Best Crypto Podcasts for Founders and Marketers in 2026

Most rankings of crypto podcasts are written for the same reader: someone deciding what to buy. Very few are written for the people on the other side of that trade, the founders and marketers who have to build the thing and then explain it.

That reader needs something different. Not the show with the largest audience, but the one where the guest actually runs an exchange listings desk, or where a journalist explains on the record why most pitches die in the inbox. Audience size tells you how many people are listening. It tells you nothing about whether the hour will make you better at your job.

This ranking scores ten shows on three things: how senior and operational the guests are, how relevant the material is to building or marketing a crypto company, and whether the host understands the business behind the technology. Two of the ten are produced by agencies, and one of them is ours: Cryptic Talks, at number one. We flag that rather than hide it. Owned shows tend to get the best access to executives and have the least incentive to ask hard questions, and both facts should shape how you use the hour.

Best crypto podcasts for founders at a glance

1. Cryptic Talks

Best for: Exchange and ecosystem strategy, straight from the people running it.

Host: Michael Graham. Live on X, with full episodes published as video on YouTube and audio on Spotify.

Cryptic Talks is the interview series produced by Cryptic, the crypto marketing agency behind this ranking, founded in 2020 and headquartered in Dubai. The show passed 140 episodes in 2025 alone, and Cryptic’s live programming on X reaches more than 100,000 monthly listeners.

The guest list is what makes it useful to a founder. Tika Lum, Head of Global Business Development at KuCoin, Kevin Lee, Chief Business Officer at Gate, and Declan Hannon of Aurora have all sat down on the show, alongside teams from Bitget, BNB Chain and Algorand. These are the people who decide how a listing gets evaluated, how ecosystem support is allocated and what a partnership team is actually looking for. Those conversations usually happen in private. Cryptic Talks puts them on the record.

Episodes run live and then publish as full video, so you watch an exchange executive answer the question instead of reading someone’s summary of it. Read the number one spot with the disclosure above in mind, and judge the show by its guest list.

Listen: YouTube, X and Spotify

2. Onchain Capital

Best for: Hearing how exchange, asset management and policy leadership talk about where finance is going.

Hosts: Sean Lee and Kim Than, founder and CEO of the crypto and AI PR agency Genius PR. Published on YouTube and Spotify.

Co-host Sean Lee is a Forbes contributor based in Hong Kong who was the first CEO of the Algorand Foundation, later served as senior advisor to the Crypto Council for Innovation and as APAC policy advisor to the Stablecoin Standard, and now co-founds Open Stable Network. That background sets the altitude of the show. Onchain Capital is less about what a token did this week and more about how capital, regulation and technology move against each other, with an East and West perspective most crypto shows do not have.

The guest list is the reason it sits this high. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng, Bybit founder Ben Zhou, Gate CEO Dr. Han, the CEO of OKX Europe, Maple Finance CEO Sid Powell on crossing $4.6B in assets under management during a downturn, Pantera Capital’s Paul Veradittakit, an EVP from Franklin Templeton, and former DOJ and FinCEN lawyer Amanda Wick on tokenized finance. For a founder raising institutional money or preparing for an exchange conversation, this is the register those rooms actually use.

One detail worth knowing before you pitch it. Episodes do not stop at the feed: several have become Forbes Digital Assets articles, which is a rare structure for an owned show and part of why the guest bar stays high. Treat it as a room where institutional credibility is the currency, and come with a thesis rather than an announcement.

Listen: onchaincap.io

3. The Starting Block, by The Block

Best for: A daily read on markets and regulation, from the people moving them.

Anchor: Gareth Jenkinson, Head of Multimedia at The Block. Live every weekday for 45 minutes, before the trading day starts.

The Starting Block is The Block’s daily live show: breaking market news, regulation and macro, delivered before the trading day unfolds. It streams on YouTube and publishes to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so it works as a morning briefing whether you watch or listen.

What earns it a high spot is the guest chair. Recent episodes feature Jesse Pollak, head of Base at Coinbase, OKX general manager Lennix Lai on retail traders already executing through AI agents, Aptos co-founder Avery Ching, Andre Cronje on the origins of DeFi, and GSR’s chief legal and strategy officer Joshua Riezman on the odds for the CLARITY Act. That is a daily show booking the people founders spend months trying to reach.

The Block also runs Layer One, an interview show hosted by Kelvin Sparks and produced with Avalanche. Its episode with Aave founder Stani Kulechov on bringing tokenized real world assets onchain is worth the hour on its own.

Listen: theblock.co

4. Empire

Best for: Understanding how capital actually moves through crypto.

Hosts: Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Roel Santos. Published by Blockworks, with guest interviews and a weekly roundup.

Yanowitz co-founded Blockworks. Santos is a crypto investor who started his career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan. The questions reflect that mix: less about where a token is going, more about where capital is flowing and why.

Recent guests include Morpho co-founder and CEO Paul Frambot, on turning DeFi lending into infrastructure for fintechs and institutions, and Optimism’s Ben Jones and Karl Floersch on what happened to layer 2s. For a founder preparing a raise, this is the closest thing to hearing how the other side of the table talks when you are not in the room.

Listen: blockworks.com

5. Unchained

Best for: Journalism rather than cheerleading.

Host: Laura Shin. More than 1,000 episodes.

Laura Shin is a former senior editor at Forbes, the author of The Cryptopians and, by Unchained’s own account, the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full time. That reporting background is the whole value proposition. Unchained asks the questions a founder would rather not answer, which is exactly why it is worth hearing before you go on a show like it.

The feed also carries shows with their own hosts. The Chopping Block brings together investors Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra and Robert Leshner. Bits + Bips covers where crypto meets macro. DEX in the City takes on regulation with a panel of lawyers and investors, and Uneasy Money comes from three longtime DeFi builders. Pick the segment that matches your problem rather than trying to keep up with the whole feed.

Listen: unchainedcrypto.com

6. Chain Reaction, by Cointelegraph

Best for: Seeing which stories and guests a major crypto newsroom thinks are worth a conversation.

Host: Ciaran Lyons of Cointelegraph. Episodes of around 30 minutes, several times a week.

Chain Reaction is Cointelegraph’s interview show, and the guest mix is deliberately wide. Founders and executives such as RedStone’s Marcin Kazmierczak on real world asset tokenization, MidChains CEO Basil Al Askari and Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten on whether spot ETFs held Bitcoin back sit alongside market personalities like Crypto Banter founder Ran Neuner and Lark Davis.

That mix keeps it out of the top five. What puts it at six is relevance: the show is a running signal of which angles Cointelegraph’s team finds worth a conversation right now, and if Cointelegraph coverage is on your media plan, hearing what its reporters ask on air is better preparation than any media kit.

Cointelegraph also runs Trade Secrets, a markets show with the same host built around interviews with prominent traders. It is useful if your audience trades, less so if you are building.

Listen: cointelegraph.com

7. Bankless

Best for: Protocol mechanics and the reasoning behind DeFi design.

Hosts: Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman.

Bankless leans heavily into Ethereum, DeFi, rollups and tokenization. It is the show to reach for when you need to understand why a design works rather than how a token performed last week.

Adams and Hoffman are also general partners at Bankless Ventures, the seed stage fund they launched in 2023. That gives them access to protocol founders and researchers who rarely do general media, and it is worth keeping in mind when a portfolio company is in the guest chair.

It sits at number seven for one reason: the audience is crypto native and investor leaning. If you market to developers or onchain users, move it up your list.

Listen: bankless.com

8. Onchain Growth Club

Best for: Crypto growth and marketing, with nothing else mixed in.

Host: Norman Wiese, founder of Onchain Growth Club. Episodes run around 30 minutes.

Most shows on this list treat growth as one topic among many. Onchain Growth Club is built around nothing else. Guests are growth leads and marketers rather than founders talking about product, and the conversations stay tactical.

Justin Vogel, co-founder of Safary, explains why standard growth playbooks break when the entire addressable market is a few million people. Shaun van Vuuren, head of marketing and comms at Chainflip, covers how to market cross-chain DeFi without leaning on hype. An episode with the crypto marketing agency Hype walks through its TikTok experiments.

For a marketing team, this is the highest ratio of usable tactics per minute on the list.

Listen: podcasts.apple.com

9. Web3 CMO Stories

Best for: Brand building across Web3 and AI.

Host: Joeri Billast, author of The Future CMO. New episodes weekly.

Aimed at founders, CMOs and marketers rather than traders, the show sits where Web3, AI and brand strategy meet. Billast has recorded more than 250 conversations, and the guest list reaches well outside crypto: Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Schaefer and Joe Pulizzi have all appeared, alongside SingularityNET’s Ben Goertzel.

Useful as a counterweight. Crypto marketing teams tend to overindex on crypto native tactics and underuse the basics of positioning and brand.

Listen: cmo-stories.com

10. Epicenter

Best for: Technical depth for infrastructure teams.

Hosts: a rotating panel including Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst and Meher Roy. Running since 2014.

Epicenter goes to protocol level: cryptography, consensus, decentralized systems and infrastructure design. It is the least commercial show on this list and the most demanding.

If you are marketing an infrastructure product, this is where you learn to talk about it in a way engineers will not dismiss.

Listen: epicenter.tv

How to build a listening rotation that is actually useful

Following ten shows is a way to feel informed without becoming informed. Pick three and give each one a different job.

One show for context, such as The Starting Block, so you know what the market is paying attention to when you launch. One show for your category, so you can talk about your own product at the level your buyers expect. One show for craft, such as Onchain Growth Club for growth or Web3 CMO Stories for brand, depending on your role.

Podcasts are the slow layer. For news as it breaks, our guides to the top crypto Telegram channels and the top crypto Discord communities cover where it surfaces first.

And if you plan to pitch any of these shows, listen to five episodes first. Producers can tell quickly whether a pitch came from someone who has actually heard the show, and that one habit does more for your chances than a longer media list.

How Cryptic helps

Cryptic is a crypto marketing agency founded in 2020, headquartered in Dubai with offices in London, Amsterdam and Riyadh, and a verified Circle Alliance Partner. We have scaled more than 200 Web3 brands, including Binance, Bybit, Algorand, OKX and Canton.

Podcasts sit inside our earned media work rather than beside it. We produce Cryptic Talks in house, which means we book the guests, run the interviews and cut the clips ourselves. That is the experience we bring to client work: which shows are worth a founder’s time, what a producer needs before saying yes, and how to turn one recorded hour into weeks of clips and a transcript that search engines and AI assistants can actually read.

If you want your founder in these conversations rather than listening to them, that is the work we do.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best crypto podcasts for founders in 2026?

The most useful shows for founders are built around operators rather than audiences. Cryptic Talks puts exchange and ecosystem executives on the record, and Onchain Capital does the same with exchange, asset management and policy leadership. The Block’s The Starting Block covers the daily market and regulatory picture, Empire covers how capital moves, and Unchained asks the hard questions. Onchain Growth Club and Web3 CMO Stories are the strongest picks for growth and brand.

Is going on crypto podcasts worth it for a founder?

Yes, if you judge it by the right return. An appearance rarely moves signups the week it airs. What it creates is a lasting record of how the founder thinks: an hour that investors, journalists and partners can check before a meeting, clips for social, and a transcript that search engines and AI assistants can read and cite. Measure it by what follows, such as inbound partnership requests, repeat bookings and press interest, not downloads. It is not worth it before the founder has a clear point of view to defend.

How do I get my founder booked on a crypto podcast?

Lead with a specific claim rather than a company update. Producers book people who can carry a segment, not companies with news. Listen to five episodes first and pitch a topic the host has already shown interest in, with a clear point of view attached. Funding rounds, listings and launches make a booking easier, but only if the founder can talk about something bigger than the announcement.

What is the difference between a podcast appearance and a PR placement?

A PR placement is coverage a journalist writes about your company, so the framing is theirs and the credibility comes from the outlet. A podcast appearance is a conversation you take part in: you control more of the framing, and the credibility comes from how well the founder holds up under questions. The two compound. A founder with a few strong episodes behind them is easier to pitch to a reporter, who can hear how they talk before committing to a story.

Does Cryptic run its own podcast?

Yes. Cryptic Talks is Cryptic’s interview series, hosted by Michael Graham, broadcast live on X with full episodes published as video on YouTube. The show passed 140 episodes in 2025 and has featured executives from KuCoin, Gate, Aurora, Bitget, BNB Chain and Algorand. Cryptic is a crypto marketing agency founded in 2020, based in Dubai, and a verified Circle Alliance Partner, working with brands including Binance, Bybit, Algorand, OKX and Canton.

Do Cointelegraph and The Block have podcasts?

Yes. The Block’s flagship is The Starting Block, a live 45 minute show every weekday anchored by Gareth Jenkinson, with guests such as Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak and OKX’s Lennix Lai. It also runs Layer One, hosted by Kelvin Sparks. Cointelegraph’s main show is Chain Reaction, an interview podcast hosted by Ciaran Lyons with new episodes several times a week, plus Trade Secrets for markets. Both are worth following if press coverage from either outlet is part of your plan.

What are the best crypto marketing podcasts?

For crypto marketing specifically, start with Onchain Growth Club, which is built entirely around growth tactics from the people running them. Web3 CMO Stories covers brand and positioning across Web3 and AI, with guests from well outside crypto. Cryptic Talks adds the exchange and ecosystem side: what listing, partnership and ecosystem teams look for when they evaluate a project.

Final thoughts

The best crypto podcast for you is not the one with the biggest audience. It is the one where the guests do the job you are trying to do, and where the host knows enough to ask the second question.

If you are building a founder profile and want a media plan behind it rather than a list of shows, book a call with our team.