Following the FTX crisis, cryptocurrency marketers are looking for a new sales pitch.

The sudden multibillion-dollar collapse of the FTX crypto exchange has left large swaths of the crypto world in poverty and misery. Retail investors are suffering greatly. Flagship exchanges are on the verge of bankruptcy. Crypto critics are overjoyed. The toilet is in the landfill, and institutional support is in the toilet.

What should a crypto marketer do?

Many small businesses are putting things on hold in the hope that attention will shift elsewhere. “We’ve been advising our clients to hold off on making any announcements,” said Samantha Yap, CEO of crypto PR firm Yap Global. “We are aware that the entire media and public attention will be focused on this story for the next few weeks as the contagion spreads.”

Another public relations professional, a toiler on several major Defi projects who did not want to be identified because he was being candid, put it bluntly: “All our team meetings revolve around trying to spin bad news into tolerable news.”

His only concern now is extracting as much money as possible from the industry before it collapses. “I’ve had three jobs as a community and project manager across three blue-chip DeFi protocols,” he explained. “Two of them are outright scams, and the third does not look promising.” But compare that to my $8,000 monthly salary for sitting on my arse all day.”

However, if you look closely, you will notice signs of life in this battered old dog. A $1.5 billion raise for a company called Matrixport. A new $100 million fund has been established for “institutional clients.” A proprietary market centered on Ape-related NFTs. The Japanese central bank is sponsoring some sort of central-bank-digital-currency thing.

Are these the last, vile screams of a dying creature, or is crypto slouching toward a new, improved version of itself that can (supposedly) withstand future disasters?

Kristian Srenson, a serious Danish chap who believes the FTX fiasco represents a golden opportunity for crypto to break free from its seedy past and embrace the warm and sensible light of regulatory compliance, would give a resolute and enthusiastic “yes.”

Srenson runs a>He believes that the increased scrutiny from regulators will “help accelerate the more healthy part of the industry—rather than get-rich-quick ambitions.”

Indeed, Srenson’s dream for crypto—listen up, cypherpunks and Silk Road gunrunners!—is for the “use cases” to be heavily regulated while the underlying technology is deployed in harmless, responsible contexts, such as enterprise-blockchain-era things like crowdfunding and verification.

Farmy, a crypto-enabled online supermarket in Switzerland, is one project that particularly excites Srenson. “They sell organic produce and various vegetables, and they wanted to expand their platform, so they ran a crowdfunding campaign in which they tokenized equity in the company,” he exclaimed. “Through tokenization, they were able to actually meet their fundraising goals—in this way, they made their core customers co-owners of the platform, which will only increase their loyalty.”

Srenson is not alone in his call for greater caution in the cryptosphere. Almost every new crypto product announcement pitched to me right now is a reaction to FTX. There are now reams (well, two, as nobody really contacts me anymore) of press releases emphasizing guardrails, regulation, strict policies of not gambling with billions of dollars of customer funds, and responsible “we would never do that” pitches in my poorly protected Gmail inbox.

Some are more trustworthy than others. One press release from the massive Chinese exchange Huobi announces an ambitious plan to “help Huobi return to the world’s top three exchanges,” noting incomprehensibly that “technology drives development and technology for good”—despite the fact that the project is led by one of cryptoland’s least savory characters, “His Excellency and Plenipotentiary” Justin Sun of the pointless TRON blockchain.

It’s not just exchanges and exchange-related businesses seeking a fresh start. Alexandra Fanning, a publicist who has represented crypto artists, told me that November’s craziness has allowed her NFT company to better pursue its goal of “working with artists who have long worked in new media art, and avoiding those who are just jumping on the bandwagon in the hope of making some quick cash.”

On the other end of the spectrum, some believe that FTX was the result of too much deference to establishment practices. Among them is Cindy Leow, the founder of the decentralized exchange Nexus, which has seen a significant increase in users since the crash, according to Leow. “So many people are unable to access their crypto anywhere other than Nexus,” Leow explained. “People are saying, ‘I’m logged out of Binance for some reason,’ but I can only trade on Nexus.”

Leow believes that the crash demonstrates that mainstream, centralized exchanges are too immature to be trusted with people’s hard-earned life savings, and that regulation will only ever provide a semblance of security and respectability. Nonetheless, she believes that people should be able to enjoy “speculative thrills” without jeopardizing the safety of their funds. Nexus “looks and feels like a centralized exchange,” she says, but each user has their own key. That way, when they lose all of their money, it will be their own damn fault.

And this is good for cryptocurrency.