Avery Akkineni can read the room. She knows that the fall of FTX will have consequences and that she could scare off brands that would otherwise be curious about cryptocurrency. When it comes to brands that were on the sidelines and considering a Web3 game, Akkineni says, the FTX news “has probably set us back six to 12 to 18 months.”

But this is only part of the story. Akkineni is the president of Vayner3, the Web3 arm of Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia. He spent the last two years incorporating top companies into crypto and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), working with brands ranging from Pizza Hut to Crocs to St. Jude’s Research Hospital. And while some companies remain skittish, and might even view Web3 as a “CFO killer,” Akkineni says that much of American business still has a crypto appetite.

“From everything I see and feel in my day to day, there is a lot of incoming business interest from companies that want to learn and want to think critically about what is happening in this new world,” says Akkineni. He points to Spotify, Reddit, Instagram, DraftKings, and Salesforce as examples of major companies forging ahead with Web3 initiatives, even in the freezing cold of crypto winter. “There’s a lot of building going on and there’s a lot of interest from companies,” she says, even if the bearish climate means that the “activation of some of those strategies will be delayed”.

Akkineni might seem like an unlikely ambassador for Web3 adoption. She doesn’t hail from the worlds of crypto, art, finance, or any of the usual NFT on-ramps. She spent the early years of her career in digital marketing, including a six-year stint at Google, where she met a charismatic motivational speaking figure: Gary Vaynerchuk. She was impressed. She was intrigued by how Vaynerchuk was “leveraging social media to build brands in a way that he wasn’t seeing in other agency partners.”

She was so impressed that she eventually left Google (not the safest option) and joined VaynerMedia in 2018. Her first assignment was to open the company’s offices in the Asia-Pacific region. She so she went on a recruiting spree and opened stores in Bangkok, Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore.

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Working in Asia had its compensation. During the depths of COVID-19, Akkineni sat cooped up in her Singapore apartment for months. She looked at the screens. She zoomed. And she thought more about how the world was becoming more digitally immersive.

Vaynerchuk had similar thoughts and started dabbling in NFTs. He encouraged his core team, including Akkineni, to investigate this wild new space. They saw passionate, highly engaged, and lively behavior across NFT’s social media subcultures: on Discords, Clubhouse, and Twitter. As Akkineni says, “It’s small subcultures, in our experience, that often drive mainstream adoption.”

So Akkineni started experimenting in the NFT space, buying random projects and artwork to get a sense of the consumer perspective. “The fundamental question that prompted me to investigate all of this was, ‘What’s in it for the consumer?’ Because brands follow consumers. Where the attention goes, the brands follow”.

Meanwhile, Vaynerchuk became seemingly ubiquitous in NFT-land, often donning a hoodie and baseball cap, appearing on Clubhouse after Clubhouse. She gobbled up NFT and grew a sizable collection, sometimes giving high-profile endorsements to projects like World of Women. (Vaynerchuk also warned that “98% of NFT projects that came out in 2021 will likely end up being bad investments for many who bought them”).

He launched “VeeFriends,” the NFT project that would later include perks like FaceTimes with Vaynerchuk, business training, and admission to “VeeCon,” a May 2022 convention that featured Web3 and Web3-adjacent notables including Beeple, Mila Kunis, and Snoop Dogg. (The 10,255 VeeFriends NFTs have a floor price of $1,206, as of this writing, suggesting a market capitalization of $74 million.)

And in early 2022, Vaynerchuk made one of the most concise and compelling pitches yet about the true value of NFTs. This is perhaps his most important contribution to the space: convincing mainstream (and wealthy) audiences that NFTs are legit. “I think NFTs are seriously misunderstood,” he said. told CNBC. “People thought Andy Warhols and Jackson Pollocks shouldn’t have value. People thought that sports cards should have no value. People thought sneakers shouldn’t have value.”

Major brands listened to this kind of advice. Vaynerchuk has the credibility. “PepsiCo and Anheuser-Busch have been clients of VaynerMedia for many years,” says Akkineni, who became president of VaynerNFT in 2021, saying the firm has now worked with nearly 50 Fortune 500 companies. “With that comes a level trustworthy”.

This is what helped Akkineni and his team, for example, encourage Budweiser to buy the Ethereum name service domain Beer.eth for $95,000, in addition to spending $25,000 on an NFT by artist Tom Sachs, and make this your Twitter profile picture. (Budweiser no longer has the rocket-themed NFT as its profile image, perhaps a sign of the times, but Akkineni said he views the Beer.eth purchase as a watershed moment for the Web3 space, as it was the first time that a Fortune 500 company bought an ENS domain). “Budweiser is taking its first steps into the NFT universe,” an Anheuser-Busch InBev spokesperson told CoinDesk at the time, with Akkineni leading the work behind the scenes.

That work would continue through 2022, even if the company needed to change. “We are constantly reinventing ourselves and evolving,” says Akkineni. “What worked a year ago doesn’t work now…and what works today won’t work tomorrow.”

Now he leads a team of 60 who are distributed in offices in New York and Miami. Part of the “reinvention” was to rebrand VaynerNFT as Vayner3 (as in Web3) and focus on a more holistic consulting approach. The scope now includes education, long-term strategy, and infrastructure development to support future deployments. “The higher demand and the higher added value that we provide are really strategic services,” says Akkineni. “The phase most companies are in is being thoughtful, strategic, learning and deciding if they are going to take a step.” She says that 7/11, for example, is a partner they’re working with to develop the Web3 strategy, but they haven’t executed anything yet because “it’s not the time.”

The vibrations have changed. During the height of the NFT hype cycle, Akkineni says brands were eager to announce their crypto experiments and rack up hype. “A year ago, everyone wanted to PR everything. Now, people are a bit like, ‘Let’s see what’s picked up.’ Let’s see what people like,’” he says, adding that they are taking a more conservative approach, rather than “shouting from the rooftops”.

While the brands aren’t screaming, Akkineni says, they are curious. Some see Web3 as an insurance policy to make sure they don’t miss out on a future trend. “Companies that really missed the boat on Web2 and social media want to jump to Web3,” says Akkineni.

It may take a bit longer, but ultimately, Akkineni predicts that by 2023, “we’ll see some companies make bigger, more intentional and more strategic changes.”

Even in the cold of the crypto winter.