it operates in some 180 countries around the world, including Australia, Binance had been banned from operating in the US until it opened Binance.US, a separate entity removed from the rest of the company. In April, Binance’s former CEO Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to violating US money laundering laws.
In April last year, meanwhile, US Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Roger Marshall sent a bipartisan letter to Binance and its US affiliate Binance.US, asking for answers about the company’s finances, risk management, and regulatory compliance as it faced charges of sanctions evasion, money laundering and unlicensed money transmission. In response, Binance’s former chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann said that it had closed the regulatory gaps that had previously existed within the business and that Binance.US and Binance were separate entities. Hillman left the company in September last year.
“Historically there has been low trust. But if you think about it, we’re seven years old as a business and the sector is less than 20 years old. For what we’ve achieved, our trust is actually very high, comparative to other industries,” said Conlan.
“I was talking to Anthony Scaramucci about this recently, he was talking about the journey that the financial sector went on in New York when it was first built and in the 1920s, Wall Street used to be called ‘gangsters’. It took them 100 years to build the structures they have. At the start of the internet, no one trusted it. No one thought this was going to be the future and in space of 40 years, I certainly know that I can’t live without it.”
For Conlan, Binance is “on the path to building stronger trust”. But “misconceptions” and “miseducation” are standing in the way. Part of the reason that Conlan made the trip down to Sydney was to help educate prospective and current users at the Australian Crypto Convention in Sydney, which saw more than 7,300 people descend on the ICC on 23-24 November. For a marketer in the crypto space, this offline connection is just as valuable to Conlan as the online interactions.
“You can only debunk myths and misconceptions if you’re educating. Just by us saying it, it isn’t necessarily going to change perceptions. We have use a volume of different types of users on our platform. It’s everyone from super-sophisticated traders to casual day traders to people that have played around in the traditional stock market and have now decided because of the spotlight that thye want to enter in and plat with digital assets. You’ve got some that use it as part of a diversification strategy,” she explained.
“One of the big initiatives we launched three years ago was the Binance Academy, it’s like a masterclass. It had more than 1,000 classes, tutorials, different types of seminars and its really catered to where you are.”
Locally, Conlan said that Binance is currently focused on its “alliance” with local academic institutions and associations, “so that we’re educating from the bottom-up”.
Globally, however, Binance is making the most of sweeping brand partnerships to get its names out. Currently, the exchange works with Portuguese football legend Cristiano Ronaldo and the Alpine F1 team. Conlan said that these were designed to create awareness of the platform and use them as an education platform.
It also runs social-first content to both engage and reward its legions of users.
The sector is also facing sweeping regulatory changes, something Conlan said Binance said is in favour of. While this operating environment may put some marketers on edge, Conlan said her career has given her a firm grounding at the time of shifting sands.
“Anyone who has worked in advertising agencies and comms in the noughties is perfectly set!” she said.
Conland worked in a variety of global roles for Havas, rising to become the global chief marketing ops officer of the French holdco. She also spent four years leading global sports and brand partnerships for Creative Artists Agency before making the switch to the world of Web3 and crypto.
“[In agency land] You’re never just on one client, unless you’re very lucky. So you understand how to manage an extraordinary number of projects and be able to spin plates and strategically pivot as you need. It sets people up so well to work in the tech space because you really understand how to get to the root of problems fast and understand how to define the value proposition and what needs to be done,” Conlan explained.
Conlan’s grounding in adland, she explained, also sets her up well to deal with changing regulation.
“I have experience from Havas working in three big, regulated industries: traditional finance, liquor and pharma. We’re [Binance] licensed and registered in 20 markets and operates on a basis that the future is regulated. We look at our marketing and overall experiences whether they be offline or online, we comply with the financial promotion regulations of the local market. In markets where there is not a licensed framework, we’re really careful about that,” she said.
“We think that’s really important in order to be able to build that safe and secure environment for users because this industry can be very attractive to people at the moment who think that they’re going to become crypto millionaires. It’s really critical for us, as the largest, that we are operating in a regulated fashion.”
The coming years for cryptocurrencies—and Binance by extension—seem set to be make or break. Incoming US President Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and both are very long on the crypto space. The rest of the world, might not be quite so bullish, however.
