Crypto loves a shortcut. The right meme, the right mint, the right partnership, and suddenly you’re everywhere. Lately, the “shortcut” of choice has been KOLs. Get a big name to tweet about your project, watch the impressions climb, and hope the momentum sticks.

Except it rarely does.

Most KOL campaigns are like a sugar high. You pay for a flash of attention, traffic spikes for a day or two, and then it all collapses back to baseline. The hype doesn’t turn into users, and the users don’t turn into a community. What you’ve bought is the illusion of growth, the same kind you used to get running Facebook ads before everyone caught on.

The problem isn’t that KOLs can’t work. It’s that most projects treat them like a vending machine for attention instead of as partners in building something that lasts.

The Misuse Problem

When you hire a KOL for a one-off shout-out, you’re betting that their audience will stop what they’re doing, click through, and care enough to stick around. But most of the time, their followers aren’t here for you, they’re here for them. Your product is a cameo in someone else’s show.

And even if you get a flood of clicks, you still have no idea how many of those people ever become active users. Without a retention engine in place, you’ve just paid a premium for churn.

This is why KOL spend feels so slippery: it’s expensive, hard to attribute, and built on an audience you don’t own.

The Incentives Are Misaligned

A KOL’s job is to keep their own audience entertained, informed, or hyped. Your job is to build a product and community that people want to engage with long after the spotlight moves on. Those are two very different missions, running on two very different timelines.

The KOL’s timeline starts and ends with the post. They get paid, they deliver the content, and their work is done. Your timeline runs months or years past that moment, from onboarding those new eyes, to turning them into active users, to keeping them engaged through market cycles.

The space between those two is The Dip: the gap between the quick hit the KOL is incentivized to deliver and the sustained adoption you actually need. It’s where impressions evaporate into nothing, and where most campaigns go to die.

Closing The Dip requires more than just picking “better” KOLs. It means rethinking the relationship entirely and aligning incentives so their success is tied to your retention curve, not just their engagement spike. Until you close that gap, you’re paying for fleeting moments, not momentum.

Flipping the Frame

KOLs do work, but not as billboards. Not as one-time fireworks. The way they become real growth drivers is if they’re integrated into your story, your narrative, and your long game.

That means finding people who are embedded in the niche you’re serving. People who don’t just know the culture you’re building for, but are part of it. When they talk about you, it’s not an ad. It’s continuing the story. 

Instead of dropping a bag for a single post, fold a KOL into a broader arc: recurring AMAs, co-created content, collaborations at events, moments that build familiarity over time. Give them more than a talking point. Give them a role in the story.

And measure it differently. Not by the reach of a tweet, but by wallets activated, retention curves, referrals, onchain engagement. Influence isn’t a spike on the dashboard, it’s the compounding effect of someone with credibility showing up for you again and again.

The best KOL relationships feel less like sponsorships and more like alliances. They have skin in the game, maybe literally, through equity, tokens, or community membership. They don’t just amplify your message; they help shape it.

Closing The Dip and Building Sustainable Influence

Once you’ve seen The Dip, you start looking for ways to close it. The answer isn’t to ditch KOLs entirely. It’s to make them part of a sustainable influence strategy that turns fleeting attention into lasting connection. That means:

Start with community, not campaigns.
If you’re paying for followers, you’re renting an audience that disappears when the budget does. Invest in a place people want to be. Get in the comments. Host the AMAs. Show up in other projects’ spaces. Over time, those people stay because they see value, not because you paid for a cameo in their feed.

Work with embedded operators, not just personalities.
In crypto, the people who move culture aren’t always the ones with the biggest follower counts. They’re the ones building, curating, and contributing in ways that earn trust. These are the people who can credibly bring your project into their circles because they’re already part of them.

Lead with value, not volume.
Content is still king, but only if it matters. Skip the fluff. Solve a problem. Share an insight. Give people something they can use today, not someday.

Reward organic momentum.
The strongest growth doesn’t come from paid promotion. It comes from people who are excited enough to bring others in. Recognize and reward those advocates, not with empty perks, but with roles, access, and real ownership in the mission.

When to Use KOLs and When to Walk Away

None of this means KOLs are off the table. But if you use them, evaluate them like you would a strategic partner, not a media buy. Forget shiny follower numbers; look for evidence of real engagement. Ask whether they’ll be around long enough to keep the conversation going. And only bring them in when your foundation is solid enough to turn the spike they deliver into something compounding.

Otherwise, you’re just paying for a sugar high.

At Myosin, we run KOL plays that close The Dip by aligning incentives, building for the long term, and measuring what actually matters. If you’re ready to ditch the hype and build something with staying power, we should talk.