Privacy Won't Market Itself

Transcript

Hello everybody. Welcome to this talk. I want to start by saying greetings loved ones. I think it's just a sweet thing to say. So greetings loved ones. We have found ourselves in the past where it is super clear that the adoption that we thought were going to come from retail is coming from institutions. That's what this whole week is about. If you've had already some conversations around it. It is giving us the the state where we had this dream about this decentralized economy and interestingly that dream might become true by the most centralized players adopting what we've built.

I don't know if that's ironic or poetic, but it seems like that's the case. I think it's a thrilling time for us to build. So this talk is about how to market it better for this adoption. For the this adoption to happen, we must make privacy and blockchain privacy specifically feel like it is not just for gambling anymore and for not just online nefarious doings.

For this, I think not only us marketers, but the whole industry itself has to serious up a little bit and I'm trying to help today with this talk to make that happen. To make this practically feasible, we also have to work through the limitations of the technology that we have and at the same time learn how to market it, how to position it and how to sell it to the decision makers and how to get there faster. The this talk is about our findings so far of what challenges there are in this process and to know more about it the new area of customers that we have and how to reach them and how to get to the decision makers faster.

Seemingly there's only one hurdle left and we named that the transparency tax which I'll also talk a little bit more about in this presentation. Um and by the way, my name is Rica Medb which you might have already known if you came to this talk specifically. I've built community infrastructure before now I'm in zero knowledge infrastructure which is very focused on privacy. Currently, I'm the marketing director of boundless networks and we are making blockchains work for global finance. So this is the problem space I work up wake up every day to to solve and I'm very excited to share some of the learnings with you today.

So what is the transparency tax? It's what we named this problem space that we found around marketing blockchains and blockchain privacy specifically. It is the feature that we traded for blockchains superb speed and efficiency and it is basically that every company that decides to have business on chain is creating a public fully readable record. It is not terribly good for business. So we can understand that this is a actual problem that we do need to solve for it both on the marketing side and the technical side to support. It makes any vendor cash flow system payment literally everything about what your business is doing completely readable

by competitors making competitive advantage keeping super super hard. Currently in 2026 as of today there's already over 500 million wallets being labeled and tracked and our infrastructure for doing that and analyzing it it's just getting better and better. So it's going to get more and more intensive all the data that we know about each and every wallet and what kind of um transactions they're doing. Aside from the trillions of volume, there's already over 30 crypto cards that people can pay with in person creating more and more of this data as well. Um BlackRock one of the largest asset managers has already tokenized um treasuries over 2.5 billion dollars

worth. Stripe one of the largest payment infrastructures also just recently last year paid over 1 billion for bridge a crypto company for basically securing themselves stablecoin rails. This is already so much movement and this is just the peak I think for what happened in the last year and there's way more coming. So I want to make sure that we are prepared of how to ease this transition. And I want to talk more about where the transparency tax shows up because for this presentation itself and how we think about marketing and selling blockchains these days, we do need to really really be sure of knowing I like how the the presentation style kind of is messed

up a little bit. It's cute. Anyway, disregard the extra Y in the middle there. So we do need to know more about what problems our customers are facing actually and the transparency tax is a pretty big umbrella term for that. So it shows up in B2B payments, treasury management treasury management moves and every single payroll um salary execution, they know everything about what is going on. This isn't only a business data leak problem because these companies, these institutions that we're trying to talk to, they do have pretty major shareholder obligations, but it's also a big compliance um liability. They also have a lot of customer

privacy obligations that we cannot disregard and we do need to make them feel like we're prepared to handle that as well and help them with it. This makes we can probably agree that this is such a major two-sided problem problem space with the compliance and also the business data leaking that privacy could be as it seemed like in 2026 is one of our last hurdles to getting that adoption that we want to have for blockchains. They were built for this, but we do need to solve for that. There are three challenges that I want to talk about a little bit. We know that the transparency tax is being solved by a lot of companies currently and this week you'll talk with many of infrastructure

providers boundless included. We're building solutions for this, but we do need to in the meantime gather and I think we do have a collective power to figure out how to plan and test our thesis is and get better at marketing it as well. So I brought three challenges today. I I'm trying to keep this presentation higher level. I know a lot of you have different pain points for already trying to market to this um to this landscape. I'm bringing three challenges and then three players that solved this previously in different parts of tech or infrastructure that we can take learnings from and then we will have a little bit of a playbook at the end because I really think we do have tools in our hand that we can try and those are things that ideally

you can start doing today or tomorrow. So the first challenge that I brought is the lack of urgency. We've already seen these in our conversations in the last few months and last year honestly. Privacy still feels like we've been fine without it kind of standpoint which you might hear a lot of times or we're still reorganizing. That's on the road map, but it's not really something that's super top of mind. Um >> [clears throat] >> which makes sense, but the usual things that we use for creating urgency marketing like FOMO, scarcity or competitive pressure doesn't really land for infrastructure decisions like this.

It doesn't really work. The same way. The second is that the buyer is not as clear of a persona. You will see this when you and your team are talking with these entities that as much as we're accustomed to more of a blockchain partnerships etc. You usually talk to a similar persona that at least has the same level of understanding of crypto and what you're talking about most of the time. For this in some of the some of the companies that you might be targeting, the the buyer persona might be a security officer, a governance lead or like a whole governance system, a general counsel, CTO. They all have super various levels of understanding of

privacy and crypto and their own needs especially within the company. So sometimes it is quite hard to push it forward and figure out what they actually want and do they understand what you're saying to them and do they respond? Not Yeah. So are you on the same level of understanding? It's super different in every conversation. The third challenge that I brought is that every implementation is different. Privacy is a super broad term even amongst the Ethereum community. We just basically put that over anything that has anything to do in that realm. So within these conversations, you will find that sometimes clients need something super specific even for one use case like for example private payroll. We did talk about the issues of payroll a little bit. For private

payrolls, one might need a super transparent way where they do have opt-in um opt-in transparency when the regulators come and they do want to see some of the data that is happening and generated being generated by these companies without generally showing anything on chain. Some might need a completely different solution. So building a full go-to-market for this value proposition is quite quite hard to do. Um the lack of urgency was was one. The second was the persona being different and then the solution being what we're building is not the same thing. It's not one thing for now.

Someone might fully speed run this and have one single solution for all of our privacy needs. We will see, but these problems I brought three teams that can serve as inspiration for us. So let's go with the first one. I brought Chainlink. If any of you don't know, they're an Oracle infrastructure company. They feed real world data to smart contracts. They launched quite a while ago, many years ago, but when they did launch, um decentralized data feeds were not really a need that people were looking for. So, it was a challenging time to market, I'm assuming, but from I really like looking back at other companies that are worth admiring and analyzing what they've done before. And all the three examples that I brought today were

through that through that analysis. And I brought Chainlink for solving for urgency because what they've done really well is they made the without this or the downside so easily understandable. And they did do some marketing of trying to make oracles happen and and do their whole positioning of creating a new category, which they've done brilliantly. But for this for urgency, what worked really well is they made urgency from the downside instead of the upside. The second, bless you. The second is for solving for the persona problem. I brought AWS.

Um >> [clears throat] >> They launched over 20 years ago. Um they launched Elastic Computing in 2006. And back then, this is a quite difficult product to understand when you're coming into talking with them for the first time. And even then, buying decentralized compute or cloud infrastructure was not on the to-do list for most people, as you can imagine. But um what they've done and amongst many things, what I want to highlight is they gave a free tier to developers very early on. And instead of forcing conversations just through trying to find the buyer within the company, they built the adoption from inside out and the business case built itself. So, the lesson here is to

target the person who's closest to the work and then the business it the sale will be easier once there's some adoption already, maybe even within that entity. It does make it a little bit harder to figure out what the business model might be cuz if you are giving a free tier, um there will be a paid tier, but when we're doing sales and marketing around privacy, so far what worked really well is the the the original sales structure of having something small to start with and then upselling works really well. And I think this example with AWS also solves that is having something simple to start with and then moving on from that.

The third one I brought was Railgun. They are a privacy protocol on Ethereum. And they launched at probably one of the most difficult times, I would say, for anything privacy to launch cuz they did it when Tornado Cash, a mixer protocol, uh received its sanctions for facilitating um um criminal activity on chain. So, they launched into a market that was not only difficult to understand, but it was also heavily stigmatized. Major uphill battle. Um and I brought them today for solving for implementation cuz if you look back at what they've done over the years, even if you just Well, you could scroll back on their Twitter, but you could also find this out through just private conversations, actually.

Um but what they've done is that instead of trying to fully make a new product into the trying to get customers to fully adopt this completely new product or buy into this new category, they've built it into the DeFi applications that people already used for lending, swapping, um providing liquidity without unshielding their wallets. And so, I imagine this was insanely hard to do on the on the business development side and actually make this happen as like a sign deal and getting approval and all of that.

Um so, kudos to them. And they did do some obviously like positioning and definition around privacy itself. But what worked really well is not making the customer change what they were what they were doing. Instead, they focused on putting it where they were already having activity. So, the lesson here is to adapt the product to user and not the other way around, which also sounds like such a to me at least sounds like such a cliché, but I think it's important for us to think that way. Um the three challenges and the three solutions that we have today, I'm synthesizing them into three different steps. Ideally, uh these are still we could have gone super deep. I think

20 minutes is not enough to go into the depths of um the details that were the problems we have. So, I wanted to make a presentation that can apply to more of you in the room or those of you watching at home. The major difficulty with this is building the funnel that we've already had for blockchain cuz I'm assuming most already have that figured out or at least to an extent. And to turn this funnel to a completely new audience and essentially dividing yourself between two different marketing styles and adoption styles and figuring out these challenges. And why it was important for us to understand the transparency tax is they though that's the major problem space you're looking to hit home with with your customers.

So, let's get into the playbook. The first one is to make the downside impossible to ignore. We've talked about this with Chainlink itself. Um what I want to encourage here is to dig up data and make forensic, readable, undeniable, undisputable works of information, number-based information that you can show your clients. If you are a more brave or more antagonistic marketer or company, you can position this aggressively as as pinpointing um the cost of privacy with the numbers specifically for an ecosystem or a competitor of what it costs for them to not have privacy.

It personally, I don't like doing that. We're more of a wholesome project at boundless and me personally as a marketer, I like to do uh a little bit more of an yeah, less antagonistic positioning. But if that, you could do this publicly.

However, for everyone, I recommend this to do internally for sales conversation to enable the team and to show in clients what it actually costs for them to not do anything with numbers is very very powerful and hopefully getting to um a yes sooner. The second is narrowing the persona. This sounds so much simpler and something you probably think about often or one thinks about often when we're building all of this, but it will be very tempting with figuring the such a widening of the funnel and having these completely new platforms.

Now you have to do LinkedIn. Now you have to be serious about your email marketing. All of these new channels and new conferences to go to, etc., etc. It will be super tempting to have all these messaging packs um developing from your current system. It will make the job harder. So, I really recommend to take the really hard exercise and focus on having two or three messaging packs itself. You can still have as many personas as possible and and that you can iterate the the solution itself since it's so custom that we've talked about with the challenges that every implementation will be different. You should take the route that those are custom in every conversation, obviously suited to the client's needs. But for persona in terms of messaging packs, of how you talk

about generally your solution, what your initial offering is, it should not be more than two or three. It will get more confusing. If you manage to narrow it down, it will more likely lead to faster decision-making processes and yes, and sign deals. And the last one I brought is my favorite thing that I we've implemented with the boundless team is something that anything we do internally and externally um we use all the time. It's where we start with is the mentality of thinking bigger. I really want to encourage everybody to try to zoom out as often as possible.

There's always a larger picture, a larger solution, and a more collaborative one. And it will increase momentum. It will increase belief in people, and it will it will just do you so good. So, I really I really encourage you to any decision you're making, any plan you're trying to do or new venture, try to think bigger. >> [snorts] >> In this case, I brought to take the message outside of crypto. It is going to be that most themes won't do because I'm assuming from the conversations and what I've seen, people are very over-indexing on the relationships and the rapport they have within the blockchain industry already. And it is more comfortable than going outside of it and starting it over again. It is much easier to go from the momentum that you have within this niche than to also

add a new one to it. It's going to be so much work. But this is why this is going to work for the teams that adopt this sooner is you do have to go to the finance conferences. You do have The last thing to do there, outside from improving the limitations that we have on the technological level that a lot of teams, including the Ethereum Foundation and boundless are working on and many other teams, is to tell a better story. It's how we position this, it's the bridging that we build between the technology we've built and the world that hasn't adopted yet. And to really show the conviction that we have in the world view that we started out with and to emphasize the technology that will actually get us there.

So, with that, I would like to encourage Oh, there was one more slide. >> [laughter] >> But it said just think bigger and be boundless. But yeah, so that is our job is to tell a better story and please think bigger and think collectively. Thank you very much. Nice. Thank you very