Trust-Driven Web3 Marketing: Security Audits as a Marketing Tactic - Vanina Ivanova

hi everyone welcome back now we will have one more amazing speech by amazing vanina Ivanova from serotonin and she will talk about trust driven web3 marketing so please enjoy her speech and remember scan the QR code and if you have any questions please feel to write them down and we will have two two three minutes uh for your questions enjoy the speech [Applause] panina thank you everyone um thank you for being here a big thanks to the um the whole team organizing this event putting it together um I'm going to start with a little bit about myself sorry okay um about myself I have been doing um all right thank you I've been doing blockchain marketing for about eight and a half nine years now which feels like a lifetime um as you probably know working in crypto one year in crypto is equal to at least 10 years in real life um so it has been a very exciting Journey um I got encrypto by chance and uh stayed for the for the tech sorry not for the money uh I'm kidding and before that I used to work in traditional marketing so I have a background in Performance Marketing funnels all that good stuff I used to work in the fintech industry um where budgets were large and people were boring um then I joined this wonderful world of crypto and my life has never been the same uh right now I am a marketing director at serotonin if you're not familiar seratonin is one of the biggest marketing um agencies in the space we basically help bring emerging technology to Market and help uh web3 and crypto project succeed um and this is these are my credentials this gives me the confidence to stand here in front of you today and and talk about what I'm going to talk about um funny enough when I accepted the invitation to speak at this at the event um I was just finishing up a job with a blockchain security company and um this is why decided to talk about the intersection of um blockchain security and blockchain marketing and if you think that this is a little bit weird and these two don't quite match together just bear with me I promise I'm going to explain how they can interact the web 3 is not a safe place that I think we can all agree on there are so many different bugs and I've just put one little piece of Statistics here because the talk after me um is going to talk about web 3 statistics and web 3 Trends a lot more in a lot more detail so I hope you stay and listen to that um I just put this little um quote here from the PEC Shield semiannual 2020 2024 semiannual uh report that says that first of all we lost uh approximately uh a billion and a half uh dollars to crypto security exploits and like that's a lot of money even for people in crypto that's a lot of money uh and the other thing that I find uh even more con concerning is that there has been almost a 300% increase in hacks and security exploits in the space and why is that that's because it's an easy target for hackers it is there's first of all there's plenty of money to be captured second of all there's a very high level of complexity it's so complicated that even if even if you have been working in this space for a long long long time and you have the confidence that you understand the technology and what stands behind all of that we're doing that is consumer facing there's still a very high level of complexity and that makes it easy for people to miss things and for projects to become hackable especially when it comes to DIY um and the other thing is funnily enough and I find it mind-blowing but even people in crypto who have been rugged and wrecked multiple times still have very very low obsc or operational security like we would be posting pictures of our treasur and ledgers on Twitter going hey got this new baby or I don't know talking about where we keep our money and really practicing very very bad online hygiene when it comes to security we are proudly wearing those t-shirts that say that we're working in blockchain and I'm I'm guilty of the same don't get me wrong I'm not saying I'm better than anybody else I do the same and then I'm like oh wait does that make me an easy target that's tell my t-shirt tells people I can be hacked and rugged I probably shouldn't be doing that and yet the next conference comes up and I'm still wearing a crypto t-shirt um so you know we all do that and that's why hackers are like H what can we do here and then I'm going to take a little break for that and jump to the topic and that's topic of marketing and web three marketing it's noisy there is so much going on at any given time all you need to is open your Twitter and if you're on crypto Twitter you can easily get overwhelmed in less than 30 seconds just by looking at what's happening in the space and um again I've just put a silly little conversation that I had with Chad gbd but that's actually uh true statistics the attention span of the current consumer especially of gen ZZ and Millennial consumers who are the ones with the largest buying power is getting smaller and smaller and smaller what we are right now now is basically goldfish with crypto um that means that we as marketers we usually have seconds or fractions of a second to capture the the attention to cut through the noise and to tell our audiences wait I'm here and I've got something important to say listen to me and that's hard and when you look around if you kind of like look at new projects popping up whether it's a b bull market or a bar run it's all of the same it's airdrops it's Community Building quests we have seen that and we keep doing it because to a great extent it's a very young industry a very new industry and we don't really know what we're doing so we're trying things and if something sticks if something works we keep trying again and again and again and when we come to launching a new project or helping a new project succeed on the market we're like yeah we're going to do this because we tried it and it worked it's very seldom that we're like wait we need to like take a step back think out of the box and come up with something alternative and sometimes the answer is just in front of our eyes and we just miss it because we're kind of like focused on what we know on the tried and tested consumers are getting tired of our it's it's getting harder and harder to convey a real message and when people what people are are looking for is not just Economic Opportunity anymore people are beginning to care about authenticity again they want to see projects that are honest that are not over promising and underd delivering they want to see the benefits of using crypto in their everyday life and the benefits of being onchain because you know better than I do that onchain ux is still insufferable to a great extent so that's what people use they want good user experience they want Pleasant user Journeys that are easy dealing with crypto should be as easy as opening a revolute account or ven Mo if you're in the state or whatever or a Tik Tok account if you wish and we're not there yet so marketers need need to work extra hard to convey the messaging to convey the benefits and the values that people are going to have by using a particular web 3 product or service especially now when we're mostly pouring money in in to infrastructure and not really focusing on consumer facing things and here is where security audits come in the majority of projects nowadays are audited why it's an industry standard but it's not just an industry standard it's a need if you don't want to get wrecked make sure that your code is audited it doesn't need to be one of the big expensive companies could be a small boutique firm you you can crowdsource it you can talk to the team and have like an intern internal company hackathon but you need to have multiple sets of eyes on your code because as I mentioned earlier it's complex it's complicated it's easy to miss security vulnerabilities and back doors and this is why companies prefer to get audited sometimes by an official company sometimes by a bug Bounty but having an audit as a company has informational value when it comes to broadcasting your entire company message to the world it tells your potential users and your supporters and your community and builders that you are committed to that security you're committed to engaging with that broader Community especially security Community especially when we're talking about bug bounties and Comm Community Driven um auditing it helps amplify the reach because sometimes a smaller company an unknown brand that doesn't really have strong marketing has the financial ability to hire and engage a bigger auditing firm and then piggy back off of their reputation so they can do co-marketing together and this way they can reach a wider audience and make their brand known to more people and to more eyes and the next few slides are kind of like a few things that I have found useful in my career as a web free marketer and also as a marketer for a web 3 security company and of things that different projects do and things that can be done with security audits this here is a screenshot of morol laabs um they have a designated page for security on their website that lists all of their audits all of the companies that have audited them and you'll see on the screen that there are some bigger companies like spare bid and trail of bids chain security open sein Sora and there are smaller companies that you may not have necessarily heard of but having this array of um uh of Auditors on your website on your homepage nonetheless is what testimonials user testimonials do for e-commerce in web too it gives social proof it tells people hey we're not just well funded and funded enough to be able to afford all of those Audits and all of those companies it says we're very very dedicated to the companies and these are the companies that have audited audited us you have heard of those companies you have seen those logos this brings the stump of security you know that you can be safe with us because you we have been audited so much and when it comes to a def5 protocol well security is important trust me you can also leverage as I mentioned earlier you can leverage the brother Community immun ify uh code Arena Sherlock platforms for Community Audits and bu bounties they have huge audiences because right now blockchain security and especially solo auditing are on the rise people are getting into that game and that's a really good way to first of all put your project on the map put your brand on the map and also get multiple multiple multiple eyes on your project but it's not just that if you play your cards right and again the example here from layer zero is an extreme example but they not just put up the world's largest Bounty before that I think the maker d was the biggest bug Bounty that there was on the market and then layer zero was like hold my beard um and they went be but that's a really good way to bankk on PR opportunities because you have this thing you have the biggest the largest the newest whatever you know if it's the first if it's the biggest if it's the largest you should do PR on it you should monetize on this communication opportunity and that's what lar zero did they made made the news I didn't really put screenshots from the media coverage but they did get substantial media coverage and other projects have gotten substantial media coverage as well just because they did something extraordinary something out of what we're used to seeing in this particular case the world's largest bu Bounty then again I already mentioned that but sometimes you're a smaller company that is uh audited by a big security firm sometimes you're a small security firm that is auditing a big project and that's an opportunity for cross marketing for piggybacking of each other's reputation for cross-pollinating each other's communities for doing Co marketing together and increasing your reach and getting to more eyes and getting to more people that could potentially be be your users that's um again another another example of similar activities you know you can see that crypto kites did a huge bug Bounty uh the jitto foundation did a great B Bounty um the bug Bounty platforms have have a a join interest with the projects that they're working with to get as many researchers on them as possible and they use marketing well because let's be honest you know companies like well projects like crypto kitties and um you know gito they do have marketing budgets and they're substantial marketing budgets um and at the same time platforms like cod Arina and hacken proof they have mutual interest in putting those big companies that they work with to the front so this way you can Engage The the security Community as well the broader security researchers community and if you've been in the industry as long as I have been you know that it's a very small group of people that jumps from one one project to another and basically you know we're far away from Mass adoption as it pains me to say but that's the reality of the situation and it's the same group of Crypton native people that go from one project to another to another so all of this brand awareness helps projects move forward um storytelling as you can see from the screenshot and again that's that's just one one of sadly very few examples um but there's a story here when you catch a big security vulnerability a critical security vulnerability especially if it's called before being exploited that's a really great storytelling opportunity hey this is what happened this is how we caught it this is what could have happened if we didn't catch it and I know that it's hard especially for CEOs and Founders and CTO of big project to go out and admit hey we had this huge security vulnerability in our code and our security firm caught it and we're not proud with the code that we put out but that's an opportunity and I think that more product projects should do that they should go out and tell the story of hey this is a disaster that could have happened but it didn't happen and this is how it happened because let's be hon honest there's not a lot of Storytelling going around and that's a major part of marketing we are marketing to people and people are emotional beings we need to relate we need to connect at the end of the day we need to find the story a story that we can identify with and when you find that good story you need to tell it I looked a lot but I couldn't find a project that put out a story like that hey we got this bug and this is what could have happened a lot of security companies do that and they do it well but I think that we should see more consumer facing projects do too so this is to yeah this is this is my talk I'm not going to go into more details but I'm going to be here until the rest of the day so if you want to talk more about marketing or security or anything other than that just find me I'll be around um use your security audits as social proof use them to make the news use them to piggyback off uh projects reputations and reach and communities and new storytelling establish that brand narrative that we're missing in the space if you want to connect with me and talk to me on Twitter you can do that you can also do it on telegram or farter um I'm not great with replying to messages but I will eventually reply might be day in a day might being three you'll hear back from me and I would love to hear from you thank you thank you so much this was amazing and very inspiring especially for me as someone who also comes from the web3 marketing do you have any questions for vanina no questions it means that it was amazing and regarding not replying to messages that's a common thing in the w three space we just ghost each other for some time and that's perfectly fine no worries about that okay guys if you don't have any more questions for vanina vanina thank you so much and now I would like