The next billion crypto users won’t come from hype cycles

The crypto industry has an unhealthy habit of waiting for a messiah. Every few years, a new trend shows up to bring millions of newcomers into the market: ICO boom in 2017, NFTs in 2021, memecoins and Telegram mini-apps in 2024. Each cycle ends the same way — crowds rush in, liquidity pours out, and the ecosystem looks around asking: what now?

The answer today is less about the next ‘boom’ and more about infrastructure — specifically, how crypto will meet billions of new users and whether crypto will be ready when they already are.

From search to answer: AEO is the new frontier

For the last decade, crypto’s growth and awareness depended on SEO-friendly hype, similarly to any business at this point. But today, global search queries are dramatically changing, with AI destroying SEO. Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity are taking the lead. This is still far smaller than Google’s massive search engine, which handles nearly 14 billion queries each day — though ChatGPT is said to have reached the 1 billion mark 5.5 times faster. That number jumps to a majority among Gen Z, who have no patience for “ten blue links,” where 40% of young users prefer ChatGPT over Google. They want answers, not lists. 

This is a tectonic shift. If SEO fueled web adoption, AEO will decide how crypto narratives spread in the 2030s. Yet almost no one in crypto is thinking about it. Marketing budgets are still spent on X threads, YouTube explainers, or influencer shills. Meanwhile, the algorithms that answer a newcomer’s first question — “How do I buy my first token?” or “What is staking?” — are being written right now, and crypto is absent from the table.

The industry needs to start treating Answer Engines as its new top-of-funnel. The fight for attention is moving from keywords to context. Whoever teaches AI the clearest, most user-friendly version of crypto wins the next billion users. 

And here are some examples of how to use AEO in crypto today.

1. From whitepapers to straight answers

Crypto has long relied on long-form content: whitepapers, endless Twitter/X threads, and jargon-heavy blogs. That worked in the SEO era. But answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini don’t reward length — they reward clarity.

A user doesn’t ask: “Please provide a detailed overview of Ethereum (ETH) scaling solutions.” They ask: “Best crypto wallets for iPhone?” — and expect: “MetaMask Mobile, free on the App Store. Works with Ethereum, Layer 2s, and integrates with Coinbase Pay.”

How to implement:

• Build Q&A hubs with real questions like “How do I buy Bitcoin (BTC) safely?” or “Which wallets support staking?”
• Write in a conversational style — skip “enterprise-grade custody” and say: “Keeps your coins safe even if you lose your phone.”
• Seed forums like Reddit and Quora with practical answers. Perplexity already cites forums in 27% of its responses.

Fact: Conversational answers are more likely to be used by AI than generic long-form content.

2. Trust comes from “live” voices, not backlinks

SEO rewarded backlinks. AEO rewards real experiences. In crypto — where scams are common — people (and AI) trust user voices over polished PR.

How to implement:

• Post personal reviews on Reddit, Telegram groups, or Hacker News. Example: “I’ve used [wallet] for 18 months, here’s why it beats Coinbase Wallet.”
• Maintain strong Google Business Profiles for exchanges, OTC desks, and ATMs.
• Work with micro-influencers. A 90-second TikTok showing how someone buys their first ETH resonates far more than a glossy ad.

Example: A Reddit post — “Opened an account on Kraken. Verification took 24 hours, fees are lower than Coinbase, and withdrawals hit my bank in two days” —  is more likely to be cited in ChatGPT than a generic blog post.

3. Structure and multimodality win attention

SEO was about keywords. AEO is about structured, multimodal content: tables, screenshots, videos. AI now parses visuals and transcripts, not just text.

How to implement:

• Create comparison tables: “Coinbase vs. Kraken: fees, KYC speed, withdrawal times.”
• Add screenshots with alt text: “Screenshot of a $100 Bitcoin purchase on the Coinbase app.”
• Publish short videos with transcripts: “How to stake Solana (SOL) in under two minutes.”
• Use schema markup (JSON-LD) for FAQs and product pages to increase AI citation odds.

Example: A “Best Ethereum staking platforms 2025” page with a table (APYs, lock-up, withdrawal speed), platform screenshots, and a short YouTube walkthrough will be far more likely to appear in AI answers than a keyword-stuffed article.

Telegram: A sleeping giant

If AEO is the intellectual gateway, Telegram is the social one. With over a billion monthly active users and with around 2.5 million users joining Telegram every day, Telegram already dwarfs most social platforms used by crypto natives, with Notcoin and Hamster Kombat being bright examples of new users’ onboarding.  

Crypto has never had a user funnel this big, this concentrated, and this unserved. Telegram is effectively a crypto-native App Store, with built-in wallets, communities, and distribution. And yet, beyond speculative games, few serious projects are investing in building long-term user journeys there.

What if Telegram became the place where people didn’t just play-to–earn, but actually learned to earn — onboarding into DeFi, DAOs, or staking with the same ease they joined a chat group? The infrastructure is already here. What’s missing is imagination.

Why UX is the only real moat

Here’s the hard truth: crypto does not have a technology problem. The blockchain rails work. The wallets work. Smart contracts work. What it lacks is a user experience that doesn’t feel like an alien spaceship manual.

Every cycle, we’ve seen the same bottleneck: newcomers arrive in droves, only to crash into confusing interfaces, opaque jargon, and scams. Some leave burned, others never return. It’s not volatility that scares people away — it’s the sense that they are on the wrong side of an inside joke.

If we’re serious about onboarding billions, UX and transparency are the only real moats. Think of Apple’s iPhone in 2007: smartphones already existed, but Apple made them usable. That is the challenge for web3 today. Answer Engines and Telegram are not just new channels; they are crucibles for proving whether crypto can finally stop building for itself and start building for people.

The hidden race for the next billion

The loudest memecoin or the flashiest NFT drop will not win the race for mass adoption. It will be won quietly, in the trenches of AEO algorithms and Telegram onboarding flows. If the crypto industry invests in teaching AI to explain itself clearly, and in building Telegram pathways that feel human rather than transactional, the next billion users will arrive not because of hype, but because the product finally makes sense.

We don’t need another bubble. We need infrastructure that turns small mistakes into stepping stones instead of dead ends. That’s how you go from cycles of hype to an ecosystem of permanence.

In the end, the strategy for onboarding the next billion isn’t complicated. Answer Engines don’t reward jargon or hype; they reward clarity, structure, and simple language. Ironically, you wouldn’t believe me, that’s exactly what newcomers have been asking from crypto for more than a decade. The paradox is almost comical: in trying to make ourselves legible to algorithms, we may finally become legible to regular, non-tech-savvy people.

If that happens, it won’t just be a marketing breakthrough. It will be a cultural one. Because once crypto stops speaking in riddles to its own insiders and starts speaking plainly to both robots and humans, mass adoption will no longer be a dream tied to the next hype cycle. It will be the natural outcome of finally being understood.