Crypto and Web3 Marketing in the Philippines

The Philippines is one of the few markets where retail crypto stopped being a novelty years ago. Axie Infinity's play-to-earn boom in 2021 turned tens of thousands of Filipinos into wallet owners before most of Europe had opened a first exchange account. Chainalysis ranked the country second worldwide in its 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index; in the 2025 edition, published in September, it placed ninth. That slide matters less than what it says: adoption here is grassroots, retail-led and remittance-driven, not institutional. It also means acquisition costs are low and trust costs are high.

What the market actually looks like

Three things shape any campaign run here. First, mobile and wallet infrastructure. GCash and Maya are the default rails for payments, top-ups and, increasingly, crypto on-ramps. If your funnel assumes a card or a bank transfer, you will lose people at the deposit step regardless of how good the top of the funnel is.

Second, English. The Philippines has one of the largest English-speaking online populations in Asia and a BPO sector built on it. This is the reason global crypto brands treat Manila as a cheap testbed — and the reason generic English creative underperforms. Filipino audiences read English fluently but respond to Taglish, to local creators, and to references that are unmistakably local. A campaign translated from a US deck reads as foreign within two seconds.

Third, channel concentration. Facebook and Facebook Groups remain the centre of gravity for community discussion, with TikTok and YouTube driving discovery and Telegram and Discord handling the actual project communities. Paid social is inexpensive relative to Europe or Singapore, but crypto advertising is restricted on the major platforms, so most of the workable inventory sits in creator partnerships, community seeding, native placements on local finance and tech media, and search.

Regulation is now a marketing constraint, not just a legal one

Two regimes apply. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas licenses Virtual Asset Service Providers, which is why exchanges like Coins.ph and PDAX operate onshore. Then, on 30 May 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued Memorandum Circular No. 4, Series of 2025 — the CASP Rules. It defines crypto-asset service providers broadly and, critically for us, treats promotion itself as a regulated activity: advertising, sponsored content, articles, events and airdrop campaigns can all fall within the definition of marketing a crypto-asset. The SEC has also shown it will act on distribution, not just issuance — access to Binance was restricted in 2024 following an SEC advisory and NTC blocking.

The practical consequence: creator and affiliate programmes that were normal in 2022 are now a liability. Any serious campaign here needs to know which entity is licensed, what the disclosure obligations are, and which promoters are registered to take payment for promotion. We plan campaigns around that from the first media brief rather than discovering it after a takedown.

The problems we get called about

For crypto and fintech projects with a real budget, the recurring issue is that Philippine numbers look spectacular and convert poorly. Cheap installs, huge Telegram growth, very low deposit rates. The gap is almost always the on-ramp, the KYC flow, or an incentive structure that attracts airdrop farmers rather than users who transact twice.

For ecommerce operators already spending on Meta and Google, the problem is different: Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop own the demand, so brand-direct traffic has to justify itself against a marketplace with free shipping vouchers. Add cash-on-delivery return rates and attribution gets ugly fast. Web3 mechanics — tokenised loyalty, verifiable ownership, wallet-based repeat purchase — only make sense here if they solve that repeat-purchase economics problem, and we will say so when they don't.

For manufacturers and B2B technology companies with a sales network across Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, the issue is that the distributor relationship absorbs all the demand signal. Nobody knows which campaigns produced which orders, and the channel has no incentive to tell you.

What we do and how it is measured

Blue Manakin has run user acquisition for Mantle, Socios.com, BetFury, Reental and Bnext — a layer-2 ecosystem, a fan token platform, a gaming product, a tokenised real estate business and a neobank. Different funnels, same discipline: paid media where it is permitted, creator and community work where it isn't, and content built to survive a compliance review.

Measurement runs to on-chain and revenue events, not engagement. Wallets connected, first deposit, second transaction, cost per funded user, retention at 30 and 90 days, and — for commerce and B2B — cost per qualified opportunity by region and by channel partner. We instrument server-side where iOS and browser restrictions break attribution, and we report against a baseline agreed before launch so the numbers mean something after three months.

We start with a market and funnel audit: where Filipino users actually drop, which on-ramp they expect, what the licensed entity is allowed to say, and what the realistic cost per funded user looks like at your current spend. If the honest answer is that the Philippines is not your next market, that is a useful outcome too.

This page is aimed at companies with an existing media budget and someone accountable for it: exporters and manufacturers with a commercial network in the Philippines, ecommerce brands already trading at scale and spending consistently on paid acquisition, B2B SaaS and technology firms selling into Philippine enterprises, and crypto or fintech projects with funding, a compliance function and a product live in market. Typically five to two hundred people, with analytics already in place and a track record of paid campaigns that can be audited. Work of this kind needs sustained investment over quarters, not a one-off push, and it assumes the product and the on-ramp already work.