There is a tendency in crypto to assume the problem is the product. For Ignacio Aguirre Franco, it isn’t.
“The challenge isn’t that the technology is too complex,” he told Financial Promoter. “It’s that we explain it badly.”
After more than a decade in marketing across companies such as Adobe and SAP, Aguirre Franco now leads global marketing at Bitget.
The transition from traditional software to crypto, he argues, has exposed a fundamental gap, not in capability, but in comprehension.
“In traditional tech, people already understand the category,” he says. “If you say Photoshop, no one asks what it is. In crypto, you start from zero every time.”
From explanation to translation
Much of crypto marketing still operates as if the audience were technically fluent. It isn’t.
Only a small fraction of the global population actively uses crypto products. The overwhelming majority, encounter an industry that speaks in layers, protocols and acronyms.
“We’re trying to sell outcomes,” Aguirre Franco says. “But we’re explaining infrastructure.”
That disconnect, he suggests, is where marketing fails.
The task is not to simplify the technology itself, but to translate it into something that feels immediately useful.
“If I can’t explain what we do to someone at a dinner table in a way that makes sense in two minutes, then the messaging is wrong.”
The narrative shift: from crypto to finance
At Bitget, this thinking underpins the company’s positioning as a “universal exchange”, a platform that combines crypto, traditional assets and automated tools in a single interface.
But Aguirre Franco is careful to avoid framing this as a technological leap.
Instead, he frames it as a behavioural one.
“People don’t think in categories like DeFi or TradFi,” he says. “They think in terms of what they want to do with their money.”
The implication for marketing is clear: stop segmenting by product type, and start aligning with user intent.
“It’s not about selling crypto. It’s about providing access to financial outcomes, whether that’s trading, saving, or generating yield.”
Why analogies matter
To bridge that gap, Aguirre Franco relies heavily on analogy, a tool often underused in financial marketing.
He describes the evolution of exchanges through the lens of music consumption:
- early crypto as the “cassette era” -fragmented and limited
- later platforms as the “CD era” – broader, but still constrained
- today’s platforms moving towards a “streaming model” – seamless, on-demand, unified
The comparison is deliberate.
“People don’t need to understand the underlying system,” he says. “They just need to recognise the experience.”
Trust is necessary – but not sufficient
While trust remains a central issue in crypto, Aguirre Franco argues it is often overstated.
“Trust matters,” he says. “But even if people trust you, they won’t use something they don’t understand.”
Education, therefore, becomes critical, but not in the conventional sense of more content or more technical detail.
“Education isn’t about adding complexity,” he says. “It’s about removing it.”
That means reframing products in human terms. Rather than explaining trading bots as algorithmic tools, for example, the message becomes simpler: you don’t need to watch markets all day.
From effort to outcomes
Aguirre Franco often draws on everyday experiences to illustrate this shift.
In one example, he describes spending hours manually cutting his lawn before buying an automated solution.
The parallel to investing is intentional.
“We’ve normalised effort as a sign of value,” he says. “But effort is not the same as effectiveness.”
The same logic applies to trading: constant monitoring, analysis and manual execution are no longer prerequisites. Automation, AI and copy trading are designed to remove that burden.
The challenge is not building those tools – but convincing users they can trust them.
Marketing for the 95 per cent
If crypto is to reach mainstream adoption, Aguirre Franco believes the industry must stop speaking to itself.
“The real audience is not the five per cent already in crypto,” he says. “It’s everyone else.”
That broader audience is less interested in innovation than in usability. They are not early adopters; they are pragmatic users.
And they are unlikely to engage with a product that feels intimidating.
“The future of this industry depends on making it feel normal,” he says. “Not revolutionary.”
The direction of travel
Over time, Aguirre Franco expects crypto marketing to converge with traditional financial marketing, less focused on underlying systems, more focused on outcomes.
In that sense, the trajectory is towards invisibility.
“The technology will still be there,” he says. “But people won’t need to think about it.”
For marketers, that represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge is to let go of technical storytelling.
The opportunity is to redefine how financial products are communicated altogether.
“Good marketing,” Aguirre Franco says, “isn’t about making things sound smarter. It’s about making them feel simpler.