When Tier-One Media Wanted Nothing to Do With Crypto: The Kadena Story

At a Glance

• Volume: 801 Pieces — Sustained Campaign
• Reach: 29.1M Views — Estimated Coverage Reach
• Social Shares: 45.1K — Social Amplification
• Backlinks: 233 — Domain Authority

The Partnership 

Let's be honest about crypto in 2019: it was a punchline. Every other project was a scam or vaporware. Trade publications were pay-to-play. And real business media—Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg—wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. No Bitcoin ETF. No institutional legitimacy. Just a graveyard of failed ICOs and regulators sharpening knives.

That was the environment when Kadena came to us. But Kadena wasn't another whitepaper with a Telegram channel. The founders—Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino—had built JPMorgan's first blockchain. Will had worked at the SEC. These weren't crypto bros chasing a pump. They were infrastructure people who happened to be building in blockchain.

The Challenge 

The technology was real: a sharded Proof-of-Work blockchain that actually solved scalability without sacrificing security. But nobody cared about technology in crypto coverage. Every project claimed to be "the next Ethereum." The challenge wasn't explaining what Kadena did—it was getting anyone credible to listen in the first place.

The Strategy 

We didn't pitch Kadena as a crypto story. We pitched it as a Wall Street story.

Two JPMorgan executives leave one of the world's largest banks to build what they believe is the future of financial infrastructure. One of them literally helped the SEC understand blockchain. That's not a crypto story—that's a business story, a careers story, a "what do these people know that we don't" story.

That framing cracked open doors that were otherwise welded shut. Forbes wrote about the JPMorgan connection. Fortune covered the product launch—a product launch, in crypto, in Fortune. TechCrunch, Coindesk and The Block covered it too. We positioned Monica Quaintance, their head of research, as a technical voice in a space starving for credible women leaders—and got her on Bloomberg TV with Emily Chang.

The Results 

The result was legitimacy. In an industry where coverage was either bought or ignored, we got Kadena earned media in outlets that had written off the entire sector. We proved that if you have real people with real credentials building real technology, the story can break through—even when the category is toxic.