Katie Perry of ZeroHash, chief marketing officer, joins theCUBE and NYSE Wired for a conversation on marketing strategies that shape enterprise adoption of on-chain technology and digital asset infrastructure. Perry explains how they position the company for enterprise customers and addresses topics such as on-chain infrastructure, regulatory compliance, interoperability across ecosystems and evolving buyer profiles. theCUBE Research frames the discussion, with hosts Gemma Allen and analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante guiding the conversation.
Perry highlights ZeroHash's value proposition of simplifying complex digital asset technology for non-crypto companies while demonstrating technical depth and regulatory trust. They note interoperability across 100+ ecosystems, solution-based messaging tailored to different buyer roles and the growing importance of artificial intelligence and large language models for discoverability and search engine optimization. theCUBE hosts emphasize that institutional endorsements and durable uptime serve as critical signals for enterprise adoption and long-term credibility.
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Katie Perry, ZeroHash
Katie Perry of ZeroHash, chief marketing officer, joins theCUBE and NYSE Wired for a conversation on marketing strategies that shape enterprise adoption of on-chain technology and digital asset infrastructure. Perry explains how they position the company for enterprise customers and addresses topics such as on-chain infrastructure, regulatory compliance, interoperability across ecosystems and evolving buyer profiles. theCUBE Research frames the discussion, with hosts Gemma Allen and analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante guiding the conversation.
Perry highlights ZeroHash's value proposition of simplifying complex digital asset technology for non-crypto companies while demonstrating technical depth and regulatory trust. They note interoperability across 100+ ecosystems, solution-based messaging tailored to different buyer roles and the growing importance of artificial intelligence and large language models for discoverability and search engine optimization. theCUBE hosts emphasize that institutional endorsements and durable uptime serve as critical signals for enterprise adoption and long-term credibility.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen, one of the hosts of NYSE Wired, and today we are talking all things marketing leaders. that are the folks shaping the messaging that is reimagining technology, markets, and businesses of tomorrow. One thing we know is that crypto is having a very unique moment. The conversation has moved beyond speculation into how infrastructure and money actually moves in the real world. Joining me now for a conversation on exactly that is the Chief Marketing Officer at zerohash, Katie Perry. Welcome, Katie.
Gemma Allen
>> Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> So crypto, so much to unpack here from the perspective of marketing, right? And I want to dive into so much. But before we do, maybe just to start, let's level set with what exactly it is that zerohash does. Give me the company 101.
Katie Perry
>> Sure. zerohash is an infrastructure company. So essentially what we do is we help companies that are primarily non -crypto companies go on -chain. Now, people who are not deep in the industry might hear the word on -chain a lot and wonder, what does that mean? On -chain is just the terminology, meaning these companies are adopting and utilizing digital asset technologies in their products. That could be turning on crypto trading, buy or sell. If you've been following the news, E*TRADE just added crypto that was powered by zerohash. So that could be as straightforward as that. It could also be using digital assets as payment rails. So that's when stable coins come into the conversation. It might also mean tokenized assets. So any of those things, if a non -crypto company wants to leverage that technology, make it part of their customer experience, part of their product, they need to have the technology infrastructure to do that and the regulatory stack. So there's a tech layer and a compliance layer that we provide. And we were just chatting about AWS. I use that a lot with my friends that are outside financial services where AWS exists to help companies build their businesses online via a ton of different ways. We help businesses go on chain in terms of using digital asset technology, however they may be using it within their organization.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. So let's go into the marketing side of this because I really think this is a very interesting challenge that you have crypto in some respects it has had a wave of enthusiasm a wave of skepticism we know that from the narrative perspective things seem to change like the weather a little bit and that's tough I'm sure from the perspective of leading a company's marketing in the space but also it's something that when it's working well no one really sees it doesn't have the same brand affiliation brand identity tangible conceptual awareness that some other brands have. So it's an interesting one. How do you think about it from the perspective of marketing? What do you think makes the marketing challenge and the opportunitytruly unique?
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, a few things I think you hit on it. Crypto is sort of one of those words that has a visceral reaction who building in the space. It started really as kind of a core group of people who really wanted this. They had a vision for this decentralized universe that they wanted to build in or live in. And it had these sort of cultural associations. It was very community driven. That still exists. That's still there. Over the years, though, you've seen institutions start adopting this technology, institutions that zerohash works with. That's a different sort of mindset because instead of tracking the performance of an asset or a token in the day -to -day. They're looking at this stuff as, I'm going to incorporate this in my business so we have long -term durability, so we can more easily pay people across borders or optimize our treasury functions. So the way they're thinking about it is much more zoomed out, it's much more measured, but you still have people supporting projects and assets. And it's interesting, even very specific example being, when we manage our X profile at zerohash, we see, fintech writers talking about, Visa Direct using stable coins, which we just announced those guys as a partner. Big institutional story. It's sending a signal into the future. Right below that, I see, you know, the anonymous account sharing it, saying, you know, this is bullish for XYZ. And so you're navigating multiple audiences. And what's interesting is, you know, we're B2B. We market to the institutions and the businesses. But those audiences within crypto are still sort of important to the ecosystem overall.
Gemma Allen
>> And do you think a lot about maintaining the loyalty of the more eclectic peripheral player in the space? like the OG crypto pro-retail, who kind of tends to be more about the democratization of finance, about the kind of almost anti-institution play versus where crypto has now come to as an industry. how do you think about maintaining loyalty, I suppose, from both audiences?
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, what's fascinating about our business is we're interoperable across 100 plus ecosystems. So we don't, you know, pick favorites. We build a technology that makes it possible for people using different assets within these ecosystems, for those to work together within the broader framework of an institutional use case. And so I think with the OG people, my personal opinion is that they still belong in the community. This would not exist in its current state. It would not be getting the attention of the big institutions without the people that really believed and stuck with it. And they're a different flavor. They're a different style. I think it's great. I go to conferences and there's people, I saw a whole Bitcoin family at the Bitcoin conference. There was a baby in a Bitcoin onesie and the parents and they took their kid to Vegas. And then I saw five Deloitte consultants who were there to meet with. And so everyone's kind of there together. I think it's good. It's a good mix. I think it's good for both sides to experience and be exposed to the other. And I think you're seeing that more and more where I think maybe a couple of years ago, the people who were like the originals were like, oh, here come the suits. Now they're starting to realize that this all works together. You know, the vision they believed in and want to see that gets accelerated when these big businesses invest in them. Because when a huge institution invests in this, they're not just testing it out for a couple. They're really vetting it. And they're like, this is core to our business, we think, in the next 5, 10, 20 years.
Gemma Allen
>> And you guys at zerohash have really seen some very legitimate, long -term, traditional legacy players use and advocate for your technology, right? Maybe talk us through some of those examples and even just the kind of evolution of your own marketing messaging as we see and hear more and more institutional traders focus on the space here on Wall Street.
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, so going back a bit, zerohash was founded in 2017, which feels like forever ago in crypto. And so the company has really survived and then thrived through some really tough times. Some of those crypto winters when the team was building, and I wasn't there for that. I hear the war stories. A lot of the original people are still at the company. It was tough. And our CEO and founder talks a lot about the company was founded on the premise that the original team wanted to. they looked at the crypto space. They're like, we believe in this. And they're like, what's the biggest challenge right now? What's the biggest challenge? Because they believe that was the biggest opportunity. And what they saw was the biggest challenge is how are you going to get a Morgan Stanley, a BlackRock? How are you going to get these big institutions to believe in and adopt the technology? And a lot of that centers on trust. 2017, very different. You're talking probably getting laughed out of rooms to today where, we worked with BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Franklin Templeton on the big institutional side. And then also some of these really up and coming emerging fintechs, Kalshi, Gusto as well. And so that was sort of the original thesis was kind of like, what's the hardest thing we can do? And that was at a time when everyone was building very fun projects. And, you know, it was a lot of these sort of, you know, some survived, some didn't. And this team was like, wait, they were looking 20 years down the road and they're like, what's the hardest thing we can do? This is what it is. So I mentioned the word trust. Our marketing as a B2B infrastructure company is really about trust. And that comes to life in a lot of the things we do, but it also comes to life in just the product itself. And so, in addition to doing fun swag and merch and events, you know, we have 99 .99 % uptime. And a lot of our trust comes from our SLAs, the product durability, ability to handle massive volumes and so it's sort of like you'd appreciate this as a marketer It's like the boring stuff. It's solution based.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, I like it. Exactly So when you think about what changed in 2017 from the perspective of large institutions and banks to now right from being like you said maybe laughed out of rooms to suddenly being very much a talking point across a lot of large institutions. Do you think that the buyer profile changed somewhat in that time too? And how do you think about that from the perspective of your own category and target marketing? Like who is Top of Funnel and where do they live and ingest information?
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, it's fascinating. I think there's a lot of parallels to the beginning of my career. I started my career at an ad agency where we did consumer marketing for brands like Coca-Cola and Mondelēz and these big brands. And the agency was focused on digital marketing. And this was at a time when we had to, we were going to meetings and basically being like, here's why you guys need a Facebook page. And they were like, why do we need that? And what I saw in that experience is those audiences started to grow. Those platforms grew. Next thing you know, Oreo has a head of digital. And it's this random person who's the digital czar and they're all over here. And that's their job is to be the innovative person. Over time, that slowly seeps into every single role at the company. You know, the integrated marketing person knows digital. The PR person knows digital. I think that same thing happened or is happening with digital assets where maybe a few years ago, and you still see a lot of jobs head of digital assets. But now it's sort of part of everyone's function. If you're on a legal or compliance team, you got to know your stuff in digital assets. it's not a product. So it's not just this one person who's the evangelist, it's spread out. And from a marketing standpoint, it creates challenges and opportunities, because now we have, call it eight different categories of businesses we can go after. Within each of those, there's four different buyer profiles, you have the compliance person who cares about the licensing of the product, the product person who wants to get in the details of our API, you know you've got the ops person and so each of those requires a different message and all of that though needs to make sense and ladder up into a bigger picture brand story I think that's the most fun part about b2b marketing
Gemma Allen
>> and on that brand story
Gemma Allen
>> how do you think about that
Gemma Allen
>> from the perspectiveof social media where the actual conversations and listening is happening especially now right as it's like world of AI and LLMs and people doing their own research. We had another marketing leader on this morning he said you know I know that technical buyers go to Claude or OpenAI or wherever it is, to get advice on products to get recommendations right. What's happening in the crypto space around that? are technical buyers or potential customers using these you know LLMs as research and qualitative reckoning like what are you seeing?
Katie Perry
>> They absolutely are. And that's become sort of a pillar of our marketing activities. That's very important. We actually use a tool called Profound. And what they do, their service exists to basically ping all of the LLMs or the main ones with queries that somebody might be typing if they're researching your company. So someone might be saying, I'm looking for a digital asset infrastructure provider for stablecoin payments. Who's the best? They'll use their technology to ping that out and then they'll get the data back on who's ranking the highest and then they'll understand why. So they'll come back to us and say, you guys are doing pretty well in this category, but actually you're a little weak in this area. So with that insight, we know we're weak in discoverability in XYZ product in an LLM. We can then incorporate that into our messaging, our press releases, which gets picked up by LLMs, our Wikipedia page. There's all these things that we can use to signal. And so SEO, people doing that within Google was pretty established practice. Now there's LLM optimization and our growth lead on my team is very focused on that right now, making sure. And we can actually, with these tools, you can track over time, share of voice and understand in aggregate. It's very important. But it's still one of those things, and this was similar with Google, where you're sort of guessing what you can do to get in there because it's always changing. The LLMs aren't super transparent about saying these websites matter more than others. Third party. You have an article in Fortune. It's a trusted third party. That counts a lot. Wikipedia pages count a ton. Reddit counts a ton. Can't really control Reddit that much. So all these factors come in and then you sort of make tweaks and then you see what worked and what didn't. And it's a fun exercise, but it's very important for especially a technical purchasing decision where there's multiple players and you want to quickly get to a shortlist.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow, it seems to me based on the conversation we've had in this series that a lot of people are learning in the moment, right? There is no tried and tested playbook here.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> You kind of have to all learn as you go.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> From the perspective of the technical roadmap for a company like ZeroHash, where there is obviously, it's an infrastructure, it's an enabler. How do you think about solution messaging and technical messaging. And how do you think these worlds of crypto tech meets regular tech meets AI are crossing? Like there is a little bit of cross -pollination, but also I feel like a little bit of confusion perhaps.What are your thoughts?
Katie Perry
>> It's a unique challenge because we exist to simplify something that's extremely complex, time -sensitive and expensive for our partners. And so the messaging has to show that. We need to establish that we're simplifying something. We're abstracting the complexity. But the flip side of that is we need to show that we have credibility in the technical side and depth of the licensing. So it's this interesting balance where we exist to simplify. But if our message was just, hey, we make this easy for you, trust us, that doesn't work. And also, the depth to which we get into the technicality of what the product does depends on the buyer. If we're talking to an executive, a CEO, an ops person, they might not be in as deep of the product. We're really focused on solutions messaging. I think one big thing about where crypto has gone is crypto is a technology that exists to solve business problems. And there are so many business problems it can solve. So you want to optimize your treasury management, digital assets could help you with that. You want to move money across borders with less fees or maybe quicker, digital assets could do that. So a lot of the sort of top line messaging is here's a business problem, here's how digital assets solve it. When you get down to the product layer and the technical decision makers, you start to layer in more of how does it work, and then we get into, we have an API structure that makes it easy. We have a modular product structure. You integrate once with one product API, and then you can build from there. But we're not going to use that for someone just looking for a solution. And what's fascinating about all this is when you talk about even discoverability in LLMs, someone might search, they have a business challenge, and they might not be thinking stable coins is the answer, but we want to appear there. We're there to educate that this is a new technology that could help them solve that business challenge, even if they've never even considered it.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.And do you think the industry broadly within crypto is doing a good job of coming together and unifying their messaging so that that kind of, you know, overall thesis of this is also an option is landing? that's the one thing I feel like it's a very collegial space in some respects. But that collegiality isn't necessarily landing in the PR narrative around the space. what are your thoughts on that?
Katie Perry
>> Agree with you on the collaboration within the industry. I've never seen more competing companies have amazing relationships between executives. There's so many committees that exist, working groups that are bringing people together. And it's so unlike a lot of the industries I've worked in where there's been times where someone's like, oh, I'll just call up so-and-so. And I'm like, don't we go head-to-head with them? And they're like, yeah, we're all working towards the same goal. I think the feeling is there's enough for everybody. We're at the very early stages of this stuff infiltrating sort of the core systems. And so I think that is amazing. I think when people can come together and work together, even though obviously we're all competing to some degree. I agree also, though, that those good vibes, we need to, you know, we're not fully there yet with people outside of crypto. If you talk to someone outside of crypto, like when I took this job, I was like, oh, I'm going to take this job. And they're like, oh, like FTX? Because that's what people know, right? And so it's understandable. And what the challenge is going to be is increasingly these digital asset use cases within products people already use. So right now, if you're watching a game on Sunday and you want to make a trade on Kalshi outside of banking hours, you could instantly fund your account with stable coins. You might not even know that's what you're doing necessarily. So this is all going to become invisible and just another way money moves. people might not even know it's crypto. So how do we sort of fix that reputation? If it starts to be underneath things, I think will be a challenge for the industry. But I think we've come a long way. I think I get less of that the more time I've been at zerohash. But there's still, a little bit of a hangover from things that happened. And I think that's just because what tends to penetrate the mainstream are not usually the positive stories or a great business case study
Gemma Allen
>> of course you have some very public prolific brand voices
Gemma Allen
>> yes
Gemma Allen
>> i get a lot of media yeah began Mark Cuban talking about Bitcoin right there's some voices out there that just get a lot of media pickup right it's a PR engine at the end of the day too and i think as an industry like many other industries that are peripheral it's a hard hurdle to overcome sometimes but it's certainly fascinating and the conversation around marketing and what's happening in this space is really interesting and profound. I'm going to actually look into that because, again, I feel like we could all learn something.
Katie Perry
>> I didn't even get paid to say that. Maybe I can get a discount.
Gemma Allen
>> Exactly.Well, Katie, thanks so much for joining us in theCUBE.
Katie Perry
>> Thanks, Gemma. Nice to be with you.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is NYSE Wired, Marketing Leaders. Thanks for watching.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen, one of the hosts of NYSE Wired, and today we are talking all things marketing leaders. that are the folks shaping the messaging that is reimagining technology, markets, and businesses of tomorrow. One thing we know is that crypto is having a very unique moment. The conversation has moved beyond speculation into how infrastructure and money actually moves in the real world. Joining me now for a conversation on exactly that is the Chief Marketing Officer at zerohash, Katie Perry. Welcome, Katie.
Gemma Allen
>> Thank you for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> So crypto, so much to unpack here from the perspective of marketing, right? And I want to dive into so much. But before we do, maybe just to start, let's level set with what exactly it is that zerohash does. Give me the company 101.
Katie Perry
>> Sure. zerohash is an infrastructure company. So essentially what we do is we help companies that are primarily non -crypto companies go on -chain. Now, people who are not deep in the industry might hear the word on -chain a lot and wonder, what does that mean? On -chain is just the terminology, meaning these companies are adopting and utilizing digital asset technologies in their products. That could be turning on crypto trading, buy or sell. If you've been following the news, E*TRADE just added crypto that was powered by zerohash. So that could be as straightforward as that. It could also be using digital assets as payment rails. So that's when stable coins come into the conversation. It might also mean tokenized assets. So any of those things, if a non -crypto company wants to leverage that technology, make it part of their customer experience, part of their product, they need to have the technology infrastructure to do that and the regulatory stack. So there's a tech layer and a compliance layer that we provide. And we were just chatting about AWS. I use that a lot with my friends that are outside financial services where AWS exists to help companies build their businesses online via a ton of different ways. We help businesses go on chain in terms of using digital asset technology, however they may be using it within their organization.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. So let's go into the marketing side of this because I really think this is a very interesting challenge that you have crypto in some respects it has had a wave of enthusiasm a wave of skepticism we know that from the narrative perspective things seem to change like the weather a little bit and that's tough I'm sure from the perspective of leading a company's marketing in the space but also it's something that when it's working well no one really sees it doesn't have the same brand affiliation brand identity tangible conceptual awareness that some other brands have. So it's an interesting one. How do you think about it from the perspective of marketing? What do you think makes the marketing challenge and the opportunitytruly unique?
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, a few things I think you hit on it. Crypto is sort of one of those words that has a visceral reaction who building in the space. It started really as kind of a core group of people who really wanted this. They had a vision for this decentralized universe that they wanted to build in or live in. And it had these sort of cultural associations. It was very community driven. That still exists. That's still there. Over the years, though, you've seen institutions start adopting this technology, institutions that zerohash works with. That's a different sort of mindset because instead of tracking the performance of an asset or a token in the day -to -day. They're looking at this stuff as, I'm going to incorporate this in my business so we have long -term durability, so we can more easily pay people across borders or optimize our treasury functions. So the way they're thinking about it is much more zoomed out, it's much more measured, but you still have people supporting projects and assets. And it's interesting, even very specific example being, when we manage our X profile at zerohash, we see, fintech writers talking about, Visa Direct using stable coins, which we just announced those guys as a partner. Big institutional story. It's sending a signal into the future. Right below that, I see, you know, the anonymous account sharing it, saying, you know, this is bullish for XYZ. And so you're navigating multiple audiences. And what's interesting is, you know, we're B2B. We market to the institutions and the businesses. But those audiences within crypto are still sort of important to the ecosystem overall.
Gemma Allen
>> And do you think a lot about maintaining the loyalty of the more eclectic peripheral player in the space? like the OG crypto pro-retail, who kind of tends to be more about the democratization of finance, about the kind of almost anti-institution play versus where crypto has now come to as an industry. how do you think about maintaining loyalty, I suppose, from both audiences?
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, what's fascinating about our business is we're interoperable across 100 plus ecosystems. So we don't, you know, pick favorites. We build a technology that makes it possible for people using different assets within these ecosystems, for those to work together within the broader framework of an institutional use case. And so I think with the OG people, my personal opinion is that they still belong in the community. This would not exist in its current state. It would not be getting the attention of the big institutions without the people that really believed and stuck with it. And they're a different flavor. They're a different style. I think it's great. I go to conferences and there's people, I saw a whole Bitcoin family at the Bitcoin conference. There was a baby in a Bitcoin onesie and the parents and they took their kid to Vegas. And then I saw five Deloitte consultants who were there to meet with. And so everyone's kind of there together. I think it's good. It's a good mix. I think it's good for both sides to experience and be exposed to the other. And I think you're seeing that more and more where I think maybe a couple of years ago, the people who were like the originals were like, oh, here come the suits. Now they're starting to realize that this all works together. You know, the vision they believed in and want to see that gets accelerated when these big businesses invest in them. Because when a huge institution invests in this, they're not just testing it out for a couple. They're really vetting it. And they're like, this is core to our business, we think, in the next 5, 10, 20 years.
Gemma Allen
>> And you guys at zerohash have really seen some very legitimate, long -term, traditional legacy players use and advocate for your technology, right? Maybe talk us through some of those examples and even just the kind of evolution of your own marketing messaging as we see and hear more and more institutional traders focus on the space here on Wall Street.
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, so going back a bit, zerohash was founded in 2017, which feels like forever ago in crypto. And so the company has really survived and then thrived through some really tough times. Some of those crypto winters when the team was building, and I wasn't there for that. I hear the war stories. A lot of the original people are still at the company. It was tough. And our CEO and founder talks a lot about the company was founded on the premise that the original team wanted to. they looked at the crypto space. They're like, we believe in this. And they're like, what's the biggest challenge right now? What's the biggest challenge? Because they believe that was the biggest opportunity. And what they saw was the biggest challenge is how are you going to get a Morgan Stanley, a BlackRock? How are you going to get these big institutions to believe in and adopt the technology? And a lot of that centers on trust. 2017, very different. You're talking probably getting laughed out of rooms to today where, we worked with BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Franklin Templeton on the big institutional side. And then also some of these really up and coming emerging fintechs, Kalshi, Gusto as well. And so that was sort of the original thesis was kind of like, what's the hardest thing we can do? And that was at a time when everyone was building very fun projects. And, you know, it was a lot of these sort of, you know, some survived, some didn't. And this team was like, wait, they were looking 20 years down the road and they're like, what's the hardest thing we can do? This is what it is. So I mentioned the word trust. Our marketing as a B2B infrastructure company is really about trust. And that comes to life in a lot of the things we do, but it also comes to life in just the product itself. And so, in addition to doing fun swag and merch and events, you know, we have 99 .99 % uptime. And a lot of our trust comes from our SLAs, the product durability, ability to handle massive volumes and so it's sort of like you'd appreciate this as a marketer It's like the boring stuff. It's solution based.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, I like it. Exactly So when you think about what changed in 2017 from the perspective of large institutions and banks to now right from being like you said maybe laughed out of rooms to suddenly being very much a talking point across a lot of large institutions. Do you think that the buyer profile changed somewhat in that time too? And how do you think about that from the perspective of your own category and target marketing? Like who is Top of Funnel and where do they live and ingest information?
Katie Perry
>> Yeah, it's fascinating. I think there's a lot of parallels to the beginning of my career. I started my career at an ad agency where we did consumer marketing for brands like Coca-Cola and Mondelēz and these big brands. And the agency was focused on digital marketing. And this was at a time when we had to, we were going to meetings and basically being like, here's why you guys need a Facebook page. And they were like, why do we need that? And what I saw in that experience is those audiences started to grow. Those platforms grew. Next thing you know, Oreo has a head of digital. And it's this random person who's the digital czar and they're all over here. And that's their job is to be the innovative person. Over time, that slowly seeps into every single role at the company. You know, the integrated marketing person knows digital. The PR person knows digital. I think that same thing happened or is happening with digital assets where maybe a few years ago, and you still see a lot of jobs head of digital assets. But now it's sort of part of everyone's function. If you're on a legal or compliance team, you got to know your stuff in digital assets. it's not a product. So it's not just this one person who's the evangelist, it's spread out. And from a marketing standpoint, it creates challenges and opportunities, because now we have, call it eight different categories of businesses we can go after. Within each of those, there's four different buyer profiles, you have the compliance person who cares about the licensing of the product, the product person who wants to get in the details of our API, you know you've got the ops person and so each of those requires a different message and all of that though needs to make sense and ladder up into a bigger picture brand story I think that's the most fun part about b2b marketing
Gemma Allen
>> and on that brand story
Gemma Allen
>> how do you think about that
Gemma Allen
>> from the perspectiveof social media where the actual conversations and listening is happening especially now right as it's like world of AI and LLMs and people doing their own research. We had another marketing leader on this morning he said you know I know that technical buyers go to Claude or OpenAI or wherever it is, to get advice on products to get recommendations right. What's happening in the crypto space around that? are technical buyers or potential customers using these you know LLMs as research and qualitative reckoning like what are you seeing?
Katie Perry
>> They absolutely are. And that's become sort of a pillar of our marketing activities. That's very important. We actually use a tool called Profound. And what they do, their service exists to basically ping all of the LLMs or the main ones with queries that somebody might be typing if they're researching your company. So someone might be saying, I'm looking for a digital asset infrastructure provider for stablecoin payments. Who's the best? They'll use their technology to ping that out and then they'll get the data back on who's ranking the highest and then they'll understand why. So they'll come back to us and say, you guys are doing pretty well in this category, but actually you're a little weak in this area. So with that insight, we know we're weak in discoverability in XYZ product in an LLM. We can then incorporate that into our messaging, our press releases, which gets picked up by LLMs, our Wikipedia page. There's all these things that we can use to signal. And so SEO, people doing that within Google was pretty established practice. Now there's LLM optimization and our growth lead on my team is very focused on that right now, making sure. And we can actually, with these tools, you can track over time, share of voice and understand in aggregate. It's very important. But it's still one of those things, and this was similar with Google, where you're sort of guessing what you can do to get in there because it's always changing. The LLMs aren't super transparent about saying these websites matter more than others. Third party. You have an article in Fortune. It's a trusted third party. That counts a lot. Wikipedia pages count a ton. Reddit counts a ton. Can't really control Reddit that much. So all these factors come in and then you sort of make tweaks and then you see what worked and what didn't. And it's a fun exercise, but it's very important for especially a technical purchasing decision where there's multiple players and you want to quickly get to a shortlist.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow, it seems to me based on the conversation we've had in this series that a lot of people are learning in the moment, right? There is no tried and tested playbook here.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> You kind of have to all learn as you go.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> From the perspective of the technical roadmap for a company like ZeroHash, where there is obviously, it's an infrastructure, it's an enabler. How do you think about solution messaging and technical messaging. And how do you think these worlds of crypto tech meets regular tech meets AI are crossing? Like there is a little bit of cross -pollination, but also I feel like a little bit of confusion perhaps.What are your thoughts?
Katie Perry
>> It's a unique challenge because we exist to simplify something that's extremely complex, time -sensitive and expensive for our partners. And so the messaging has to show that. We need to establish that we're simplifying something. We're abstracting the complexity. But the flip side of that is we need to show that we have credibility in the technical side and depth of the licensing. So it's this interesting balance where we exist to simplify. But if our message was just, hey, we make this easy for you, trust us, that doesn't work. And also, the depth to which we get into the technicality of what the product does depends on the buyer. If we're talking to an executive, a CEO, an ops person, they might not be in as deep of the product. We're really focused on solutions messaging. I think one big thing about where crypto has gone is crypto is a technology that exists to solve business problems. And there are so many business problems it can solve. So you want to optimize your treasury management, digital assets could help you with that. You want to move money across borders with less fees or maybe quicker, digital assets could do that. So a lot of the sort of top line messaging is here's a business problem, here's how digital assets solve it. When you get down to the product layer and the technical decision makers, you start to layer in more of how does it work, and then we get into, we have an API structure that makes it easy. We have a modular product structure. You integrate once with one product API, and then you can build from there. But we're not going to use that for someone just looking for a solution. And what's fascinating about all this is when you talk about even discoverability in LLMs, someone might search, they have a business challenge, and they might not be thinking stable coins is the answer, but we want to appear there. We're there to educate that this is a new technology that could help them solve that business challenge, even if they've never even considered it.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.And do you think the industry broadly within crypto is doing a good job of coming together and unifying their messaging so that that kind of, you know, overall thesis of this is also an option is landing? that's the one thing I feel like it's a very collegial space in some respects. But that collegiality isn't necessarily landing in the PR narrative around the space. what are your thoughts on that?
Katie Perry
>> Agree with you on the collaboration within the industry. I've never seen more competing companies have amazing relationships between executives. There's so many committees that exist, working groups that are bringing people together. And it's so unlike a lot of the industries I've worked in where there's been times where someone's like, oh, I'll just call up so-and-so. And I'm like, don't we go head-to-head with them? And they're like, yeah, we're all working towards the same goal. I think the feeling is there's enough for everybody. We're at the very early stages of this stuff infiltrating sort of the core systems. And so I think that is amazing. I think when people can come together and work together, even though obviously we're all competing to some degree. I agree also, though, that those good vibes, we need to, you know, we're not fully there yet with people outside of crypto. If you talk to someone outside of crypto, like when I took this job, I was like, oh, I'm going to take this job. And they're like, oh, like FTX? Because that's what people know, right? And so it's understandable. And what the challenge is going to be is increasingly these digital asset use cases within products people already use. So right now, if you're watching a game on Sunday and you want to make a trade on Kalshi outside of banking hours, you could instantly fund your account with stable coins. You might not even know that's what you're doing necessarily. So this is all going to become invisible and just another way money moves. people might not even know it's crypto. So how do we sort of fix that reputation? If it starts to be underneath things, I think will be a challenge for the industry. But I think we've come a long way. I think I get less of that the more time I've been at zerohash. But there's still, a little bit of a hangover from things that happened. And I think that's just because what tends to penetrate the mainstream are not usually the positive stories or a great business case study
Gemma Allen
>> of course you have some very public prolific brand voices
Gemma Allen
>> yes
Gemma Allen
>> i get a lot of media yeah began Mark Cuban talking about Bitcoin right there's some voices out there that just get a lot of media pickup right it's a PR engine at the end of the day too and i think as an industry like many other industries that are peripheral it's a hard hurdle to overcome sometimes but it's certainly fascinating and the conversation around marketing and what's happening in this space is really interesting and profound. I'm going to actually look into that because, again, I feel like we could all learn something.
Katie Perry
>> I didn't even get paid to say that. Maybe I can get a discount.
Gemma Allen
>> Exactly.Well, Katie, thanks so much for joining us in theCUBE.
Katie Perry
>> Thanks, Gemma. Nice to be with you.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is NYSE Wired, Marketing Leaders. Thanks for watching.
Gemma Allen