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Marketo's New Startup Raises $7.5M to Match Crypto Wallets to Their Owners

Tim Fries

Published: February 1, 2023 10:23 pm

According to a Wednesday report, Addressable, Marketo’s startup focused on Web3 marketing, recently raised $7.5 million. The company’s plan is to match cryptocurrency wallets to their owner’s social media accounts to help facilitate targeted marketing.

Addressable Raises $7.5 Million to Boost its Crypto-Focused Marketing Effort

Addressable, a Web3 marketing firm, recently raised $7.5 million to fund its effort to match cryptocurrency wallets to their owner’s social media accounts. Due to the anonymity present in the digital assets space. marketers haven’t been able to profile their potential customers—discerning their age, location, gender, other interests, etc.—and offer targeted advertisements.

The startup, founded by the Adobe-owned Marketo, hopes to solve this problem by essentially doxxing digital asset owners to advertising agencies. Addressable claims it has already matched 17 million cryptocurrency wallets to the Twitter accounts of their owners. The firm’s seed round found investors in companies like Viola Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Mensch Capital Partners, and North Island Ventures.

On its website, Addressable states that “targeting users solely on social media is limited because it overlooks the data of the blockchain, where all purchases take place”, and claims it will empower advertisers “to target audiences where they hang out, based on their Web3 activity.” The startup’s owner, Marketo, was founded back in 2006 and is best known as the seller and developer of marketing automation software for account-based marketing.

Targeted Marketing and Privacy Concerns

While some have been arguing that targeted marketing is seriously infringing on the right to privacy for a very long time, the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 brought the issue into the public conscience. The scandal involved questionable data harvesting from Facebook users and lead to the #DeleteFacebook movement.

The cryptocurrency space has so far mostly been spared from the standard issues associated with data harvesting and targeted marketing due to the anonymity offered by blockchain technology. However, concerns over privacy have recently been on the rise within the space.

Soon after FTX collapsed in early November 2022, Uniswap unveiled its new privacy policy revealing it would track user data for optimization. MetaMask also recently found itself in hot water after it was announced that ConsenSys’ Infura is collecting users’ IP addresses whenever they send a transaction. By early December, ConsenSys attempted to alleviate the concerns by stating it would enable users to easily replace Infura—which serves as MetaMask’s default.

Last summer, the crypto community saw OFAC’s blacklisting of the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash as another potential vector of attack against anonymity. The move was controversial in more than one way. It was not only seen as a potential opener for a government crackdown on privacy offered by blockchain but also as infringing on the first amendment as Tornado Cash—being a piece of open-source software—should be protected as free speech by the constitution.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist