Go-to-Market: Growth, Distribution & Scaling Onchain Products | Boston Blockchain Week 2026

All right, welcome everybody. Uh, my name is Gayen Moore. I lead marketing at Stok Labs. We're an Oracle provider mostly for Perpetual Futures Exchanges. And I'll let the other two we got a slightly smaller panel than we were originally build here, but uh I think we'll we'll do a good job.

Uh maybe perhaps even better. Uh let me let the other panelists introduce themselves.

Awesome. Thanks. Um great to be here. My name is Christian Crowley. I'm a partner on the go to market team at A16Z crypto.

I spend most of my time working with our portfolio companies and their founders navigate challenges around go to market. I've been building in crypto for about 10 years. Um founded two companies in the space, DeFi and AI. Um looking forward to this conversation. Thanks guys.

Uh my name is Ibu Carell. I'm the founder of Lolo which is the official networking and agenda platform for Boston blockchain week. Before I was working on Lolo, I was the CMO of a DeFi protocol called Folks Finance, which did crosschain lending and I've been part of the crypto ecosystem for about six years.

Cool. So, um, go to market's a significant challenge in crypto. I think has been for a long time. Everybody talks about it. uh it's um you know the sort of product market fit or the mass appeal the elusive um you know what does it what what is this industry blockchain dude to cross that gap uh I think um Christian I was looking at a blog post that you wrote recently I think the title is tradi doesn't want defi so talk about that for me a little bit would you just broadly speaking I think we are it does feel like we're at a bit of a eb in terms of uh defi VC don't want DeFi.

Uh, and neither does the sort of the more institutional direction that things are going. So, what does what does the DeFi or the onchain finance world need to do broadly in order to achieve some kind of sense of product market fit? Is it happening uh or um or or do we have sort of another uh chapter yet to write before we get there?

I think it's I mean the long and short of it is it's happening to a certain degree just not in the form that we initially had thought. I think it's largely based on how effective the core team at a given project can execute and adapt what they're offering. And what I mean by that is, you know, the term DeFi emerged back when you had permissionless protocols offering products that could be accessible by anyone and there wasn't really a need or a use case to incorporate institutional access flows in any capacity on the um on the supply side. So over time, what we've been seeing over the past 18 months is this gradual shift from companies that cut their teeth in public blockchain space offering protocols to individual users. um shifting their focus towards institutions and reorienting how their products are viewed by the market from permissionless protocols to infrastructure that can adapt and interact with existing offerings that asset managers or banks currently have in market.

So we when we write TRDFI doesn't want DeFi, it really means they don't want the original vision of DeFi. They're not interested in permissionless systems. They're not interested in um open access necessarily through the lens of what we saw in DeFi summer. That said, underlying infrastructure that was born out of these protocols is very interesting. You know, faster settlement, easier access for certain segments of the population or certain businesses.

There are components of DeFi that Treadfi is interested in. I think it looks more and more like certain versions of the technology than any sort of manifestation that we saw um you know during DeFi summer for example and there's a lot more to unpack there but that's kind of at a high level what what we've seen on the go to market side over the past 18 months go ahead I mean because I think you are building a product here that is not right you do not have a token for lolo uh does that I assume you talk to folks who do

do you feel jealous of them or or are you super glad not to have that baggage?

Uh well, Lol Lolo is Lolo is not a crypto product though my background is in crypto. So that's where I can build initial like an initial network. But I do have a lot of experience with this subject because of my previous job which was with a lending market. And I think Christian's completely correct about what he was saying which is and I can speak from my own experience. Um, okay.

Well, I think people who were part of DeFi uh back in 2020 and when these protocols originally came out like a unis swap, compound, um sushi swap and you know some of the other OG protocols that are really big now, they expected okay well uh a has now let's just a couple years ago 1 billion TVL and eventually JP Morgan Chase will come in and deposit a trillion dollars and then my bags will go to infinity because the there will be a headline line about it. But really what ended up happening is that JP Morgan just contacted a was like actually we want this but private permissioned with our with our own rules negligible to zero fees and not exposed to everybody else's volatility. And so essentially the concept of DeFi decentralized finance I wouldn't even consider it that's not actually what institutions want. They want permission no not even permissionless finance they want uh blockchain finance. They just want to have more fluid rails, but they still control it because that's the one thing per uh institutions are just not willing to give up is they're not going to go and concede their market share or their control to random anonymized individuals on the internet.

So I think that's where a lot of DeFi builders hearts got broken. But that's where we're also seeing insane adoption right now with uh permissioned vaults and lending and like hypersp specific blockchains like Tempo uh which like are just owned by Stripe and it's not permissionless at all. It's just straight straight up like that's just their technology, right? So blockchain is really going in the direction I think of like and DeFi it's like it's just a foundational layer but you can still have the open protocols but the big big institutions with big money they don't want to use those they just want to use the same thing but private version.

Is that is that heartbreaking Christian? I mean what is that is that a depressing reality? Are we do we just build a better database for uh for for Wall Street?

I think the end state is still being determined. Um I think for many it's not the future that many set out to kind of bring into reality. Um that said you know I want to mention one piece. So the technology and how compelling it is in certain ways is is part of it but you you look at how enterprises institutions banks they make their buying decisions you know very slowly and in a very deliberate way. And it took time you know there's a couple shifts.

There's a shift from permissionless technology to modular infrastructure that can be plugged into institutional flows. Then there's this mindset that we can launch a public protocol, fund it in a variety of ways, but launch it and give access to anyone tomorrow and then it's it's live to it takes institutions over a year to make a decision based on a vetted vendor list and then when they make that decision, they're going to trial it with a proof of concept and risk and compliance are the top three or five considerations. So that that shift, you know, the buying mentality shift is a big reckoning as well when it comes to how we're going to get this stuff adopted.

That by itself is a tremendously difficult adaptation for a go to market team, right? To go from a a sales cycle that might have been 30 days to one that's 18 months. But but what I mean what else what are the other challenges that come up and maybe more importantly who who are some examples of teams that you've seen you know make that pivot from selling maybe they're selling infrastructure to a cryptonative team on B2B side or maybe selling to retail now they're trying to sell to institutional buyers who's who's making that transition effective

yeah I mean I I share a few I I'll just mention you know it also comes down to this idea that you know how much do the banks or asset managers want this new technology I think like the benefits have to so profoundly outweigh any sort of risk or cost for them to consider it. We've had the same rails whether it's payments or interbank transfers in place for decades and the technology has existed to improve those rails 10x for a long period of time and we haven't done it because it threatens established business models. It threatens a range of things that you know the benefits of which don't outweigh those risks. Um but certain teams in our portfolio Moro for example has done a fantastic job initially launching as a set of vaults on top of a to now both a robust and and growing public defi protocol but also being able to sell their vault infrastructure to Apollo. UniS swap has been working very closely with um Black Rockck on the Biddle um fund access.

So there there's a range of things and you know Canton digital asset they've spent years in market refining how they bring components of this technology to institutions in a way that's accessible and speaks to a use case versus leading with the technology saying this technology is 10x better than what you have in place regardless of whether it addresses your use case or improves your existing systems. Certain teams have gotten better at aligning their value prop to what's currently in place. Here's a marginal improvement. Here's a path to implement it without running a file your compliance team or your risk team.

People, what do you think when it comes to opportunities that are still available? You're running a consumer app. Is there still a consumer opportunity uh in onchain finance or onchain anything, gaming, any kind of area where someone might be building? Is there a uh I think you might have se you you might look at at the growth of DeFi and say you know this is a population or a kind of investor uh who is not being served right by the existing financial infrastructure. Maybe it's a retail in uh investor in the US who wants to a lot more leverage and risk than a sort of a traditional schwab type of product can provide.

Maybe it's um someone in a market where they don't have ready access to US securities or dollars. uh what are the opportunities that might still exist for an entrepreneur building on chain today on the retail side uh at this time when it feels like everybody's attention is on the uh the more institutional side of the market. So so I'll um there definitely is still opportunity and I'll bring up two examples that are currently you know doing amazing in that category. One is FOMO which is a mobile first trading platform um which has designed to be basically a CDI product centralized DeFi. Uh they use DeFi in the back end but they wrapped it in a centralized app that pretty much they control and you can you can take your keys but when you start off it's they've abstracted all the all the crosschain stuff.

So it's as simple as you can buy any coin that they've listed. It's pretty much any memecoin. um on any chain there's you don't notice the fees, you don't notice the speed like everything happens instantly and this is the experience that a lot of wallet pro uh wallet products missed and they

very different from the early DeFi currency.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

And those are like a some people think FOMO is like a representative of abandoning the the uh core tenants of DeFi, but it doesn't matter because they're they're growing at a crazy rate.

What are they doing right though? What is it that FOMO provides that that is I I've actually been wondering this myself and I haven't quite figured it out like what is the kind of killer feature of FOMO in your view. What have they done right in their marketing GTM?

Yeah.

The the type of user that they're going after. What is what is the key to their success? Because I think in some cases that that that's quite apparent. Like I look at Hyperlid I'm like okay

I understand what they're doing right. Sometimes when I look at FOMO I'm like I'm not I'm not quite sure what what makes them so successful.

Yeah. I think like I'm a user and I I originally found like I got sent the app like over a year ago when there was almost no users and I only started using it recently because they did have a network effect of like a social element where you can like social trading.

Yeah, you can like see who the biggest holders are. You might already know those people from Twitter and it gives you like a extra thing. The UI is good and

has been like the thing since whenever I don't know social trading, right? That feels very 90s.

Yeah. Uh, I'll also say like their strategy, they're doing it right.

They are their strategy like I was able to get this like I I DM'd the founder and I was like, okay, when they launched on Robin Hood and Robin Hood's currently the most hype ecosystem with a lot of volume right now.

Another great example of like retail financial innovation success perhaps not on chain or maybe Robin Hood chain, right? You have these examples. Yeah, I think I think the thing about building an onchain DeFi product is that onchain volumes and trading activity is extremely fluid and one day it'll be on Salana and then Robin Hood drops and 5 days later the Robin Hood's volume is going crazy. And I think like just to wrap up my point um is FOMO is like we just created a product that's flexible enough that we can instantly add wherever the liquidity is and we can instantly get all those users instead of being cumbersome and slow and not able to like add in the new chain or being tied up in a deal with a blockchain exclusively which I think is a massive losing formula for any product.

Yeah. I mean, one thing I'll add, not to get too specific on FOMO, um, but you know, the experience of this space to to date, I mean, over the years has been mercenary fluctuations in capital based on incentives, um, right,

chain to chain. And I think,

right,

you know, you combine that with up until recently, there was this purity test that protocols had to pass that their projects were decentralized enough, they subscribed to a certain ethos. I think what we're seeing now is a coalescence around a few different kinds of use cases. um prediction markets, perexes, maybe options in the future, but but these teams that are really finding success in product market fit are only putting certain portions of those products on chain and they're leaning into that and and they're and they're really only and I think it's analogous to kind of institutional adoption in the sense that they're maintaining things offchain that work better being offchain. Yeah. and they're incorporating certain aspects on chain that allow for fee compression, faster settlement, benefit XYZ.

Uh when in the past you'd have tradeoffs by putting everything on chain and the user will not tolerate those,

right?

And it took it took us a while to realize that. I think in the end you still can deliver some of the promises of a more decentralized system uh access transparency you can deliver those things without having the whole thing end to end uh running on a completely decentralized system and we've seen that at STOR you know the the oracles that existed before Stor came along were not fast enough for a perex uh and being able to then provide something that had hybrid components onchain and off uh we still have cryptographic signatures for example but those run off chain, right? So, you can do things that that increase the speed, improve the user experience, but actually I want to I want to click into something that you talked about there for a second, Christian, which is like the the sort of the incentive based go to market and it's still right it's I think it's still with us the sort of you're paying your users as it were uh subsidizing growth. To what extent is that still a legitimate tactic? to what extent have we moved on beyond that and it's you know about time and do we still have a sort of a I think you know you might see some teams feeling like frustrated that you know they have to compete with people who have deeper pockets who can basically buy users when you know maybe the product is not as good.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting. I think it speaks to the this broader idea of you had years of projects launching tokens that essentially provided a means for that project to exist over months or years without the need to actually raise capital or justify your product finding a set of users that kind of would be sticky or persist. I think now that we've kind of gone through a few cycles, a lot of that has been contracted. Um, I'm seeing we're seeing on the go to market team a much more profound focus on anchor anchoring the product in use cases that have a stickier user base who's a user whose primary goal in using your product isn't to make money.

is to, you know, process a payment more quickly or spin up a bank account more efficiently or have access to a certain range of assets more um in a more convenient way. There's benefits, I think, up until this past cycle that weren't clear because too many projects masked what their product was doing in um you know, in the tokconomics or

So, was that all just kind of a bad dream? like the utility token, was that like a regulatory shoehorn that that we did that was ridiculous and maybe we shouldn't have done or or you know is there still kind of a path for the tokenized like token issuance as a you know incentive driver uh growth driver like should should an entrepreneur like Ibu be thinking about somebody who's building a social app be thinking about maybe what could a token do for me in this context or is that really something that they should just forget about and pretend it never happened. I would love some free advice from an a A16C partner.

I'm not going to go near that. I think like I mean, [laughter]

oh, come on.

My point really is just around, you know, bringing your product to market and enticing a user to use your product. You know, it should be able to stand alone, stand on its own outside of

the promise of, you know, a currency or an asset. And I think a lot of projects and due the nature of the core technology they kind of spun up they part and parcel their offering their use case their benefit was tied to somehow consuming the token using the token. I mean this is all this is just history this is nothing looking forward but you know I'm encouraged to see teams looking at use cases that incorporate products that are partially on chain and they're thoughtful about what are the benefits of putting something on chain. Does it make sense to have voting or to have other aspects on a blockchain network? Um, you know, but but the technology is improving and we're at a place now that we weren't, you know, even two years ago.

You know, layer zero announced there's zero layer 1 blockchain and you know, now from a trans transactions per second, storage, privacy, this technology allows you to run applications on a on a blockchain network that you typically run in the cloud at years past. you wouldn't be able to do this on, you know, ETH L1 of of of year years ago. So, I do think, you know, as teams are smartening up about use cases and and the stickiness of their of their products and market, the technology is catching up and it's going to be a question of how do you value battle tested architecture against the promise of new um performance and I think it's going to be an interesting kind of next next wave we'll see in in the coming months.

Can I jump in as well? I think that was a really good point. Um, I I agree with Christian that I think the best and most successful builders uh in crypto right now understand that crypto's reached a point of maturity where you don't need to just hamfistedly force the entire product to be crypto crypto top to bottom. You just pick and choose what aspects of crypto/blockchain technology actually benefit the product. And then the other thing is about the emissions and the incentives that you're talking about.

I think I think it still exists but the industry and especially successful protocols I'll give three examples pump fund hyperlquid and ponds which is a new launchpad on uh Robin Hood doing very well they have all basically they still do the same thing but they've twisted it by instead of directly distributing token they use their fees to buy back their token and burn sometimes but basically they're creating those tokens are not actually utility I don't consider them utility. The utility is that it goes up. The utility is that the fees buy back and burn the token. So the utility is that it pumps more and it has a stronger price performance. So the utility for the users is to make money off of the token.

Whereas before it used to be let's just directly distribute them huge APYs or rewards. Now it's we're kind of just going to obscure it and buy back token and pass more of the risk on to the end user.

Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned those three. I mean two out of those three also have a like it's not just uh hybrid onchain offchain but also the product the end user uh the the sort of type of products they're they're offering are a hybrid of sort of cryptonative and uh more trady right like a hyperlquid for example a ton of their growth has been in RWA per right uh Robin Hood obvious example coming in from the other direction right now sort of and so this convergence of okay prediction markets per uh RWAS tokenized stocks uh you know any of the above of all kind of comes together. It kind of creates a a sort of an potential inflection point, not just from the cryptonative side, but from the traditional side as well. People have got to be thinking about that.

Can I can I drop one point just before you jump in, Christian? I think like you mentioned something that's really interesting and I noticed a ton of apps doing it now. I noticed it since about a year ago. I think for financial orde uh or like apps that have anything to do with finance or trading, they all just are inevitably heading in the same direction, which is a super app that has everything. stocks, meme or stock memecoin trading, per prediction markets, options, even like Pokemon card trading, NFTs, like that like whatever they can add volume on that's hot, they'll add.

And that's what I was talking about earlier, like if you have a modular enough platform that you can just like plug and play with a whatever is hot at the time because crypto moves so fast, right?

Then you'll be constantly making money. But if you're too slow to integrate the new thing, you're going to get left behind immediately.

I agree. I would just add um you look at the projects that are running towards that everything app they're all starting from different places.

So Robin Hood is starting from a different place than Coinbase even some of the banks um Revolute Hyperlid they all have an initial core user base that was drawn to their offering for very different reasons. My I always I always think about you know which core user base is sticky enough to stay with that platform when you have capability or feature parity across what each of these teams are offering. You know, I think you can make an argument for each of them that they have a sticky user base. But at a certain point, if everyone has prediction markets, perplexes, spot trading, lending, and borrow like all these different components, how do you ensure that your user stays on your platform? And I think, you know, that's an open question.

Um, and I think different teams have taken different approaches to that. Yeah, I mean to to add on to that, some teams have taken the social first approach to create like a network effect such as FOMO where they believe that even if they have the same features as every other app, they have the lock in of people like posting about their plays that will keep them there. And then some others maybe are taking like uh I don't know, you could say like Robin Hood, they have the they do have some social features, but I think their biggest selling point is like we're Robin Hood. We're a big company and we're kind of like we have more established credibility in the bank than a FOMO.

They also I think achieved an understanding of their user that's quite remarkable that maybe maybe they didn't have in the beginning. Uh Robin Hood that is. I'll just add I mean it's interesting because up until pretty recently most crypto users were you know to a degree cryptonative and I think Robin Hood

is really interesting because they're coming from this place where a large percentage of their user base is not crypto first they're they went to Robin Hood as an alternative to their brokerage or their bank and they and they kind of view crypto as potentially another asset and then you supercharge that with what's happening with tokenized stocks and all this kind of stuff. It makes it even more interesting to kind of see what the onboarding process is. Instead of going from zero to we'll trade crypto, it's going from here, I've been trading stocks on your platform in a very compelling way. This is a new asset class. Maybe I can crock what that means a little more easily.

And maybe it doesn't matter because maybe I can trade the same stocks but with leverage as a per or something like that, right? I I would almost I mean I would look at that and say advantage Robin Hood over Coinbase for example. you know, coming from that direction generally, not to pick on those two, but coming from that direction generally, I'd say your advantage is coming from the kind of Trafy incumbent rather than trying to be the cryptonative company that's uh got the, you know, coming into a broader world.

Yeah. I mean, I would just add I mean, I don't know if I agree with that. I would add that, you know, time in market matters. Coinbase has been in market for for quite some time and they have an institutional arm that Robin Hood hasn't really broached. And I think there's you're going to see a series of concentric circles that that are these companies and the overlaps will manifest themselves as these everything apps.

But that's not all they do. And I think you know the teams that can kind of incorporate more of what their core offering is into some of the more visible components of their offerings will be will be successful, can build longerterm businesses.

Find that feature that is the sticky feature as you were saying, right? That thing that people are staying with them for.

Yeah. Ibu, I'm curious about your learnings. We've got just a couple minutes left here. Um, but I'm curious about your learnings from growing a non-crypto app. What What became obvious to you once you started building in an outside of uh of the of the crypto bubble?

So, so it's interesting because the original idea for Lolo was essentially snap maps for NFTTS. It was like, let's take any every NFT community, plug them into a map, now you have thousands of communities that would link up, right? the and then you could extrapolate that to also be for memecoins and tokens and etc. So because I I believe that like holders of tokens are essentially just communities united by a single data point. So like a Bitcoin holder is more likely to vibe with another Bitcoin holder simply because they both hold Bitcoin.

So they can talk about something. They already have something to talk about. But when you go to an NFT that connection becomes like a million times more intense because they're like really dedicated. However, that wasn't that might still have potential and there is still the option in in Lo to link a wallet from Salana or EVM and like have that work. But when when I first started actually building the product, that idea was from years ago, but when I first started building it this year and I first came at it from that angle, it just wasn't getting the adoption because there just was a perception problem of look NFT plus map, no matter what I did to preserve privacy, people just weren't into that concept.

And the it was an inverse thing because the more valuable the NFT is, the more popular the community is and the more people want to be part of it,

the less they want anybody to know where they are.

Yeah, exactly. So, it's like it wasn't working, but maybe there's potential for it. Um, but that it was an interesting thing because I started as a cryptoocial product uh or in the original vision and then I understood like actually the NFT is representative of a community. It's more about communities than

Yeah.

than just crypto. Like crypto has communities and everything has communities. So it's more about building. I'm trying to build that framework that's modular enough like I was talking about before.

So with that in mind for the other early stage builders here and this is Boston so we have to talk about early stage. What should they stop thinking about right now? What what do they what is what does somebody need to stop thinking about in order to succeed and go to market right now? I so I would orient it around a specific problem you can identify and instead of thinking about it through the lens of this is what the technology can do and then go search for issues that you can address. I would try to find a specific challenge that you want to be the solution for and then kind of build out your your go to market around that.

Right? Like now you know past five years I was going to crypto conferences. Every single time I go I'm like I don't know who's here. what like why don't I know who's here? I'm posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, who's going to be in Boston, no one replies.

I was like there should just be a thing where everyone just pings that they're in town for the conference and then I know. So that's like what I'm trying to do right now and you know building it up on a small scale um here with Boston Blockchain Week and hopefully we can go bigger soon.

Nice. Great. Well, thanks Christian. Yeah, real pleasure. Thanks everybody.