The new comms playbook: show, don’t promise

The next era belongs to builders with receipts

For several decades now, the tech industry has been able to get public recognition and external credit for the interesting ideas coming out of it. So much so that the startup concept of a “minimum viable product” got the same acronym — MVP — as Jalen Brunson (New York Forever).

But over this last decade, and especially in recent years, there has been a tremendous sea change in tech: MVPs, great ideas, and incredible teams no longer cut it for an external audience. Since the crypto industry in particular has been hit the hardest — with the combination of regulatory questions and headline-grabbing bad actors — people’s BS meters have been heightened as they have been increasingly inundated with noise and have begun to filter accordingly.

And when traditional finance (TradFi) players take crypto seriously — like BlackRock launching a tokenized money market fund, Fidelity filing for a crypto ETF, JP Morgan settling transactions on a blockchain it built in-house — the conversation changes. Not just about what crypto is, but about what it takes to be taken seriously in the industry.

That’s the moment we’re in right now. This moment has quietly rewritten the rules for everyone building in this space.

Welcome to the “show me” era.

What changed, and why now?

For most of the industry’s history, it operated on a kind of promissory logic: The vision was the product. You could launch with just a whitepaper and a token, and the press and crypto community would meet you there. The bet was always on what something could become, not what it had already proven. That dynamic has shifted.

Why? Simply put, I believe that this communications shift is happening due to the combination of a lingering and growing skepticism of the technology, now a couple of decades in; the entrance en masse of traditional financial institutions into the crypto arena, not just in name but in product; and the AI industry (with its overnight success that was really decades in the making) shipping tangibly consumer-ready products.

Massive institutions have stopped just watching the space or siloing efforts in “innovation arms” and started building for scale: BlackRock and Larry Fink’s full embrace of tokenization. Fidelity’s custody and ETF infrastructure. JP Morgan’s Onyx network. Franklin Templeton’s onchain money market fund.

These aren’t experiments anymore — they’re real products, with the corresponding TradFi compliance frameworks, institutional clients, and balance sheets behind them.

The entry of TradFi at scale raised the baseline for what “serious” looks like in crypto. When the largest asset manager in the world is tokenizing treasuries, the bar for what a credible project needs to demonstrate — to media, to partners, to the market — rises with it.

The industry has entered the mainstream from a policy perspective as well. With stablecoin legislation (GENIUS Act) passing last year, and now comprehensive market structure legislation (CLARITY Act) now ready for a full Senate vote, expect product communications to change further. If CLARITY passes, it will allow founders to publicly talk about what they’re building with a level of specificity that previously was not possible.

Altogether, the industry has matured, whether it was ready for it or not.

The result is a communications environment where the starting point is no longer ”What are you building?” but:

“What have you built, and who is using it?”

In practice, this means that a compelling story alone will no longer move the needle. We need proof.

The new proof stack

The pitch that used to work — “we’re building X for Y, and here’s why it matters” — now needs a second act. I call it the proof stack: the layer of evidence that transforms a hypothetical, abstract narrative into a credible, concrete one.

So what does that proof stack look like?

Partnerships with teeth — not “in conversations with.” Actual integrations, deployed contracts, and partners willing to go on record about why they chose you. The partnership announcement used to be a lazy substitute for traction. Now it only works if the partnership itself is evidence of traction. That is, a major institution, protocol, or platform chose you over a dozen alternatives, and you can explain why.

This also means sharing more hard data and transaction volumes on mainnet, not just testnet, active wallets, revenue, and retention curves. Not “growing fast” — but percentages, timeframes, baselines. Journalists covering this space are increasingly sophisticated; they’re doing their own onchain verification. If your numbers don’t hold up to a Dune, CoinMarketCap, or other analytics dashboard, your story won’t hold up either.

The proof stack also involves sharing real signals of product-market fit. Who is using your product, and why would they (including other market customers) keep using it?

I believe the clearest proof of “fit” isn’t a launch announcement — it’s an organic and growing community that existed before the PR push.

If your most enthusiastic users are your investors, or people with skin in the game, that’s a yellow flag, given they’re financially incentivized. But if they’re people who found you through word of mouth, that’s a story worth telling.

This is all about coverage that came before the press push, not because of it — third-party validation, audits, independent research. The most credible kind of proof is the kind you didn’t manufacture. It’s the kind where someone else is telling the world there’s something there.

What this means for startup comms

The temptation when you’re early — when the product is still taking shape but the vision is more vivid — is to lead with the vision, a manifesto. It feels honest. It is honest.

But in the current environment, it reads as a risk.

The better approach is to sequence your story around what you can prove. Lead with the data point you’re most confident in, even if it’s small: 1,000 active daily users who didn’t know the founders is more compelling than 1, also carries a thesis of a million dollars in strategic backing. A protocol that processed $50M in volume in its first 90 days is more interesting than a protocol that “will” process volume once it scales.

This also means being more precise about what you’re claiming. “We’re building the future of payments” is a thesis, not a proof point. “We’ve reduced cross-border settlement time from three days to four minutes, and here are three businesses using it today” is a proof point that happens to carry a thesis inside it.

For comms teams and founders doing their own communications, the practical implication is that the story should emerge from the facts, not the other way around. That’s a different kind of writing — harder in some ways, more disciplined — but it’s what lands. Especially right now.

The long game

None of this means vision is irrelevant. The best crypto communications still operate simultaneously on two tracks: here’s what we’ve built, and here’s why it’s the beginning of something much bigger. The difference is in the sequencing and messaging proportion.

By “proportion”, I mean that you could get away with 80% vision and 20% substance back in 2021. That ratio has flipped today.

You can still publish a whitepaper, a manifesto… but it’s not enough. The vision still matters — it’s what makes the proof points more meaningful, and what gives journalists and analysts something to write toward — but that vision has to be earned by the substance underneath it.

* * *

The Show Me Era isn’t a temporary industry correction. The growing sophistication of the crypto audience — media, institutional, retail — has permanently ratcheted up.

The best builders in this space have figured out that this is actually good news. If you have real traction, real data, and real partners, the higher bar works in your favor; it filters out the noise and makes your signal much louder by comparison.

The question is whether your communications strategy is built to show that proof, or is still built to promise it.

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