Halfway through our conversation, a man whose agency pitches crypto stories to journalists like me said that DeFi does not exist, at least if you ask him. Itai Elizur is Managing Partner at MarketAcross, and on day one of CONF3RENCE in Dortmund I asked him how the crypto stories you read actually get made. He answered from the pitch room, where the audience has shifted from cypherpunks to banks, and where he says AI handed ordinary users weapons and handed the professionals nukes.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Itai Elizur is Managing Partner at MarketAcross, a blockchain PR and marketing agency that calls itself crypto-native since 2014. His speaker bio counts more than 300 blockchain companies served, Binance, Solana and Polygon among them. |
| 2He says AI hurts the media side of his business most, and that press releases are finished: his team now sends journalists short snippets. |
| 3He sees the crypto market turning into fintech, where pitches are about API integrations and bank relationships, and he tells founders to become their own KOL instead of paying YouTubers. |
| 4My read: his most useful advice was for founders, and it costs nothing. Stop renting a voice and build your own. |
The full conversation runs nearly nineteen minutes.
Why MarketAcross’ Itai Elizur moderates panels
I opened with something that had been bugging me. PR people usually work behind the scenes at an event, making the introductions that end up as interviews like this one. Elizur keeps turning up on stage instead, moderating panels about MiCA and regulation, so I asked him what the managing partner of a PR firm is doing up there. Before he answered, he pointed out that MarketAcross and Cryptofocus have worked together for several years, and that his firm is also the main marketing and media partner of this event.
I don’t know if every story you see in crypto has a PR person behind it, but I do think that there’s some thought into the narrative side, and that’s for sure. I think narratives are very strong in the world of consumers in general, especially in crypto. And I do think that we, as PR people, have a lot of control in that.
Itai Elizur, Managing Partner, MarketAcross
That is a more precise answer than my question deserved. Narrative is the product in crypto in a way it rarely is elsewhere, because a token trades on expectations long before it trades on revenue. The people who frame those expectations for journalists hold real influence, and he said so plainly.
His case for being on stage is about translation. He told me he is no lawyer, and that moderating is a job of its own: you take a situation, dissect it and edit it on the fly.
when you put three lawyers and me on the stage maybe we can splice it in a way that people will actually be able to listen a bit more
Itai Elizur
Anyone who has sat through a regulation panel knows the problem he is describing. The expertise is on stage, and half the audience drifted off at the first article number. A moderator who can cut that into something a founder will actually listen to is doing editorial work, which is close to what I do for a living. At an event, his firm also gets clients onto the programme and press into the room, and it distributes the news through Chainwire, a newswire he says the group owns.
Read the thread on X
AI handed the professionals nukes
Then I asked about AI, because this conference puts it next to tokenisation on the programme, and because every founder I meet now thinks ChatGPT can write their op-ed. Elizur said he could talk about it for hours, and he started where it hurts.
I think that the major thing that AI is doing that’s harming our business is on the media side.
Itai Elizur
He means publications like the one you are reading. Fewer people write full time for a paper or a website, so fewer humans sit on the other end of a pitch, and an agency needs media to talk to. The agency side, in his telling, is doing well. His team got what he calls superpowers, and the oldest format in the trade is already gone.
To be honest, press releases are even dead right now. We have a whole different thing that we send journalists. It’s more of like a little snippet or whatever.
Itai Elizur
On the newsroom side, the difference is one of time. The four-paragraph release with a boilerplate footer was written for a journalist with time. A snippet is written for one who has none, and who may be the last person left on the desk. Then he summed up what AI has done to his trade.
So if you ask me, the normal people were given weapons, we the professionals have been given nukes.
Itai Elizur
The logic runs like this: if a founder with no PR experience can produce a passable op-ed in a minute, a team that has placed stories for years can use the same tools to produce better ones, faster and in more languages. On his reading, the gap between amateur and professional widens with every new model.
AI agents are still a dream, he says
I pushed further and asked what happens when the company he pitches answers through an AI agent. He rejected the premise before I had finished the question.
So agents are a big dream that people have been talking about, but other than hacking other things right now, agents don’t exist on a matter of fact.
Itai Elizur
He allowed that agents pitching agents could come one day. For now, he said, newsrooms use ChatGPT to write articles, and the agentic future that fills conference stages is eons away. The more revealing part came later in our conversation, when he explained where his own firm does use them.
agents are amazing for internal process. So we use agents to create everything. A human does everything outside of that.
Itai Elizur
The line he draws is clear: inside the building, software does the drafting and the sorting, and outside it, where a journalist decides whether to trust a source, a person does the work. He holds his staff to the same rule. Everyone is expected to use the tools, and anyone who mistakes the tool for the job will not stay long.
DeFi doesn’t exist, and banks are the new audience
The line that will travel furthest came when I suggested that DeFi and TradFi are growing together. He disagreed with my framing straight away.
DeFi doesn’t exist, if you ask me. Stablecoins giving yield is not DeFi.
Itai Elizur
What he described is the room he now pitches into. MarketAcross also runs a business-to-business side outside crypto, and he told me he looks at much of this market as fintech, where the conversation is about whether your API connects to mine and what it does better than the next one. Years ago, he said, telling someone you believed in Solana could make an Ethereum maximalist leave the room.
So that whole part of the discussion is gone, and now it’s from how do we replace the banks to how do we get the banks to like us.
Itai Elizur
CONF3RENCE is a fair place to test that sentence. The programme puts Union Investment, DZ Bank, Commerzbank and ING in the same halls as crypto-native builders such as SwissBorg, Algorand and Centrifuge. At an event built like this one, the question on stage is how a crypto company becomes a partner a bank can sign with.
For a PR firm, everything downstream shifts with it, from the buyers in the room to the media covering them. He said these conferences are now about how the island crypto built can talk to the real world, and his clients rewrite their story for that audience. A few years ago, he said, the same clients mostly wanted to reach crypto natives.
Stop paying YouTubers and become the KOL
The advice I would pass to any founder came near the end, when I asked how he keeps a team together for years in an agency business where people usually churn. His answer turned into a lesson about marketing itself.
Everyone wants a KOL. And I say, stop giving YouTubers money and make yourself a KOL. So make your founder a KOL. Make your employees a KOL.
Itai Elizur
A key opinion leader, in crypto marketing, usually means a paid influencer with an audience. His point is that a paid voice leaves when the budget does, while a founder who can explain the product on a panel, and a team that writes and speaks in public, keep building trust for as long as they stay. He practises it himself: most of his team has been with him for four, five or six years, and they speak on panels and write for publications under their own names.
It also connects to what he said about how crypto used to communicate.
they called it PR, it was actually IR. It was investor relations for B2C.
Itai Elizur
For years, crypto communication meant talking to token holders about price and calling it press. He says that part of the business is changing, so companies now have to think about their digital footprint and their funnels, and his firm helps them grow from an idea into a movement, then an exchange, then a financial institution. That arc is the fintech point again, told from the client’s side.
Surviving is the plan for the next cycle
My last question was about growth for Q4 and next year, and his first word was the most honest one of the conversation.
Crypto is sometimes about surviving, not just winning. So we’ve survived. It was a difficult year.
Itai Elizur
No forecast came with it, because he said nobody knows what the next cycle will look like, only that each one brings its own launch playbook. Last time it was airdrops, before that it was IDOs, and whoever writes the next textbook will make a lot of money in that run. His firm’s job, as he sees it, is to spot that playbook early and be ready first.
That is the question I will be watching after Dortmund: who writes the textbook for the next launch cycle, and whether it is written for token holders or for banks. On what he told me, his clients are already rewriting their pitch for the second group.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Itai Elizur?
Itai Elizur is Managing Partner at MarketAcross. His speaker bio describes him as COO and Managing Partner at MarketAcross, InboundJunction and Chainwire, and he invests through BlockBuilders. Before crypto he held content and marketing roles at Wix, Infolinks and The Forward.
What does MarketAcross do?
MarketAcross is a blockchain PR and marketing agency and the Web3 branch of the InboundJunction group. Its site lists blockchain PR, strategic advisory, SEO for Web3 companies and event partnerships among its services, and his speaker bio puts its client count at more than 300 blockchain companies.
Why does Itai Elizur say DeFi doesn’t exist?
In his view, stablecoins that pay yield are not DeFi, and the conversations he sees in the market are fintech conversations about API integrations and bank relationships. He told me the industry has moved from asking how to replace the banks to asking how to get the banks to like it.
What is a KOL in crypto marketing?
KOL stands for key opinion leader, usually an influencer paid to promote a project. Elizur’s advice is to stop paying YouTubers and to turn the founder and the team into the voices people follow.
Read next
- Where the risk sits: CONF3RENCE 2026 in thirteen interviews, our complete article on the thread connecting all thirteen conversations.
- All our CONF3RENCE 2026 interviews, published as they come out of Kokerei Hansa this week.
- Our preview of CONF3RENCE 2026, for the programme and who else is speaking in Dortmund.
- MarketAcross and Itai Elizur on X.
Three primary sources worth opening yourself: his Consensus 2025 speaker bio for his roles and the 300-company figure, Chainwire’s about page for the newswire he mentioned, and the CONF3RENCE speaker list for the institutions and builders sharing the stage in Dortmund.
Recorded at CONF3RENCE 2026, Kokerei Hansa, Dortmund, on 15 September 2026. Quotes are verbatim from the recording with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of CONF3RENCE. Nothing here is financial advice.
