Konstantin Vladimirovich Tserazov, a seasoned fintech expert and former Senior Vice President at Otkritie Bank; examines in more detail the Wild West that is social media, and the brand implications and financial risks that this type of environment can foster in an exclusive op-ed for tahawultech.com.
Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 has emboldened a deregulatory ethos in U.S. social media. With platforms pivoting toward a less regulated, free-expression model — echoing Trump’s vocal critiques of corporate censorship — this move has unleashed a torrent of unfiltered information. Historically reliant on these ecosystems, advertisers now face a dilemma: stay and risk reputational damage or flee and lose efficiency.
Trump’s February 27, 2025, meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, at which he welcomed the remarks of VP JD Vance, who questioned the state of free speech in Britain, underscores his broader agenda to reshape global discourse.
Social Media’s Market Influence and Financial Risks
At the same time, brands are confronting an increasingly volatile digital landscape, where misinformation and market hysteria thrive, turning social platforms into risky terrain for brands. And if recent history is any guide, the dangers aren’t hypothetical.
Consider March 2023: Silicon Valley Bank imploded in just 10 hours after a social media-driven bank run siphoned $42 billion in deposits — a collapse fueled not by fundamentals but by fear spreading at the speed of a post on X.
Sound familiar? The GameStop surge of January 2021 saw a swarm of retail traders on Reddit send the stock soaring from $17 to $483, inflicting $19.4 billion in losses on short-selling hedge funds. In late 2024, another wave of online fervor — this time sparked by a post on X — reignited interest in GameStop, causing a sharp but short-lived rally. The sudden spike was another alarming reminder of how easily social media can still fuel market swings, raising fresh concerns about volatility and the lack of a decision to fix this issue.
Despite these events, regulators and tech platforms remain largely hands-off. And with fact-checking mechanisms being dismantled in 2025, the stage is set for the next speculative frenzy that advertisers, investors, and policymakers may not be ready for.
The Future of Brand Interaction in Blockchain-driven Media
The decision is to develop blockchain-based social media governed by Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), in which brands and other stakeholders, including clients, will be on the board. This ground for collaboration (DAO for social media) will bring brands closer to their clients and thus create a new level of interaction that will help develop tailor-made goods and services.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help catalyze this interaction. Combined with fintech and the rise of neo-banks, these innovations will create new social media brands and their client’s wants. We see a new paradigm: Brand-to-One (B21). B21 means that every client will get their brand — a personal and unique experience of dialogue with a brand.
These innovations will transform how a brand develops and disrupt the classical structure of business ownership. Clients will gain huge influence over brands, while brands will have unprecedentedly close relations with customers.
Such interaction will require redefining the role of “branded digital assets” on blockchain. In this year’s first couple of months, we witnessed a torrent of such assets — including those associated with the 47th U.S. President, Donald Trump, and The First Lady, Melania Trump.
But I believe we are only at the dawn of a great transformation of the media and information landscape. Social media’s reach — 4.5 billion users worldwide — means a rumor in one market can cascade across borders. Only with DAO-driven social media can such tokens and branded NFTs gain actual ‘utility use,’ as they can influence how various brands develop.
Now, we still have a shaky information landscape. The power of people’s activities on social media has great leverage over financial markets, creating huge volatility in some stocks and driving bank closures. The scope of such influence will only enlarge over time until it makes classical monetary policies critically inefficient.
What factors influence inflation, stock valuations, U.S. Treasury yields, and brand trust? This leverage is the power of social media sentiments to uplift economies and create positive business buzz or throw economies with financial markets and brands under the bus. This new reality is still not properly recognized at the world level — but it’s time to do so.
I see the beginning of social media platforms governed by all involved parties via blockchain. The B21 approach, and no less importantly, the rise of SM21 (Social Media-to-One), will create a personalized digital environment tailored to each individual’s needs. Blockchain creates a new level of trust. This approach to social interaction will enable us to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges— from climate change and government debt to resilient inflation — while finding consensus through blockchain-driven solutions for society.
