Paco

marketing & crypto | account director at @hypepartners | personal opinions only

[Paco @cullipaa]

Hyperliquid: Road to TGE

I keep seeing takes on X saying Hyperliquid never needed marketing because they built a great product.

Even the best have a marketing playbook.

Here is how Hyperliquid executed it.

1. Pre-Testnet: Seeking Validation & Feedback

Hyperliquid built a strong early community by partnering with trading-focused DAOs.

These partnerships helped them:

· Spread brand awareness
· Drive interest in their product
· Funnel early supporters to test the app

2. Testnet: Driving Growth & Retention

Hyperliquid launched its point program to incentivize user activity through gamification. Pivotal to keep users interested.

· 6 months flight
· 1M points distributed weekly
· points utility –> reward users

This approach kept the community heavily involved.

They also engaged with a few trading KOLs to promote the app, using a referral and rewards system.

The type of content created was:

· Announcements about the creation of vaults
· Updates on trading performance
· Live trading sessions or post-trade analysis on X

For those wondering.

Vaults are mini hedge funds where users would provide money, and these KOLs would manage it for them.

In essence, Hyperliquid used them as the influential faces of their product. This was a KEY user acquisition lever for them.

Within six months:

· 4,000 users
· $200 million in trading volume

3. TGE: Proving What You Stand For

The $HYPE launch was perceived as the return to “fair launches” in crypto.

The key success drivers were:

1/ Massive airdrop: 31% of the supply was distributed on day 1. This attracted more users, captured mindshare, and led to a 125% price surge.

2/ Community-first tokenomics: no VCs. No private sales. Fully self-funded

3/ Long-term rewards: over 40% of the supply was set aside for trading incentives post-TGE

4/ Tokens fully unlocked: immediate token utility and liquidity to holders. This helped in building trust and engagement.

4. Post Mainnet: Comms & Product Development

Remember the KOLs? Well, they got some users rekt.
Leading to FUD and withdrawals.

Despite this little crisis, the team stayed locked in, focusing on:

1/ Product development
· new trading features
· staking rollout
· solid cadence of listings involving community

2/ Retention
· rewards for active traders
· strong security and transparency positioning

3/ Messaging
· consistently showcasing growth and performance

Conclusion

Even the strongest products need a clear GTM strategy and growth playbook.

Hyperliquid proved it.

[Paco @cullipaa]

@thedlearner No time to lose my man!

[Paco @cullipaa]

Started my Bitcoin DCE strategy yday.

The next 3-6 months are going to be key for BTC longing and positioning yourself well for the next 2-3 years.

Exciting times.

[Paco @cullipaa]

Always happy to see positive DeFi adoption signals amid rough markets

@coinbase still pushing for onchain finance

[Ethena @ethena]

Ethena and @coinbase have partnered to grow onchain finance and savings products for their 100m+ userbase, with the first growth initiative launching next week.

Alongside this partnership Coinbase Ventures have also made their first investment into Ethena on the open market.

[Paco @cullipaa]

Crypto sponsorship deals are more of a "look how powerful we are" sort of brand move. It built the illusion that you can buy mainstream adoption with a shirt logo.

Imagine what you could do with a $20M budget instead of going for a Premier League shirt without regulatory risk and more measurable views and conversions.

[Financial Times @FT]

Premier League clubs could face legal action over sponsorship deals with crypto firms https://t.co/s4M0X2eiX2

[Paco @cullipaa]

bookmarked

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Bookmarking tweets and not going back to them has become an epidemic

[Paco @cullipaa]

@0xxDana dana doesn't use ifs or whethers, she only says facts

[Paco @cullipaa]

We are hiring video reply guys.

Reply with a reaction pitching why we should hire you.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

Commentary is one of the most important pillars of X. And sometimes the best way to share your thoughts is with video.

Today we're launching a whole new way to make them:
React with Video

Tap the repost button and start recording with green screen, split screen, or picture-in-picture.

Now available on iOS

[Paco @cullipaa]

@Dashchkkk Happy to hear you are liking it so far! Alicate is a great place to live

[Paco @cullipaa]

Reviving this one.

[Paco @cullipaa]

x in 2026 shows what ai actually did to content:

articles ghostwritten by ai
boosted by the algo
summarized by grok
engaged with via ai

did any of it get better?

[Paco @cullipaa]

Top-performing brands on TikTok run multiple accounts.

All of them run three or more, each niched to a topic or audience, each posting 30 to 50 videos a week.

When one of them breaks out, they decide what to do with it. Clip it for paid. Repurpose it for other platforms. Build it into a recurring property.

This isn't new. @garyvee called it 18 months ago.

What's new is the cost. AI UGC, faceless creators, batched scripts. Producing at this volume went from five-figure budgets to almost nothing.

If you're still running one branded TikTok account for your crypto project in 2026, you're behind.

[Paco @cullipaa]

happy sunday fam, don't forget to touch grass when you run out of tokens

[Paco @cullipaa]

x in 2026 shows what ai actually did to content:

articles ghostwritten by ai
boosted by the algo
summarized by grok
engaged with via ai

did any of it get better?

[Paco @cullipaa]

@mariamagenes1 @GroverGPT 😂😂😂

[Paco @cullipaa]

@bogwitch 💨💨💨💨

[Paco @cullipaa]

Most crypto brands think TikTok isn't for them.

When they finally test it, the failure usually traces back to one of three things. None of them is budget.

1. They obsess over follower count.

TikTok is interest-first, not follower-first. A brand account with 3K followers can compete with a creator at 3M. The key to a breakout is at the video level.

2. They recycle content from other channels

Don't clip podcast or conference highlights. If your team is going to a conference, send a TT specialist with them. This applies not only to TT, but also to X and IG.

We do this at @hypepartners

3. They want results now

Sometimes brands come to us needing results in 4-6 weeks, and if they don't find the content format that breaks out for them, they declare the channel dead.

To find several formats that work for you, we recommend a minimum of 3 months of testing target personas, formats, and content angles. Many quit before that window even closes.

The reality is, we can't control virality, but the more time you give yourself to test, the higher the chances to breakout either via ugc content or brand page.

See attached a screenshot of a recap deck our team @nikkifrommia & @0xLynnpham put together for a crypto ai app client last year.

[Paco @cullipaa]

@bogwitch why do you think cointelegraph got de-indexed @bogwitch ?

[Paco @cullipaa]

@naruto11eth @Polymarket wow, big news, congrats!!

[Paco @cullipaa]

@0xLynnpham Did you run out of tokens?

[Paco @cullipaa]

reading greg's sf list, three things stood out:

· sf doesn't have a moat anymore. same apis, same x feed. you can build from berlin, lagos, anywhere. it's okay to be outside the bubble.

· mcp is the new seo. if agents can't find your product, you don't exist. most crypto projects have zero mcp exposure today.

· every fast-growing startup, vc, and frontier model is hiring content creators

if you're a crypto project and want to fix your agent discoverability, hit us up.

it's exactly what @0xxDana and @glitch_ are working on at @hypepartners 's ai studio

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Paco @cullipaa]

@ZoeCatherineF @Zcash are laptop cameras getting covered with stickers, too? haha