Adil Ashfaq · Crypto marketing strategist
About

I did every part of this job before I led it.

I started as a freelance writer in 2017 and worked up through content creation, content management, strategy and team management to CMO. That order matters more than the title does. It is the reason I can tell you which part of a marketing plan is going to fail before you spend money on it.

Today I work independently with crypto and fintech brands on narrative, content and go to market. Protocols, wallets, auditors, RWA platforms, stablecoin issuers, mostly at the point where they have a product and no way of making anyone believe in it.

My focus is RWA tokenization and stablecoins. Those are the two places where crypto is touching real money and real people, and as a marketer they are the only vertical I find interesting. Everything else is either solved or not real yet.

But the part I actually care about is access. Someone in Lahore, Jakarta or Sao Paulo buying gold, oil, Apple or Nvidia from a wallet, which they could not do five years ago, and which no local broker was ever going to offer them. That is a bigger story than any yield number, and almost nobody in crypto marketing tells it properly.

So I write about it every week, which is also where most of my work now comes from. Seven years of being in the room means I can say when something does not work. The audience I built is mostly people who wanted someone to say it.

At a glance
In crypto since2019
Writing since2017
RecognitionTop 30 Most Influential Voice in Fintech, LinkedIn
EducationBSc Software Engineering, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
Audience32,800 followers, 6.2M impressions a year
FocusRWA tokenization, stablecoins, institutional adoption
LanguagesEnglish, Urdu
The arc

Writer, then strategist, then the seat where the number lands.

2017

Freelance writer

Started writing for whoever would pay, which turned out to be the fastest education available in how a reader decides whether to trust a page.

2019

Into crypto

Guides, announcements, lore and whitepapers for Sandbox, Axie Infinity and NFT collections, during the period when the whole category still had to be explained from scratch.

2022

Content management and strategy

Head Writer on the $LUMI RWA launch at LumiShare, content strategy at Techouse Games, and agency side work at Blockwiz across dozens of crypto clients. Built and ran content teams delivering at volume.

2023

Marketing strategy

Joined Antematter to build a B2B content engine from almost nothing. It produced over $1M in new revenue in Q1 2024 and is still running. I still work with them part time.

2023 to 2025

CMO, Circular Protocol

Owned marketing for a DeSci Layer 1 for two years. Community from near zero to 250K, fifty plus partnerships closed including Accenture and ZayaAI, and six figure paid campaigns for the ICO and listings. Hired and managed the team.

2025 to now

Independent

Consulting across multiple crypto and fintech clients, plus LinkedIn distribution as its own line of work. And open to the right full time seat, which the case studies will tell you more about than this page can.

The companies that win on distribution are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that build real credibility before they ask for anything. The finding behind seven years of this
What I think is actually happening

Stablecoins and RWAs are redrawing where financial power sits.

You are hiring a point of view as much as a skill set, so here is the point of view. Disagreeing with it is fine, and sometimes the more interesting call.

Access is the real RWA story

Not yield, not efficiency. People anywhere buying gold, silver, oil, Apple, Google and Nvidia from a wallet, when their local market never gave them the option. Everything else is a footnote to that.

RWA works on stocks and commodities, not property

Tokenized equities and commodities are functioning now. Real estate at any real scale is not, whatever the decks say, and pretending otherwise damages the category.

Crypto is moving toward TradFi, steadily

More ETFs, more institutional participation, more products built for people who will never use the word degen. Meme and degen culture does not get replaced by this. It flourishes alongside it.

Users should not have to read the legal wrapper

The average person buying a tokenized product should not need to understand its legal structure to be safe. That responsibility sits with issuers and platforms, and most of them are quietly offloading it onto the user.

Where I am skeptical
  • High FDV launches, and token models designed around VC extraction rather than a working product
  • Leverage trading marketed at retail audiences who have no business near it
  • Narratives with no real revenue behind them, however loud the category gets
  • Scammers and shillers, which I call out publicly and do not treat as a cost of doing business in this industry
How I publish

Every week, on a fixed cadence, since December 2024.

The audience was built by showing up on schedule rather than by going viral. If you are hiring me for distribution, this is the machine you are buying into.

Tuesday

Thought leadership. The current run is on how crypto is shifting toward traditional finance and what marketers have to change because of it.

Thursday

Quote graphics across four themes: marketing and narrative, stablecoins, RWAs, and product experience.

Friday

Humour and real experience. Things nobody warns you about, unrealistic client expectations, and life as a crypto marketer.

Weekly

The Weekly Recap. Ten stories with headlines and blurbs, running continuously since December 2024.

One rule holds across all of it. If a number appears in a post, I have to be able to defend it in the comments. Nothing gets rounded up.

Outside the work
  • Islamic history, jurisprudence and practice
  • Geopolitics and macro markets, particularly the geopolitics of money, which is where my interest in stablecoins actually started
  • Football. Haaland and Ronaldo, and I will defend both
  • Travel, the outdoors and being somewhere with no signal
Where the audience is

Dubai, London, New York, Lahore, Jakarta and Sao Paulo. I write for a global audience rather than a US and Europe one, which is deliberate. The people who need tokenized access most are not in the markets that already have it.

CV and full work history

For a senior role or a longer engagement, the full CV covers the roles, dates, team sizes and references that this page leaves out. Email me and I will send it the same day.

Email itsadilashfaq@gmail.com
Telegram @itsadilashfaq
Get in touch

Open to consulting engagements and to senior marketing roles.

Whichever one you are here about, a call is the fastest way to work out whether it is a fit.