Prophet has been one of our first clients since we published the Prediction Markets audience report – a niche audience breakdown and our approach to running creator campaigns on X.
The first campaign to test that approach was launched even before the Select app went live. This report covers the second one: a four-wave, 18-creator campaign built on that first test. A third campaign is running right now. Few crypto teams treat KOL marketing as something you iterate on instead of something you buy once. Prophet does.
72 posts published.
8,147 engagements.
2.05% aggregate engagement rate.
$9.86 CPM.
198 new users through our own referral link alone – and more than 2,000 new users total, by Prophet's own tracking, credited to the campaign.
<$5 CAC (awesome result for a newly-launched product, huh?)
A junior marketer will tell you crypto KOL campaigns are a numbers game: book the biggest names, buy the most impressions. An experienced one will tell you the winning move was never in the follower count. It was in the right offer and selection.
Here's what actually happened, and what we'd tell you to steal.
What Prophet asked for
Prophet was a new product looking for users
Almost every new product faces the same challenge – user acquisition. Prophet tested different channels, and the X creator campaign was among them. That's a pretty typical playbook, but what wasn't typical was the execution.
Most agencies read a creator brief and stop at the content: does this person post about prediction markets? We check something else, too: does the audience that follows them actually care about prediction markets, or do they just follow the creator? Is this audience genuinely involved in discussing the topic, or just commenting "great post, bro" to support the author? A crypto account can write about Polymarket all day and still reach followers who've never placed a bet in their life.
That overlap between creator and category isn't something you get right on the first list. We built the roster, then kept tuning it with Prophet round by round – swapping creators in and out, partly to reach the right people, partly to bring CPM down without giving up reach.
The Offer
Like in ads, the right offer is king
Most projects make the same mistake. They underrate how much their offer matters.
They launch with a real product but give strangers no real reason to try it today instead of never. They assume the product itself is the argument. It isn't. Paying to get a user isn't a shortcut – it's how acquisition actually works, in crypto and everywhere else.
Prophet gave each creator a unique referral code (to track sign ups) to distribute among their followers. Anyone who used it got $5 in free credit to trade with. That single wave – just the free credit push – pulled 116,283 impressions and 2,474 engagements, the highest of any of the four waves we ran.
You might say paying people to show up is cheating. It isn't – there's no such thing as free acquisition. CAC exists somewhere no matter what.
A new yogurt brand hands out samples at the store entrance. A cosmetics brand ships free minis with every order. B2B SaaS gives you a free trial before you ever see a price. None of that is "organic." It's acquisition with the cost made visible instead of buried in overhead nobody's tracking.
Paying for it meant Prophet got users fast, got real feedback fast, and could watch the funnel – signups, first trade, retention, churn – in weeks instead of guessing for months. Yes, it cost money. Everyone else's "free" growth costs money too, just hidden in timelines or unpaid hours.
The execution
Selection is a process, not a spreadsheet
We ran calls to nail down the campaign goals and who the client actually wanted representing their brand. Some KOLs were a clear fit for this specific campaign, so we reached out to them directly. Others we pulled from our existing creator base. Then we ran AI-powered selection on top of that pool to find the best fit on CPM and coverage of the target audience.
Creator management and communication run entirely on our side – the client's team can jump in if they want to, but they don't have to. You decide how deep you go into the day-to-day.
Cost efficiency
A cheap CPM means nothing without the right creators behind it
At $9.86 CPM and $0.48 per engagement, this campaign priced well below typical crypto KOL benchmarks, where concentrated-audience placements often run $70+ CPM. Part of that came from the free-credit hook driving volume. Part came from mixing smaller, high-concentration creators with a few larger names for visibility – the same principle we laid out in our Prediction Markets audience report: small accounts carry more niche concentration, big accounts carry more absolute reach, and the right campaign uses both.
Individual creators still varied a lot – some cleared 12% engagement rate, others sat under 1% at similar prices. That's why CPM alone was never the number we trusted. We track engagement rate per creator, how organic their engagement is (non-shilling replies, non botted impressions etc.) too, and that's what actually decides who gets rebooked.
Results: Beyond the impressions
Reach is easy to measure. Impact isn't.
Social metrics tell you who saw the campaign. They don't tell you who acted on it. That's why we track what's beyond that, if the project's infra allows us to.
An interesting thing to add would be that purely the launch of the campaign created a huge boost in followers (largely creator accounts) - this was massive value that was not expected and would not occur with other agency styles.
Anyway, the campaign was built to drive product actions. 198 new users came through Wallchain's own referral link alone, which was added only in one place as a hyperlink, and we didn’t promote it aggressively. More than 2,000 new users joined the product overall, as reported by Prophet from the creators' posts.
An ATH in terms of simultaneous users was also reached during the campaign.
A simple takeaway to close on (and the one you can steal for your next influencer campaign): with the right offer and the right set of creators, a creator campaign can work as a performance marketing channel, not just an awareness one. Just plan it accordingly and be ready to treat it as other performance channels, not a magic pill.
If you read this and thought "that's what a KOL campaign should look like," we should talk. If you thought "that's a lot of tracking for a Twitter campaign," we're probably not a fit – and that's fine too.
Either way, drop us a line on Telegram: @surapyk.