[LEGAL: review before publishing]
Crypto has some of the most engaged creator communities on the internet and the worst reputation for how they get paid. Both are true at once. Token projects have spent years teaching audiences that a KOL post is probably a paid pump dressed as an opinion, and the audiences have learned the lesson well. They now assume the worst, and they are often right.
That is the situation you are launching into. The good news is that a clean campaign stands out precisely because the bar is on the floor. Here is what clean looks like, in four parts.
Say it is paid, every time
Disclosure is not optional, not a formality and not something to tuck into a reply three comments down. If a creator is being paid, in money or tokens or anything else of value, the post says so, up front, in words the audience will see without clicking.
This is a legal requirement in most places your audience lives, and the rules vary by country and platform. We tell every creator what their post needs, in writing, before they make anything. If a creator pushes back on disclosure, they do not go on the orbit map. It is the simplest filter we have, and it removes the people you would least want speaking for you.
Disclosure also works in your favour. An audience that has been burned trusts the creator who says “this is a paid partnership” more than the one who pretends to have stumbled across your protocol on a Sunday. Honesty reads as confidence. Hiding reads as having something to hide.
Tokens are not a fee
The quiet problem in many KOL campaigns is how creators are paid. A token allocation, a vested grant, an early allocation at a favourable price: these turn a creator into a holder, and a holder has a reason to want the price up that has nothing to do with whether your product is any good.
We pay creators from the creator budget, in money, at rates you see line by line. If a project wants to offer tokens as well, that is a conversation to have with your lawyers first and us second, and if it goes ahead, the holding is disclosed in every post along with the payment. The audience is entitled to know that the person recommending a token owns some.
What we will not do is run a campaign where the creator’s fee is a token position and the disclosure says nothing about it. That is not a campaign. It is a conflict of interest with a camera.
The lines you do not cross
Certain kinds of statement about tokens are financial promotions, and financial promotions are regulated. The details depend on where you and your audience are, and this is where your legal advice matters more than ours. But the shape of the rules is consistent enough to brief against.
A clean brief tells creators to talk about what the product does, how it works, what it is for and who it is for. It tells them not to talk about where the price is going, what the returns might be, when to buy, whether to hold, or how this compares with putting money anywhere else. No predictions. No “early”. No countdowns. No language that treats the token as a way to make money rather than a way to use the thing you built.
That can feel restrictive if you are used to the way crypto marketing has often been done. It is also the only way to run a campaign that does not become a problem for you, the creator and the audience, in that order. If a creator cannot make an interesting post about your product without talking about price, the problem is not the brief.
Nothing in this article is financial advice, and nothing in a campaign we run should be either.
A community voice, not a shill
A shill talks about a token. A community voice talks about what people are building, what broke, what got fixed, what is worth trying this week. You can tell them apart in a minute of scrolling.
The shill’s feed is a sequence of launches, each one the best thing they have ever seen, each one forgotten by the next post. The comments are either empty or full of people asking why they were recommended the last one. The community voice argues with their audience. They say when something is not ready. They turn down projects, and they say so publicly. Their audience trusts them because they have watched them be honest at a cost.
The community voice is harder to book, costs more per post and will tell you things about your product you did not want to hear. They are worth every bit of that, because when they say your protocol is worth a look, people look.
The orbit map for a token launch is built from community voices. We look at the work, the comments and the history, not the follower count, and we ask every creator whether they have used the product before we ask anything else. If they have not, they do before they post, or they do not post.
That is the whole of it. Disclose everything, pay in money, stay off price, book people with a conscience. It is not complicated. It is just rarer than it should be.