Amanda Cassatt: The Storytelling Playbook Behind Ethereum, Web3 & AI

Amanda Cassatt served as CMO of ConsenSys and what she describes as the de facto CMO of Ethereum in its early days, a role she invented and pitched to Joe Lubin. She came from a media and publishing background at Condé Nast, The New Yorker, and HuffPost with no computer science training, and attended the first Ethereum meetup in New York as a founder.

She identified early that Ethereum's messaging was too technical and too jargon-filled to survive the New York media environment. In 2015 and 2016, expressing ambitions to make Ethereum a household name comparable to Starbucks or the MLB was treated within the community as a sign of being mentally ill, and even people doing marketing roles at ConsenSys branded themselves as researchers because that was the more desirable identity inside the organization. She describes the broader crypto ecosystem today as having swung to the opposite extreme, too commercial relative to that early academic culture. To avoid introducing errors when compressing technical content for mass audiences, she took MIT OpenCourseWare courses in computer science, and defines good marketing as market making, where misrepresenting the product causes the entire function to fail.

The early Ethereum go-to-market strategy focused entirely on attracting developers. ConsenSys packaged products as startups and sent them on tour through global meetup groups, rebranded the marketing team to Catalyst to distinguish it from conventional advertising, and organized a large Discord for meetup organizers so the company did not have to execute every local event itself. The Facebook and Google advertising bans on Ethereum and Bitcoin were a forcing function that prevented crypto from relying on the same systems it was philosophically rebelling against and pushed the ecosystem to invent alternative growth strategies from first principles. She contrasts this with the current environment where founders can run large scaled paid campaigns, and argues that once a founder can confirm positive ROI on CAC they should run them at scale.

She argues that tokenizing an asset does not create value out of thin air and only places existing value somewhere it can be traded with other on-chain assets. Every attempted intersection between crypto and an industry fails to the degree participants believe they are creating value by simply wrapping something on chain. She views NFTs as having paved the way for broader institutional comfort with bringing real-world assets on chain, but notes that the current RWA narrative being pushed by institutions sometimes groups in data and other digital assets that are not technically real-world assets.

The metaverse hype of 2020 was driven in her view by COVID-era bias toward believing screen-mediated life would persist. She notes that Meta spent billions on a cartoon metaverse because leadership genuinely believed that was where people would spend time, making it a larger bet than anything in crypto. She acknowledges a steelman case exists because actors who benefited economically from COVID could have had incentives to prolong conditions favoring screen-mediated life.

On AI, she argues that if someone could not create economic value doing a certain thing before AI, AI will not help them create economic value doing it. The total amount of content on the internet has multiplied since the advent of LLMs in 2023, making judgment, discernment, and curation more important rather than less. She uses photography as a metaphor, noting that access to the same tool does not produce equal economic outcomes and that specialized skill and judgment still determine results. She also cautions that even when using AI for work, users should question whether they are genuinely more productive or simply in a dopamine loop that feels productive.

She founded Serotonin in 2019 because no external agency understood the crypto space deeply enough for her to feel comfortable working with as CMO at ConsenSys. She warns that a dangerous outcome in crypto is raising hundreds of millions of dollars and achieving a large market cap while having no actual users, then being forced to start from square one while projecting the opposite image. She describes old airdrop structures as basically the worst ROI marketing campaign in the world and has been working to bring back models where people pay something to receive something, which she argues better composes the holder base. She argues founders should not treat marketing and product as separate functions early on because they form the same feedback loop, and that in a crowded market the story of why a founder built something a particular way can be the differentiator, with the introspective core of that story needing to come from the founder rather than an outside agency.