Before Jay Kurahashi-Sofue had to explain why a dollar could get stranded on the wrong blockchain, he had to persuade people to listen to a record. In 2010, while still in college, he started a music publication. The project was an education in attention conducted outside a classroom: find something worth hearing, understand the audience, frame the work, publish it, and hope it travels. It was also his first encounter with the quiet machinery behind culture. Songs do not simply reach people. Someone builds the route.
That early lesson has followed him through a career that looks eclectic only from a distance. He studied the history of art at Indiana University Bloomington, added a minor in telecommunications, entered advertising through Ogilvy's graduate program, and moved into blockchain before most large agencies knew what to call it. He then led marketing at Fluidity and AirSwap, spent four years helping build Avalanche at Ava Labs, and joined Eco as chief marketing officer in 2024. In 2025 he opened a second track, co-founding the electronic-music label SONARA Records.
The through line is not crypto. It is not music either. It is orchestration: the arrangement of many moving parts so that the audience receives one coherent experience.
“My brain has always processed information by constructing systems.”Jay Kurahashi-Sofue on how he assesses risk and competition
Art history was the practical degree
Kurahashi-Sofue graduated in 2015 with the sort of degree that obliges its owner to answer an annoying question at parties: what will you do with that? His answer turned out to be marketing technology that did not yet have a familiar vocabulary. Art history had trained him to inspect an unfamiliar object, place it in context, resist the first obvious interpretation, and make an argument from evidence. Those are useful habits when the object is a Renaissance panel. They are rather useful when the object is a decentralized exchange, too.
He has credited the program with cultivating curiosity and helping him avoid tunnel vision. In an industry prone to declaring a new world every fortnight, intellectual flexibility is a sturdier advantage than certainty. The job of a brand strategist is often to step outside the product team's private language and ask the impolite, necessary question: what does this mean to anyone else?
Ogilvy gave that instinct a professional setting. He joined through its graduate program and worked across digital strategy, brand, and transformation. He also helped form the agency's first blockchain marketing group. The timing mattered. Blockchain companies were rich in technical claims and poor in shared language. Kurahashi-Sofue found an intersection between a subject he wanted to understand and a craft he was learning to practice.
Starts a college music publication and learns digital distribution by doing it.
Graduates from Indiana University and enters Ogilvy's graduate program.
Moves from agency strategy into marketing leadership at Fluidity and AirSwap.
Joins Ava Labs as Avalanche approaches its mainnet launch.
Leaves Ava Labs after four years and becomes CMO of Eco.
Co-founds SONARA Records, returning to music with a decade of marketing experience.
Giving a network a recognizable shape
At Fluidity, the Brooklyn company behind AirSwap, he was responsible for launches, go-to-market work, growth strategy, and the marketing team. AirSwap's problem was a preview of those he would keep choosing: the underlying mechanism mattered, but the customer still needed a clean reason to care. He wrote about evolving the brand in an industry already noisy enough to mistake volume for clarity.
In May 2020, Kurahashi-Sofue joined Ava Labs. Avalanche's mainnet arrived that September. His remit stretched beyond promotion into ecosystem formation: developers, applications, institutions, community programs, events, and a global audience all needed distinct messages without splintering the brand. Early work included a visual-identity evolution, support for ten languages, hackathons, and grants for developers building financial applications and tools.
Four years is a long tenure in crypto, where both companies and convictions can change between conferences. When he left in May 2024, he emphasized the team rather than assembling a victory lap. A former colleague replied that Kurahashi-Sofue had been a catalyst for the culture. The response fits another piece of advice he carried from his college music-blog days. A more experienced person named Mitch had helped him without needing to. The lesson was brief: “Kindness goes a long way.”
Mosquito bands beat another banner
The most revealing campaign on his résumé may also be the one least likely to appear in a blockchain white paper. For FWB FEST 2024, Eco's Bend product was the payments partner at a three-day summer-camp-style gathering in California. The team had $5,000, a crowd of roughly 1,000, and the usual sponsor's fear of dissolving into the scenery.
Kurahashi-Sofue and colleagues made the brand physically useful. They ordered 1,000 mosquito-repellent bands, 300 campfire mugs, 60 inflatable sofas, and 25 disposable cameras. The bands moved around on wrists. The mugs stayed in hands. The cameras came back with pictures. The sofas proved comically difficult to inflate, which made people gather around and try. A minor logistical failure became live entertainment, the rare marketing asset improved by refusing to cooperate.
The campaign reported 42,000 digital impressions and 2,000 engagements, but the more interesting metric was behavioral: people carried the brand because the objects earned their place. In a business obsessed with abstract networks, Kurahashi-Sofue had built a small network of wrists, mugs, seats, and film rolls.
The product wants to disappear
Eco presents a more difficult assignment. Stablecoins are digital assets designed to hold a stable value, often one US dollar, but moving them between blockchains can involve bridges, gas tokens, separate balances, and a small vocabulary test. The category has demand. The experience still shows too much scaffolding.
Kurahashi-Sofue's thesis is that usability, not another burst of jargon, will open the next phase. Eco builds connective infrastructure so an application can move stablecoins across networks without forcing a user to manage every step. He has compared the desired experience to consumer payment apps: the action should make sense before the architecture does.
This creates a delicious marketing paradox. If the infrastructure works, the user notices less of it. Kurahashi-Sofue must make the problem visible long enough to explain why the solution should fade from view. He does so by returning to plain tensions: money that settles slowly, value fragmented across networks, fees that make a dollar feel unlike a dollar. The nouns are financial. The frustration is universal.
His approach to distribution is similarly unromantic. Crypto conversation concentrates on X, but he has argued for search, educational content, YouTube, and testing language against what developers actually seek. The point is not to publish everywhere. It is to build a route between a useful answer and the person already looking for it.
“A dollar is supposed to be a dollar - but why doesn't it always feel that way?”The opening problem in his 2025 essay on stablecoin adoption
Back to the beat, now with a business plan
SONARA Records makes the circularity of his career almost suspiciously neat. The college music publisher returned to the industry in 2025, this time as a co-founder with Tooker, David Mayer, and Nico Stojan. The label's geography is part mood board, part operating map: Sardinia supplies stillness and water, Berlin supplies club culture, and Brooklyn supplies urban energy and, in Kurahashi-Sofue's case, business operations and marketing strategy.
The label began with relationships formed before the pandemic and conversations that refused to go away. Kurahashi-Sofue and Tooker saw room for a more deliberate approach to artist development. Rather than receive a finished track and decorate its release date, SONARA works earlier on the artist's profile, identity, and distribution. Its first EP, Coda, arrived in September 2025 after launch gatherings in Sardinia and a festival showcase in Estonia.
Here again is orchestration. A record requires composition, performance, artwork, audience, timing, and trust. A cross-chain transaction requires liquidity, execution, verification, settlement, and trust. The risks are wildly different, but the organizer's pleasure is recognizably the same: separate parts become a single movement.
The photographer at the edge of the frame
Outside company life, Kurahashi-Sofue has worked as a street, portrait, travel, music, and event photographer. He has shot underground concerts across New York and produced techno and house music. Photography is useful preparation for marketing because it disciplines the eye. The frame is not the world. It is a decision about which part of the world another person should notice.
His public advice tends toward simple verbs. Dive into the subject. Apply the strengths you already have. Research before investing. Be confident. Behind those short instructions sits the systems thinker, mentally mapping participants and possible routes. Beside him sits the photographer, waiting to decide which route belongs in the frame.
That combination explains why his projects can stretch from payment rails to record releases without feeling like a double life. Both ask him to listen for friction. Both reward patient context. Both depend on distribution that feels natural to the recipient, whether the thing arriving is a stablecoin, a photograph, or a four-on-the-floor pulse after midnight.
Kurahashi-Sofue's career began by helping music find an audience. Now he is helping money find a route and artists find a longer runway. The technologies are new; the assignment is ancient. Make sense of the system. Invite people in. Then get out of the way of the movement.