Selling the return of U.S. token sales • Jake Schaeffer

Context

Aztec’s token sale was hard to explain for a good reason.

It used the Continuous Clearing Auction, or CCA, a new onchain auction format developed with Uniswap. CCA was meant to fix a bunch of things people hated about old token sales: fixed-price mispricing, last-second sniping, gas wars, insider allocations, and weak liquidity after the sale.

It also had a legal story that should have been much louder. For the first time since the 2017 ICO era, a token sale had real regulatory clarity from the SEC.

CCA sounded like mechanism design. SEC clarity sounded like something for lawyers. My job was to make both feel concrete enough that a real person would understand the sale, trust it, finish KYC, and put money in.

Making CCA understandable

Most people did not know why a “Continuous Clearing Auction” was different from a Dutch auction, a fixed-price sale, a bonding curve, or a centralized allocation. They also did not know what it meant for how they should bid.

So I treated CCA like a translation problem.

The message was simple:

This is a fairer way to run a public token sale.

I leaned on people the audience already followed to help explain it. Ciara Nightingale’s video, Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction Explained, was especially useful because it made the mechanism feel slightly more understandable. It was a challenge to understand, but for many in our audience, the challenge made it fun.

That mattered for email. If someone clicked from an email into a landing page and still could not tell what the auction was, I had already lost them.

The dashboard changed the campaign

While the education work was happening, I used Codex to build dashboards from onchain and funnel data.

I wanted to know:

who had gone through KYC
how far they got in KYC
where they were in the purchase funnel
whether they purchased
which countries they were from

The country view was where I saw a problem.

The sale had a huge U.S. angle, but the campaign was not treating it like one. U.S. participants needed a different landing page than everyone else. They needed to know this sale was open to them, why the SEC clarity mattered, and why Aztec’s auction was different from the token sales people remembered from 2017.

The message shifted:

Token sales are back in the U.S., and this one is using a fairer onchain auction.

What I sent

I pushed for a U.S. landing page, then I sent emails to the U.S. audience.

The page made the SEC angle explicit. It explained why U.S. participants could take the sale seriously, why the legal clarity mattered, and how the CCA worked without forcing people to read a research post first.

The emails were direct. I sent people to the page that answered the question they were most likely asking:

Is this actually available to me?
Why is this sale different?
How does the auction work?
What do I need to do next?

I tested U.S. messaging against the localized page. When it converted better than the generic path, I expanded it.

Email was the lever because it let me speak to people based on where they actually were: KYC started, KYC approved, eligible but not bidding, interested but not purchased. I was moving people through the sale.

The Bankless clip

The U.S. story needed someone outside Aztec to say the quiet part out loud.

The team had built PR relationships over the previous months. Once the U.S. page was live, we circulated the regulatory and market-access angle through those relationships. That helped get the story into Bankless, one of the biggest podcasts in crypto.

Their framing was the line the campaign needed:

Token sales are back in the USA.

Bankless clip: token sales are back in the USA

Once that clip existed, I used it as proof. I cut it into social, paired it with the U.S. landing page, and used it to reinforce the email campaign.

The point was no longer abstract. Bankless had made it plain: U.S. token sales were back, and Aztec was the launch proving it.

Results

I sent more than one million emails across the campaign.

Email directly attributed more than $5 million in sale proceeds.

After the U.S. landing page and social amplification went live, the amount raised from the U.S. audience increased 5x.

What I learned

The CCA mattered, but most people needed help understanding why. The SEC angle mattered, but most people needed to hear what it changed for them.

Email let me segment by country, KYC state, eligibility, and purchase behavior. It let me test the U.S. story before sending it more broadly. And once Bankless validated the narrative, email gave me the fastest way to turn that attention into participation.

That was the job: take a mechanism people did not understand, attach it to a regulatory opening people did care about, and send the right message to the right person at the right point in the sale.