About the author:
Outset Legal Lens is led by Alice Frei, Outset PR’s head of security & compliance. In this series, she draws on years of experience in legal, compliance, and due diligence work across Web3 projects to show where teams most often get it wrong, and how to build communication that supports growth without quietly creating liabilities.
Most Web3 teams worry about bad PR. Very few realize how dangerous good PR can be.
Strong coverage accelerates adoption, attracts capital, and builds credibility. In fast-moving Web3 markets, it often feels like the only way to stay relevant. But the more effective your PR is, the more it amplifies whatever risks already exist inside the project.
Years later, the same words are often read very differently by regulators, lawyers, and counterparties trying to understand what the project actually communicated to the market.
That’s where PR stops being “just communication” and starts becoming legal material.
Where PR meets legal in Web3
Good PR works as another powerful growth engine. Strong coverage helps projects stand out in an increasingly crowded Web3 market, where visibility can arrive faster than product maturity or internal processes.
That’s where friction begins.
PR and legal operate on two different mental models:
- PR is optimized for speed, attention, and growth
- Legal is optimized for risk control, compliance, and defensibility.
Web3 realities amplify the gap: fast launches, global teams, unclear jurisdictions, and pressure to move first push communication ahead of structure, bringing legal in reactively. Teams ship the product and generate hype through early-stage PR because it produces visible results while legal work can feel expensive and abstract.
However, PR doesn’t just promote a project. It documents it. High-profile interviews, confident founder statements, and viral narratives create momentum and shape perception. At the same time, they leave behind a permanent public record. Long after a campaign ends, the same words can resurface in regulatory actions, disputes with users, or during due diligence, working as evidence.
Why PR regularly steps on legal rakes
The legal risk in Web3 PR usually starts with one shift: communication stops describing what exists and starts shaping expectations. From that moment, PR becomes legally relevant and intent matters less than impact. Regulators ask what an average user could reasonably take away from it.
PR enters legal risk territory when it:
- forms assumptions tied to money, rights, or future value
- influences financial or investment behavior
- frames future outcomes rather than present functionality
Importantly, this shift doesn’t require explicit guarantees. The most “red flag” statements often hint to that by being confident, reassuring, and perfectly reasonable from a marketing perspective.
Financial promises
Any language that can be read as an expectation of financial return immediately moves PR into a high-risk zone.
This includes:
- references to yield or profitability
- phrases like “passive income”
- claims or implications of token price growth
Even when framed as long-term vision or ecosystem logic, such statements are often interpreted as signals of economic upside.
Guarantees and certainty
Statements that imply control, predictability, or reduced risk are particularly dangerous in decentralized systems – precisely because they suggest outcomes the project legally denies being able to guarantee.
Common examples include:
- “minimal risk”
- “sustainable or stable demand”
- “the protocol always…”
From a regulatory standpoint, certainty reads as assurance. And assurance, in a financial context, is rarely defensible.
Team-dependent value
Another high-risk category is language that ties the future value of a token or product to the actions of a specific team.
Typical formulations include:
- “we will ensure growth”
- “the team will support the price”
- “we will launch X to increase value”
These statements are especially sensitive because they directly support the argument that value depends on the efforts of identifiable actors – a key element in many regulatory frameworks.
FOMO pressure
Urgency cues create the same problem through behavior. Examples like:
- “last chance”
- “only available now”
- “early participants benefit the most”
- “the window is closing”
push users toward fast financial decisions. Scarcity tied to future value is where risk escalates: limited supply framed as a value driver, fixed pricing “until date Y”, or suggestions that participation now leads to better economic outcomes later. The issue is how that language influences investment behavior.
In regulated financial markets, behavioral pressure is restricted for a reason. Cooling-off periods exist to prevent users from being pushed into high-stakes decisions under time pressure. From a regulatory perspective, FOMO is a signal that communication may have influenced investment behavior.
Where PR creates the most legal exposure
Legal risk in PR is also about where and how it’s said. Some formats reduce control, increase improvisation, and make it harder to correct or contextualize statements later. In Web3, those formats are often the most visible ones.
Conferences and panels
Live appearances are risky for founders and spokespeople. Adrenaline, time pressure, and audience expectations push people to speak confidently and decisively, often without legal framing. Statements made on stage are routinely recorded, clipped, and redistributed without context. What felt like an offhand explanation can quickly turn into a headline or a quote used to support claims the team never intended to make.
Podcasts, AMAs, and long-form interviews
Long formats lower guard. The longer the conversation runs, the higher the chance someone drifts from explaining how something works to speculating about what comes next. Founders often feel they’re speaking to a friendly or informed audience, but legally, there’s no difference. Once published, these conversations become permanent artifacts that can be revisited years later without the original nuance.
Social media (X, LinkedIn, Discord)
Short formats create a different kind of risk. Nuance disappears, statements get compressed, and context is easy to lose. Screenshots last longer than posts, and replies written casually in comment threads often carry more legal weight than teams expect. This is especially true in community spaces. The illusion of “talking to our own users” lowers self-censorship, but from a regulatory perspective, Discord chats and X threads are still public communication.
The risk of a format is about loss of control and permanence. The less opportunity there is to review, contextualize, or correct a statement, the higher its legal impact tends to be.
Practical case:
In the Ripple Labs vs SEC case, regulators also relied on public statements, interviews, and marketing materials. Communications that framed XRP’s value as tied to Ripple’s efforts were used to argue that the token was promoted with an investment expectation.
How to live with it: building PR that reduces legal risk
The key shift is simple: PR should operate within legal boundaries defined in advance. When communications are built inside a legal framework, they can reduce risk and become more predictable over time.
When this alignment exists, PR becomes the first layer of compliance rather than a source of uncontrolled statements.
In practice, legally disciplined PR tends to work in a few consistent ways.
Defining what not to say
The most effective risk reduction comes from agreeing upfront on topics that shouldn’t be discussed publicly, narratives that create unnecessary expectations, and areas where silence is safer than explanation. These boundaries are about preventing spontaneous statements from turning into long-term liabilities.
Shifting from promises to product logic
PR reduces risk when it explains how a product works, not why it will succeed financially. Instead of leaning on future outcomes, disciplined communication focuses on product mechanics, current functionality, verifiable facts, and limitations. This removes the need for implied guarantees and makes it harder for statements to be interpreted as investment signals.
Thinking in archives, not headlines
Every public message should pass a basic test: how would this read three to five years from now, stripped of context and urgency? Teams that think in archives tend to avoid exaggerated certainty, resist hype-driven shortcuts, and prioritize consistency over virality. This mindset makes it safer and more durable.
What PR must ask legal before going public
Before any media activity, legal should set the frame within which PR can operate safely and more efficiently.
Sensitive jurisdictions
PR needs to understand where communication is most legally sensitive. Which jurisdictions create the highest regulatory exposure for the project? Are there markets where certain topics should be avoided entirely? Does targeting or distribution change the risk profile of the same message? Even though Web3 communication is global by default, geographic awareness still matters, especially at early stages.
Absolute communication taboos
Some topics should never appear in public communication, regardless of format or context. PR needs clarity on statements prohibited under any circumstances, narratives that create unavoidable investment expectations, and areas where even “one exception” can undo months of careful positioning. Most legal problems come from a single outlier statement that breaks the pattern.
Disclaimers that actually work
Some disclaimers create a false sense of safety, or attract additional scrutiny. PR should ask legal which disclaimers have real legal value, where disclaimers are mandatory, and where they are ineffective or counterproductive. A disclaimer, at its best, supports a message that is already framed correctly.
Where flexibility is allowed
PR needs to know where it can speak freely. Clear boundaries create room for confidence. Unclear boundaries create hesitation or improvisation. When legal defines safe zones, caution zones, and silence zones, PR stops negotiating risk on the fly and starts communicating consistently.
Conclusion: PR is either protection or evidence
Every public word a Web3 project puts out lives longer than the campaign it was written for. Over time, PR either strengthens a project’s position or becomes material used to question it.
There is no neutral ground.
When communication is built without legal discipline, it quietly accumulates risk. Statements meant to inspire confidence can later be read as commitments. Casual explanations can turn into evidence. What once drove growth may resurface years later in a completely different context.
When PR is aligned with legal from the start, communication becomes more consistent and starts protecting the project’s long-term position.
This is the core idea behind Outset Legal Lens. In this series, we’ll keep unpacking the legal side of Web3 communication, with a focus on helping teams speak clearly, responsibly, and in a way that supports the long-term growth of the industry.
