3 Marketing Lessons from the Tether Saga

TL;DR– the debate and discussion around Tether and its behavior gives us a glimpse of marketing in a crypto-first world.

I will admit that I have not followed the whole debate about Tether very closely even though it is an important one.

The basic question, as I understand it, is whether every Tether (known as USDT on the exchanges) is, in fact, backed by a US Dollar and, if so, can an owner of Tether lay claim to it? In addition, what is the nature of the Tether- Bitfinex relationship? There are a lot of points of overlap.

There is so much going on here (and, again, I don’t have to go super deep), but I am at the point at the debate where I am not 100% of whether Tether serves a really useful purpose or whether it is semi-fraudulent.

I will say, at the recent Satoshi Roundtable, there was a really healthy and extremely informative debate about Tether and its relationship to Bitfinex by people who would know. At the end of it, I thought, ‘ok, this makes sense and I trust the guys who are piloting the ship now.” Many people (by a show of hands, in fact) felt the same way.

On the other hand, you can read some pretty strong takedowns (like this one) and arrive at the opposite conclusion.

Welcome to crypto, right?

However, it was while reading the excellent write up by Alex Vikati called A Closer Look At Tether’s Blockchain that I feel like I saw an element of the marketing future.

• Arguments that win leverage the blockchain.
  Once Alex points you to the blockchain data itself, she writes: “While other coins do run on Omni, Tether is the largest tenant by far, with over 75% of Omni’s transactions ever and over 95% of its transactions in January. At this point, Omni is effectively a Tether blockchain.”
• You can get market insights by watching wallet behavior.
  In a decentralized world, the wallet ID is going to replace the personal data that companies use to track and up-sell. Now, the relationship will be with a wallet.What Alex showed us is that looking at wallet behavior tells you a heck of a lot about the people who use (or don’t use) a network.
  After a solid series of points discussing issues around transaction trends, Top 50 Senders, Top 50 Spenders, she arrives at the conclusion.
  “the top 200 addresses out of Tether’s nearly 100K active addresses hold over 2B USDT. Yes, the top 0.2% owns over 90% of the token’s total supply. This is more than double BTC’s wealth concentration.”
• “Customer Satisfaction Scores” in a crypto-world are sitting in the blockchain.
  You just need to know the right questions to ask to get them.It really drove home for me when she wrote:
  We believe that on-chain data, in combination with network metrics, ultimately provides the best understanding of the vibrancy and health of any blockchain. They will matter as much tomorrow as DAUs and ARPUs do today.

I guess the basic takeaway for this post is that the blockchain-marketing of the future is going to care about many of the same things (customer satisfaction, chief among them) as previous organizations, but have entirely new ways of discovering the answer.

The question will be: did you study the blockchain?

Upcoming Korea Trip

I am speaking at the Digital Marketing Korea conference on 3/15 in Seoul. It is the largest convention of marketers in Korea. Plus, as you know, the country is a worldwide hotbed for cryptomania. The reason I share this is if you have specific questions about Korea or know someone there whom you find interesting, please let me know.

I’ll blog about it, most likely, when I get back.