Scott
Keto

CoinList is a San Francisco company that runs regulated token sales and a crypto exchange. Founders come to CoinList because they want to raise money and distribute tokens in a way that will not later be re-characterized by a securities regulator as a fraud. Investors come to CoinList because the projects have been vetted, the paperwork exists, and the KYC has been done. Scott Keto is the person who runs the place. When a founder pitches CoinList, they are eventually pitching him.

This is a strange job because it sits on top of a stack of contradictions. Crypto is supposed to be permissionless. CoinList is a permissioned gate. Crypto is supposed to be borderless. CoinList's product is a compliance surface for exactly those borders. Crypto founders complain that gatekeepers are the problem. Then they email Keto to ask if their project can list.

Keto came to the job in 2018 with what looked, at the time, like a mismatched resume. He had spent his early twenties at a family-office wealth advisor, Athena Capital, first as an analyst and then as an associate portfolio manager. He had done a Fulbright-Hays year in Qingdao. He had gone back to school at MIT Sloan, picked up an MBA and two certificates - Finance and, oddly, Sustainability - and interned at Accomplice VC and Citi Ventures. Then, instead of joining a fund, he joined a token launchpad that most of Wall Street still didn't quite believe in. Six years later, the launchpad is one of the last regulated venues standing and he's the president.

What a president does at a company like this

According to the organization chart, Keto oversees the heads of sales and partnerships, the general counsel, and the head of business development. In practice this means he touches every stage of the pipeline that turns a whitepaper into a token launch: which projects get in, what the terms look like, how the distribution is structured, which jurisdictions the sale can happen in, and what the marketing plan on the way out the door will look like. It is the most operational job in a company that pretends, from a distance, to be a marketplace.

The tell that Keto is a real operator, rather than a person who found a title, is the promotion cadence. Director of strategy in 2018. COO in January 2021, roughly the moment the platform was about to close its $100M Series A. President after that. In a company of 73 people, that trajectory does not happen unless the person is right about the thing they were hired to do, which is figure out how a regulated token venue makes money without either burning its brand or missing the cycle.

Keto is not an especially loud executive. The CoinList blog has one bylined post from him - a summary of ETHCC Paris from July 2022 - and reading it is the closest thing to a public thesis he has left in the open. Four takeaways. Each of them, in retrospect, was correct in a way that the room was not.

First: “L2s and app chain ecosystems are coming. And coming fast.” This was written before the modular narrative had eaten the rest of crypto conversation. He was watching where the capital was going and where the developer talent was going, and the two were pointing at the same place.

Second: the “next billion users” slogan was doing more work than the underlying products. Most projects at the conference, Keto wrote, were building for existing crypto developers, not for civilians. Which is fine, if you say that's what you're doing. Most weren't.

Third, and this is the one that got quoted: most projects can't tell you their lifetime value or their customer acquisition cost. In any other industry this would be an embarrassing thing to say out loud. In crypto it was, in 2022, a diagnosis.

Fourth: token distribution was maturing. Away from spray-and-pray airdrops, toward allocations that rewarded developers, stakers, and governance participants who could actually sustain a network. This is convenient for a launchpad to say, because it justifies vetting. It also happens to be the direction the market moved.