And there’s often someone who, for reasons you may never fully know, doesn’t—your foe.

Spotting and managing both can be the difference between a smooth close and a slow death.

The Advocate

When I sold RARA to Mask Network, my advocate was Homin Luo, founder of NextID. I first met Homin when meeting potential investors and buyers at ETH Denver. Spending a lot of time around him and the Mask team, it was clear Homin had vision and influence.

From our first conversation, he understood the value of what we’d built—not just the tech, but the complimentary value of our protocol’s engagement graph played to NextID’s social graph. He knew the strategic fit inside Mask’s broader ecosystem, and he took personal ownership of making the deal happen.

Homin pushed meetings forward when calendars stalled and back channeled when the deal ran into resistance with the finance team. He translated internal priorities into clear asks so I could address them before they became objections. He worked behind the scenes to line up support from other product teams on not just the technicals but the vision.

And most importantly, he sold the deal when I wasn’t in the room. He sold our shared vision of the future of consumer social.

That’s what an advocate does—they carry your story and your numbers into rooms you’ll never see. Without an advocate, even a great deal can die in busy calendars and lost momentum.

The Foe

Months earlier, I’d been in advanced talks with another potential acquirer. The CEO was a strong personal connection and we had years of a shared working relationship. On the surface, the fit looked perfect.

But inside their company was a different story. The deal’s foe was a senior leader with soft power over a number of business units. They saw me personally as competition for budget, headcount, and frankly their personal authority and influence.

They raised doubts about competency and framed the deal as a distraction to other business leaders. And, most damningly the CEO shared my proposed role as COO and compensation structure - a stark difference to the foe’s title and compensation.

When I realized the strategic mistake, I tried delicately to explain the dynamics at play and why we need to de-scope the deal teams to only those who need to know and directly influence growth outcomes.

It was too late. The foe had convened an internal meeting—and killed the deal.

The CEO wanted the deal and our team to join his company. But by the time the internal resistance had hardened, it didn’t matter. The deal was dead.

That’s the thing about a foe: they rarely have to say “no” outright. They just slow things down, seed doubt, and create enough friction that momentum disappears.

Why This Matters for Founders

You can’t control every personality inside a buyer’s org, but you can:

1. Find your advocate early – Look for the person leaning in, asking sharp questions, and showing up without being chased. Their energy level is your tell.

2. Arm them with proof – Give them the story, the strategic fit, and the data they need to win over other stakeholders. As the deal progresses, give advocates talking points to address concerns and neutralize potential foes.

3. Identify your foe – Listen for repeated objections, subtle reframing of your value, or people who disappear when decisions get made. Again - energy levels and their presence are your tell.

4. Neutralize without confronting – Engage foes directly, acknowledge their concerns, and find ways to make the deal less threatening to their priorities. Most importantly, identify their motivations - social or financial. Do they care about title and power or are they more financially driven. Use this insight to frame the deal in a way that protects their ego and, where possible, gives them a win.

Why This Matters for Buyers

If you’re on the acquiring side, know this: every deal you pursue has both an advocate and a foe inside your company. The question is whether you recognize them early enough to act.

• Empower your advocates – Give them authority, resources, and time to shepherd the deal.

• Surface your foes – They’re not always wrong. Sometimes their resistance points to real risks. Address those risks instead of letting them fester. Separate egos from outcomes.

• Share information strategically – Advocates and foes both need information to be effective, but not everyone needs to know everything. Limit sensitive details—like compensation—to legal and finance to avoid unnecessary internal strife. Give each deal team member only what’s relevant to the outcomes they own.

The Takeaway

In M&A, the advocate moves your deal forward.

The foe slows it down—or stops it cold.

You don’t get to choose whether these roles exist. But you do get to choose how you work with each.

Your exit will depend on it.

The Origins of Relayzero

At Relayzero, we believe exits are created and earned—not found. That belief and the name of Relayzero started with one number: 0x000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f.

Mining bitcoin is a brute-force grind. Millions of machines all over the world are competing to find a random nonce (numbers) until one hits a hash with enough leading zeros. That’s proof of work.

Being a founder is no different. The world has all of the same information and sees the potential reward, but behind every outcome is relentless grind. Relayzero exists to honor and amplify that work—especially at the finish line.

Founder Exit Market Fit

Like mining, building a company is a relentless amount of work, often thankless iteration through failures, pivots, and silent wins. The world sees higher valuations, token launches, or maybe an exit. But founders just see all their work.

Most founders I know are not just chasing liquidity. They’re chasing alignment. They care who’s buying, what happens to their team, their product, their users, and - especially in crypto - the legacy they will help create. They want an exit that fits—both financially and philosophically.

That’s what we call Founder Exit Market Fit.

The Year Crypto M&A Got Weird

We are sitting 18 months into the juiciest crypto merger and acquisition market on record. This surge in M&A activity is driven by crypto’s first native revenue cycle with revenue up and down the stack from apps and protocols to defi and consumer.

I bought my first company in 2016—a Bitcoin wallet. It was a customer of the banking API company where I was General Counsel and they were running out of cash. We didn’t just buy code—we hired the team, gave them long-term upside, and aligned on a shared vision where fintech and crypto would collide. Classic acquihire.

For years, M&A in crypto followed a simple path:

• Buy talent

• Buy users

• Buy revenue & roadmap shortcuts

The market was pretty “expected”.

But in 2024, the crypto M&A market got weird.

On February 27, 2024, Phantom (the leading Solana wallet) acquired Simplehash (a token metadata API). Thirty days later, Simplehash’s API—used by many of Phantom’s competitors—was shut down. That’s not a typical acquihire or product and revenue acquisition. This sent wallets and a lot of other consumer apps scrambling to find alternatives and wasting time refactoring code (FN 1). That’s what we’ll call an adversarial acquisition - an acquisition that harms competition.

In March 2024, three AI token DAO’s proposed a merger in what looks to be in retrospect a marketing stunt to not combine the three tokens but to create a fourth proxy token.

As one of the first people to write extensively about onchain cashflow, a potential DAO merger piqued my interest.

Did someone say onchain M&A? Turtles all the way down.

In October 2024, we saw a more picturesque version of token acquisition when the Synthetix DAO ($SNX) proposed to acquire Kwenta DAO ($KWENTA), the token behind the Synthetix marquee app.

While technically, we saw our first onchain M&A in 2021, it’s pretty clear crypto has entered its real M&A era.

Traditional companies like Stripe are now billion dollar buyers. DAOs are writing term sheets. Products are acquired and then killed off to hurt competitors. Markets are no longer just competing for users. They're competing to win.

Doing the Work at Relayzero

We help founders navigate this new landscape—and create the outcomes they want.

Relayzero is an M&A advisory firm built by a founder who’s been on both sides of the table. I’ve sold my own company, purchased others, had deals blow up at the finish line, and helped founders land deals amidst the chaos.

(FN 1) I am an advisor to Indexing Co, a distributed ETL for blockchain data. Indexing Co is an excellent solution for companies built on data API’s like Simplehash. Ask your data engineer. They’ll explain.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to receive updates on the crypto M&A market.