For years, crypto sales were “crypto-native.”
You didn’t have to explain a wallet or a protocol. Everyone you sold to already believed.

That phase made distribution simple — because your customers were insiders.

But look at the signals now:

• Bitcoin ETFs now manage $150B+

• Circle’s IPO surged 300% in its first month

• Fidelity and Schwab are onboarding millions of retail investors into direct crypto trading

• Robinhood’s crypto revenue is 2.5× equities

We’ve entered the enterprise era of crypto — where selling means convincing organizations, not just believers.
And when markets mature, distribution changes shape.

Jason Rosenthal says it bluntly:

“The best products sell themselves” has been a long-lived fallacy in tech.

In early crypto, that myth kind of worked. You built something great, people found it through Farcaster or Crypto Twitter, and word spread fast.

But your next customer isn’t hanging out in Telegram.
They’re in risk committees, procurement offices, and compliance reviews.

They don’t care about your governance model — they care about uptime, audit readiness, and ROI.
This is where crypto founders hit the wall. They’re still pitching ideals when buyers want outcomes.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia don’t have massive sales teams because their products are weak. They have them because distribution scales through people.

A strong sales process does what virality can’t:

• Translate technical value into business value

• Navigate procurement and compliance

• Build trust across multiple decision-makers

• De-risk the buyer’s choice

That’s distribution in its most durable form — not hype, not virality, but trust that compounds.

Crypto-native founders sell alignment — shared values, shared vision, shared chain.
Enterprises buy something different — ROI, reliability, and reduced risk.

Their job to be done isn’t “join the revolution.”
It’s “increase revenue, reduce cost, or stay compliant.”

Every adoption curve goes through this shift:
The early adopters buy the vision.
The early majority buys the value.

That’s why Distribution is Hard.
Each stage demands a new translation layer.

Rosenthal warns:

“The four most dangerous words in enterprise sales are, ‘We got the verbal!’”

Crypto founders used to fast cycles — DMs, quick deals, handshake mints — will find enterprise procurement excruciating. Pricing models, liability clauses, SLAs, legal reviews — it’s trench work.

Every inch of progress is earned.
It’s football, not pinball.

But that discipline is distribution.
It’s what turns early interest into lasting revenue.

Crypto is reliving what SaaS went through a decade ago.
The shift from community-led adoption to institutional sales doesn’t dilute the mission — it scales it.

It means crypto has grown up.
The next wave of builders won’t just evangelize decentralization; they’ll operationalize it.

And they’ll understand that sales isn’t the opposite of distribution — it is distribution.

Crypto doesn’t need to abandon its roots; it needs to evolve its reach.
The early believers got us here.
The enterprises will take us the rest of the way.

Distribution rules everything around me.
And right now, distribution looks a lot like sales.

If you’re building in crypto, your next unlock isn’t another feature — it’s a distribution system.
Join the /distribution channel on Farcaster to connect with founders doing the work.