The Ethics of Cryptocurrency Marketing: A Systematic Review of Promotional Practices, Consumer Vulnerability, and Governance

Abstract

In cryptocurrency markets, credibility may be created before it can be verified. Promotional signals from influencers, online communities, exchanges, and project actors can create an impression of legitimacy before consumers are able to independently assess the quality, risks, or underlying value of the asset. This systematic review examines how promotional activity contributes to this condition and how the literature connects it with ethical concerns, consumer consequences, and governance. Following PRISMA 2020, 54 empirical studies published between 2019 and 2025 were identified through Scopus and analyzed using thematic synthesis. The findings indicate that promotion is distributed across social media, influencers, communities, exchanges, and project actors, making the boundary between marketing, personal opinion, and financial advice difficult to maintain. Ethical problems arise not only from fraud, but also from selective information, hidden incentives, artificial attention, and market signals that give uncertain assets an appearance of legitimacy. Consumer vulnerability is similarly situational. Knowledge and experience may offer some protection, but trust, technological complexity, social influence, and speculative expectations continue to shape judgement. Regulatory and educational responses remain fragmented because responsibility is dispersed across actors and jurisdictions. The review connects these relationships through an ethical marketing cycle that conceptually organizes how ethical concerns may develop across communication, market activity, consumer interpretation, and governance. This perspective extends ethical marketing beyond the accuracy of individual claims and locates responsibility within the structures through which cryptocurrency credibility is produced. The review is limited by its reliance on Scopus and the absence of a formal risk-of-bias assessment of the included studies.