Legitimacy on Demand
Press releases were supposed to announce news. Now they manufacture it.
Chainstory analyzed 2,893 crypto press releases published between June and November 2025.
Their findings read like an indictment: 62.5% came from projects flagged as high-risk or outright scams. Only 27% traced back to legitimate operations.
Flip those numbers around and something darker emerges. Legitimate projects rarely flood the wire - they attract journalists organically.
Scams have no such luxury. When no reporter will touch your story, you write it yourself and pay for placement.
The volume becomes the tell. More press releases, more suspicion. The industry built a credibility machine that now runs in reverse.
Who's actually reading these things - and more importantly, who's investing based on them?
Traditional press releases follow a simple path. The company sends an announcement to wire service. Wire service is distributed to newsrooms. Journalists decide what's worth covering. Editorial judgment acts as a filter.
Crypto rewrote the rules.
Pay and your announcement lands on 100+ websites. No pitch required.
No editor to convince. No questions asked. The wire services call it "guaranteed placement." Projects call it legitimacy on demand.
"You aren't buying reach, you're buying a veneer of truth," Tal Shmuel Harel from Chainstory stated.
Chainstory's data reveals what actually floods through these pipes. Product updates and exchange listings account for 74% of all releases - routine operational noise that would never survive a newsroom's sniff test.
Only 2% covered genuinely material events like funding rounds, acquisitions, or substantive research.
Exchanges were among the heaviest users - nearly a quarter of all releases covered listings, trading promos, and new features. They compete to attract token projects, and PR distribution is part of the package.
Cloud mining platforms - where roughly nine in ten releases came from high-risk or scam operations - use the wire to dress up unrealistic yield promises in professional language.
The prize isn’t genuine coverage; it’s the "As Seen On" section stacked with borrowed credibility from Tier‑1 outlets - a mirage crafted through syndication, not journalism.
Users see familiar brands and assume someone vetted the claims. Nobody did.
Here's the twist most buyers never learn: Google's algorithms hide duplicate content. When identical releases appear across dozens of sites, search engines filter most into oblivion. You're paying for URLs that exist but nobody sees.
Shotgun distribution sounds impressive in a sales pitch. Reality delivers trophy links for landing pages and little else.
Gallup data shows trust in mainstream media at historic lows.
Crypto media operates with even fewer guardrails. When editorial judgment gets replaced by invoice processing, what's left resembles news in form only.
None of this is new. Scammers figured out decades ago that press releases move markets faster than fundamentals.
The playbook was written long before anyone heard of blockchain - so why does crypto keep falling for the same tricks?
The Playbook
Let’s roll the tape and see how the game’s been played before.
Economist Thomas Renault analyzed SEC pump‑and‑dump enforcement cases between 2002 and 2015, finding that press releases appeared in 73.3% of schemes - the most common information channel, ahead of spam emails, fake websites, and message‑board hype.
The perpetrators weren't random bad actors. Company insiders - CEOs and CFOs - showed up in 60.7% of cases. Paid stock promoters appeared in 49.3%. The line between issuer and fraudster blurred more often than not.
Mark Cuban spotted this pattern early. His investigative site ShareSleuth has sent researchers to physically verify claims made in press releases. They'd show up at addresses listed as corporate headquarters.
Common finding: "No utilities, nobody there."
"I used to make a f*** ton of money shorting companies," Cuban said in January 2025.
The gap between press release fiction and on-the-ground reality was that predictable.
September 2021 proved even verified distribution channels aren't immune. A fake press release hit GlobeNewswire claiming Walmart would accept Litecoin for payments. Reuters picked it up. CNBC ran with it. Even Litecoin reportedly retweeted it.
Litecoin spiked 30% in minutes.
Circle of BS PR complete.
Walmart denied everything. The price crashed. GlobeNewswire issued a retraction - a fraudulent account had slipped through their verification process.
Reuters got duped on a wire that actually has compliance standards. Crypto-specific services skip that step entirely.
Christmas Eve 2025. A fake platform called "CircleMetals" pushed a press release claiming affiliation with Circle, the USDC issuer. All fraught with fabricated quotes from CEO Jeremy Allaire and they even used Circle’s branding.
The site prompted visitors to connect their wallets - a classic drainer setup.
Circle confirmed the scam, but by then the release had already spread.
Hong Kong's JPEX exchange used press releases throughout 2023 to claim licensed status and legitimate partnerships.
The Securities and Futures Commission eventually warned the public that JPEX had never been licensed and hadn't even applied. By then, 2,700 victims had lost HK$1.6 billion.
Press releases didn't create these scams.
But they gave fraudsters something editorial coverage never would have: a microphone with no one asking questions.
When the same manipulation tactics work for decades across different markets, is the problem the scammers - or the infrastructure that keeps handing them megaphones?
The Amplifiers
Press releases land the placement. Influencers do the rest.
September 2025, ZachXBT dropped a leaked spreadsheet containing wallet addresses and rate cards for over 200 crypto influencers.
Price range: $50 to $60k per post (Only one was $60k, Most clustered well below $10k).
Of the 160+ accounts that accepted promotional deals, fewer than five disclosed the posts as paid advertisements.
The pipeline runs clean. Project buys press release distribution. Headlines appear across dozens of sites. Influencers get paid to share those headlines with their audiences.
Followers see trusted voices endorsing something that's "already in the news." But none of that legitimacy is truly learned.
FTC guidelines require "clear and conspicuous" disclosure for paid endorsements.
Violations carry fines up to $53,088 each.
Enforcement has been sparse - the agency relies mostly on warning letters.
The SEC handles securities. The FTC handles advertising. Crypto influencer promotions often fall into both buckets - but only one agency has actually moved.
The few celebrity cases that made headlines were SEC actions under securities law: Kim Kardashian paid $1.26 million in 2022. Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled settled in 2018. Steven Seagal in 2020. Four cases. Seven years. Meanwhile, undisclosed promotions remain the norm.
Taylor Monahan, Lead Project Manager at MetaMask, didn't mince words back in 2022 (From a CNBC piece): "I am viciously opposed to all partnerships with crypto influencers. I would urge anyone, even if they consider themselves legitimate, to not form these sort of faux partnerships."
Camila Russo built The Defiant as an alternative to the pay-to-play ecosystem.
Her view on the current state of crypto media: "A lot of crypto journalism is just paid advertisement that isn't being disclosed. We get so many pitches every day from people who want to pay for articles and are asking for that to not be disclosed."
The legitimate journalists are still out there, doing the work. But they're competing against a flood of paid content designed to look exactly like their output.
Bot services complete the illusion. Services offer customizable fake engagement - likes, followers, comments - to make projects appear legitimate. A post with thousands of interactions looks organic.
Algorithms reward the activity. More eyeballs arrive.
The fake engagement industry feeds larger fraud operations. Crypto scams drained an estimated $17 billion in 2025. Operations that buy bulk social media accounts are 238 times more effective. AI-enabled scams extract 4.5 times more money than traditional approaches.
According to recent research from Chainalysis, impersonation scams show massive 1400% year-over-year growth.
Press release creates the headline. Influencer amplifies the headline. Bots validate the influencer. Retail sees consensus where none exists.
When many layers of the signal chain can be purchased, what's left that can't be faked?
The Body Count
CoinGecko tallied the damage in January 2026. Since 2021, 53.2% of all cryptocurrency tokens have died.
Not struggling. Not dormant. Dead.
The carnage accelerated. 2021 saw 2,584 failures. By 2024, that number hit 1.38 million.
Then came 2025: 11.6 million tokens collapsed in a single year - 86% of all recorded failures in crypto history, concentrated into twelve months.
Q4 2025 alone buried 7.7 million projects. October's liquidation cascade wiped $19 billion in leveraged positions and took the marginal tokens with it.
Total projects tracked went from 428,383 at the end of 2021 to over 20 million by December 2025. The explosion came from low-effort launchpads - Pump.fun and its imitators - that let anyone mint a token in minutes.
Creating tokens got easy. Creating the appearance of legitimacy remained the bottleneck. Press release distribution solved that problem at scale.
The math writes itself. 62% of press releases come from high-risk or scam projects.
The distribution industry isn't accidentally servicing fraud - fraud is the business model's center of gravity.
SEC enforcement actions hit $4.98 billion in crypto penalties during fiscal year 2024.
Cornerstone Research released a report recently. They found that the SEC initiated only 13 actions in 2025 ($142 million in penalties), a 60% decline from 33 actions in 2024.
New President, new administration, new SEC, with less enforcement.
The retreat of enforcement didn’t shrink the grey areas, it expanded them.
Press releases remain technically legal as long as they carry disclosure labels. Liability sits with the issuer, not the distributor. Wire services get paid either way.
11.6 million tokens died last year. Many had press releases. Many had influencer threads. Most had engagement metrics that looked real enough.
When the obituaries outnumber the survivors, who exactly is the credibility machine built to serve?
Telling this story won't win popularity contests.
Wire services sell distribution packages. Influencers sell audiences. Projects buy both. Point at the machine and you're pointing at revenue streams.
Revenue streams have friends. Friends get defensive.
But 62% of press releases coming from high-risk or scam projects isn't a narrative. It's data.
11.6 million dead tokens isn't FUD. It's a body count.
The clues were always there, the story just hadn’t been stitched together yet.
It's an exposed playbook that keeps working because nobody wants to talk about it.
Tal Shmuel Harel and Chainstory published the research knowing the findings would make the industry uncomfortable.
Camila Russo built The Defiant on the principle that journalism means not taking payments to say nice things.
ZachXBT keeps exposing influencer paid promotion schemes despite the harassment that follows.
A little tip when it comes to some of these scams: Consider checking ZachXBT’s Twitter feed and replies to see if he called out an influencer or project, it could save you some time.. and money.
On my watch, Rekt News has not been paid to promote any of these scams, we’d rather report on them. But I do see the DMs, and choose to ignore them.
We are here as a public service, not to do people a disservice.
Editorial judgment exists for a reason. Reporters ask questions. Editors verify claims. Publishers stake reputations on accuracy.
The system isn't perfect, but it creates friction - and friction is exactly what scams can't survive.
Pay-to-play removes the friction. That's the feature, not the bug.
Press releases were designed to communicate material developments to the public.
Somewhere along the way, crypto turned them into a tool for manufacturing the appearance of consensus - legitimacy without merit, coverage without scrutiny, trust without earning it.
The inverse signal holds. Legitimate projects attract journalists. Scam projects buy placements.
The more press releases flooding from a single source, the more questions you should be asking.
This story won't make friends. But it might save someone from becoming exit liquidity for the next project with a hundred headlines and nothing behind them.
Manufactured legitimacy breaks the moment someone decides to look.
When credibility is for sale, who can afford honesty?
REKT sirve como plataforma pública para autores anónimos, nos deslindamos de la responsabilidad por las opiniones y contenidos alojados en REKT.
dona (ETH / ERC20): 0x3C5c2F4bCeC51a36494682f91Dbc6cA7c63B514C
aviso legal:
REKT no es responsable ni culpable de ninguna manera por cualquier Contenido publicado en nuestro Sitio Web o en conexión con nuestros Servicios, sin importar si fueron publicados o causados por Autores ANÓN de nuestro Sitio Web, o por REKT. Aunque determinamos reglas para la conducta y publicaciones de los Autores ANÓN, no controlamos y no somos responsables por cualquier contenido ofensivo, inapropiado, obsceno, ilegal o de cualquier forma objetable, que se pudiera encontrar en nuestro Sitio Web o Servicios. REKT no es responsable por la conducta, en línea o fuera de línea, de cualquier usuario de nuestro Sitio Web o Servicios.