Tim Haldorsson Built Lunar Strategy During Crypto’s Collapse. 7 Years Later, He’s Still in the Market

By late 2018, the ICO boom had turned to rubble. Bitcoin had shed roughly 80% of its value from the peak. Projects that had raised hundreds of millions on little more than a whitepaper were going dark. Developers were updating their LinkedIn profiles. The phrase “crypto winter” had moved from metaphor to lived reality. It was precisely at this moment that Tim Haldorsson decided to open a marketing agency for the industry. “When you can build a profitable business in a challenging market,” he says, “that builds a very strong foundation for what’s going to happen after.”  Lunar Strategy launched in 2019 and never really slowed down. Seven years later, the Lisbon-based agency has worked with more than 250 clients, including Polkadot and Cardano, and is now expanding beyond crypto marketing into AI automation. On May 15, the company turns seven. In retrospect, the timing looks almost visionary. At the time, it mostly looked like stubbornness. The Battle for Attention in Crypto Crypto has never lacked technical innovation. What it has consistently struggled with is explaining that innovation in a way people actually understand.  For Haldorsson, that remains one of the industry’s defining challenges: not just building a strong product, but building the narrative around it. “There’s a lot of competition between communication of what tech is the best,” he says. “You need to be able to tell the story as well and communicate it in a very clear way to stand out.”  That competition has only intensified as the industry matured. Blockchain ecosystems are no longer simply competing for token holders. They are competing for developers, liquidity, institutions, and long-term users. In many cases, the deciding factor is not necessarily superior technology, but whether a project can articulate why its technology matters. The broader implication, Haldorsson argues, is that infrastructure alone is no longer enough. Projects increasingly operate inside an attention economy where narrative clarity can shape adoption just as much as throughput or decentralization metrics. As a result, crypto marketing itself has fundamentally changed. From Hype to Revenue In 2019, much of crypto marketing revolved around speculation, token launches, and rapid community growth. By 2026, according to Haldorsson, the market has become significantly more disciplined. “One thing that we see now in 2026 is that it’s much more TradFi and revenue focused,” he says. “Investors have gotten much higher standards and are much more diligent with what they want to see in the market.” The projects attracting attention today are increasingly those capable of demonstrating actual business sustainability rather than pure token momentum.  “You can see that the products that have strong revenue are the ones that are doing the best,” Haldorsson added. The trend mirrors the broader institutionalization of crypto markets following multiple industry crises, including the collapse of the FTX exchange in 2022. For many crypto-native companies, that period became a turning point. For Lunar Strategy, the fallout from the FTX collapse became one of the company’s most difficult periods. “2022 around the whole FTX situation,” Haldorsson recalls when asked about the agency’s hardest year. “Not so much for ourselves, but it was very hard for a lot of our clients, which brought a lot of challenges to our company.” Even so, he sees the period as formative rather than destructive. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” he says. That focus on sustainability shapes how Haldorsson evaluates growth itself. Why Incentives-Driven Growth Fails One recurring problem Lunar Strategy encounters involves projects relying too heavily on incentives to create user activity. “A key challenge I see is that a lot of crypto projects are doing very well with incentives,” Haldorsson said. “But then when they don’t have the incentives anymore, they’re struggling quite a bit.”  The issue has become particularly visible across sectors like DeFi, GameFi, and newer social token ecosystems, where aggressive reward systems often generate short-term engagement without building lasting product loyalty. For Haldorsson, the underlying issue is relatively straightforward: users need to genuinely want the product even after the rewards disappear. “I think that’s a key thing to build a product that people love even without the incentives.” That same philosophy also influences how he thinks about marketing execution. Founder-Led Marketing Gains Favor For startups operating with limited budgets, Haldorsson believes one strategy stands above the rest in 2026: founder-led or team-led organic marketing. Rather than spending aggressively on influencers or key opinion leaders early on, Lunar Strategy CEO advises projects to prioritize direct visibility through interviews, podcasts, opinion articles, and community discussions. “Focus on pitching opinion articles, podcasts, interviews, X spaces, and do all of those organic things,” he explained. “Completely ignore working with content creators or key opinion leaders at the start.” The recommendation reflects a broader shift across crypto marketing itself. Where past bull markets rewarded influencer reach and hype, today’s environment increasingly favors credibility, transparency, and direct communication. From Conferences to AI Expansion Haldorsson recalls how the company’s approach has evolved alongside the industry itself. Two years ago, Lunar Strategy hosted a crypto and AI conference in Lisbon that drew roughly 1,300 attendees and 70 speakers. Despite its scale, Haldorsson says the company later shifted toward smaller, more curated gatherings focused on founders and VCs. Those internal conversations have since extended beyond marketing. Lunar Strategy recently launched Espressio AI, an automation business built on internal systems developed over several years. The turning point, Haldorsson says, came after showing one of the tools to a friend. “He was like, ‘We need this, and how much would you charge for it?’” he recalls. “That was kind of the hallelujah moment.” His team realized they were significantly ahead in AI adoption compared to many companies, many of which were still early in their transformation. Lunar, by contrast, had already solved problems that those firms had yet to fully identify.  Espressio AI is now the vehicle for bringing those solutions to market. Bottom Line Haldorsson opened Lunar Strategy when the industry looked finished. Now, as crypto enters another transition, he is placing another one: that the next cycle belongs to projects built on real revenue, real products, and stories worth telling. The timing, as ever, is his own. Dig deeper into DailyCoin’s trending crypto scoops today:Fidelity, DTCC Tap Chainlink in Landmark Week for Tokenized FinanceNvidia’s HBAR Bet Clashes With Retail AI Agent Frenzy People Also Ask: What are crypto marketing services? Crypto marketing services are specialized promotional and growth activities designed for blockchain and Web3 projects. They typically include content marketing, community management, PR, influencer outreach, SEO, and strategic positioning to help crypto projects attract users, investors, and developers. What is a crypto marketing strategy? A crypto marketing strategy is a structured plan used to grow awareness, users, and adoption for blockchain projects. It combines storytelling, community building, content distribution, partnerships, and data-driven growth tactics. What is AI automation? AI automation is the use of artificial intelligence systems to perform tasks automatically without continuous human input. It combines machine learning, workflows, and decision-making tools to streamline processes like marketing, data analysis, and customer engagement.