HypeLab vs Bitmedia: two kinds of wallet targeting, and what each door costs

HypeLab and Bitmedia are the two self-serve crypto ad networks that will sell you a wallet rather than a web page, and they are the two most likely to be compared by a founder with a token launch and a five-figure budget. One of them has published its own version of this comparison. Ours is different in one respect: we reviewed both, HypeLab at 7/10 and Bitmedia at 6.5/10, we hold no stake in either, and every figure below was read from the two networks’ own terms, help pages, developer documentation and blogs on 30 September 2026, then set against what each says about the other.

The short answer

HypeLab is a wallet-side network: its code runs inside the apps where people already hold and move crypto, and it prices itself for a performance buyer who wants to test cheaply and measure on-chain. Bitmedia is a web-side network with a wallet layer bolted on in October 2024: a large tail of crypto sites bought at auction from $0.30 CPM, plus a separate, dearer product that targets wallet-connected audiences by what they hold. If your users live in Phantom, MetaMask or a block explorer, HypeLab is the door built for you, and it costs $100 to open. If you want reach across the crypto press and a wallet segment on top, Bitmedia sells both from one dashboard, and it costs $300 to walk in plus $200 a day once you touch the wallet product. Everything else in this article is about the small print behind those two sentences, and about a comparison page HypeLab published in March that gets several of the facts about Bitmedia wrong, and one about itself.

What “wallet targeting” means at each network

HypeLab’s version is technical and documented. Publishers install its SDK, for the web, Android, iOS or Unity, or a WordPress plugin, or a header-bidding adapter, and the SDK looks for the wallet extensions a browser exposes: MetaMask, Phantom, Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow, Trust Wallet. A February 2026 post by one of its machine-learning engineers explains the rest with unusual candour. Wallet presence becomes a binary signal per wallet, the signals feed a gradient-boosted model, and “only about 20% of traffic on HypeLab’s publisher network has detectable wallet data”; the other 80% is served on context and geography like everyone else’s traffic. Publishers can also pass a connected wallet address to the SDK, which the documentation calls optional and says “helps us show the most relevant ad”. Detection is on by default; a publisher who wants it off has to pass a disableWalletDetection flag, and the same page says the SDK “should only be loaded for users who have provided valid consent for personalized advertising”, which places the consent problem on the publisher.

Bitmedia’s version starts elsewhere. Its FAQ says that “Bitmedia Wallet Targeting Technology uses anonymous data collection as users connect their wallets, assigning an anonymous ID to their device”, the connection happening “through one of our data providers or publishers”. The wallet’s holdings and history are then indexed and the device is filed into segments: by balance, by holdings (bitcoin, ether, Tether, memecoins, DeFi) and by interest (gaming, gambling, trading, NFT). Its dashboard guide adds the commercial terms the marketing pages leave out. Web3-audience ad groups are bought on CPM only, you may choose exactly one audience per ad group, and when you set a daily limit “$200 is the minimum requirement”. The ordinary Bitmedia campaign, geo and device and language and a VPN-traffic toggle at $0.25 CPC or $0.30 CPM, is a different product from the wallet one, and the price of admission is not the same.

The honest summary is that HypeLab targets the wallet a person has installed, at the moment they are inside an app, and Bitmedia targets a device that once connected a wallet somewhere in its partner network, wherever that device later reads about crypto. The first is narrower and fresher; the second is broader and older. Neither publishes how many wallets its segments actually contain, and HypeLab’s home page figure of “20M+ wallets reached” is a claim we cannot check from outside. We rank every network that sells this kind of inventory, including the ones that only claim to, in our Web3 ad networks ranking.

Getting in: $100, $300, $500 and a $10 that does not exist

HypeLab’s terms and conditions are the one document that binds it, and clause 7.1 says advertisers “have to pay the Company, in advance, a minimum amount of 100 USD”. Its blog disagrees with its contract three times over: the 2026 network comparison lists a “$500 minimum budget requirement”, the benchmarks post says “a $500 minimum budget”, and the same comparison post also manages “no minimum budget. You can start with $500” in one breath. The table on its HypeLab vs Bitmedia page adds a fourth number, “None ($10 to start)”. A limited-time $100 free credit for new advertisers is advertised beside the $500. Take the contract’s figure and expect the sales pages to argue with it. Payment is by card, crypto (USDC, USDT, BTC and ETH per the blog) or bank wire, a campaign “can be live in as little as 10 minutes”, and the self-serve sign-up form is open. The company’s own benchmark ranges are $3 to $15 CPM for standard inventory and $20 to $40 for wallet-targeted premium placements; its budget calculator uses “~$2.50” from “internal campaign averages” for itself and, curiously, $3.00 for Bitmedia while citing a $0.30 Bitmedia floor from a third-party review as the source.

Bitmedia publishes its floor in two places that agree with each other. The FAQ: “The min deposit for payments with card is 300$. The minimum deposit amount in cryptocurrency is equivalent to 300 USD. Payments less than 300 USD are not processed and will not be credited to your balance”, with the smaller amounts “non-refundable” and a single carve-out, “the minimum deposit amount requirement shall not apply to BTC transactions”. Clause 6.1 of the advertiser agreement repeats it. Bids start at $0.25 per click and $0.30 per thousand impressions, funds go into a main balance after three network confirmations and are moved into campaigns from there, and deposits are taken in BTC, USD, USDT, BNB, TRX and ETH, plus USDC since 5 March 2026. Creatives are approved “within several hours”, up to 24 at weekends. So the arithmetic for a first test is $100 against $300 on paper, and $100 against $300 plus $200 a day if the wallet audiences are the reason you came. We keep both floors, and every other network’s, current in our payouts and minimums table.

What the contracts do with money you do not spend

The two contracts are close cousins. The sentence that sets the minimum is word for word the same in both, down to “the amounts paid may be spent on any campaign type offered by the Company”, and HypeLab’s version still describes a press-release service that none of its product pages mention. Both then say, in capitals, that all amounts paid and reflected in the account are non-refundable. Where they part is what happens to a balance you forget about.

HypeLab’s rule is one line, clause 7.3: “Accounts that remain inactive for 12 consecutive months will be deactivated and unused funds will be forfeited.” No notice period, no restoration, no partial credit. Bitmedia’s is a small machine. Clause 4.14 lets it deem an account inactive after six months without a sign-in, suspend access to whatever is left, and delete the account after a further three-month grace period, with fourteen days’ email notice. Clause 6.4 says funded accounts inactive “for up to 6 months will lose access to their funds” and that the funds are then “written off with no refunds”. Clause 7.5 offers the only way back: restore the account inside the grace period and “sixty percent (60%) of the then-outstanding deposited amount will be re-credited exclusively for the placement of advertisements”, valued in dollars at the exchange rate of the day you funded it, with “no withdrawals or cash redemptions”. The one refund Bitmedia does promise is clause 9.3: if Bitmedia itself ends the agreement, on 24 hours’ notice, for reasons not attributable to you, unused funds come back by the same rail they arrived on. HypeLab’s terms contain no equivalent. Both policies sit in our refund comparison beside the networks that charge an exit fee; on this page the point is simpler. A twelve-month clock with total loss at the end is worse than a six-month clock with 60% at the end, and neither is a reason to deposit more than the next month’s spend.

The publisher side, where the two really diverge

HypeLab’s publisher terms are the cleanest in this niche and have not moved since we reviewed them. Clause 8.2: paid monthly, up to 30 days after the month of service, once the balance reaches $50. The publisher page adds the rails, “USDC or USDT stablecoin payments directly to your wallet, or traditional bank/wire transfers”, and the promise of “no platform fees or hidden charges”. Guidance eCPMs are $1.50 to $5 and up. The application criteria are one sentence, “crypto-relevant sites with genuine traffic”, each application is reviewed, most integrations are live within a day, and publishers can block advertisers and categories. What is still missing is the number that matters most: the revenue share is not published anywhere, so a publisher learns what its traffic is worth only after the tag is live. The other cost is the one described above, a wallet-detecting SDK whose consent burden the documentation hands to you.

Bitmedia’s publisher documents contradict each other, and have for some time. The publisher terms, “last updated on March 13, 2023”, set the floor at “equivalent USD 20”, say payment is made “mostly” in bitcoin with fiat requests converted by a third-party processor and no fees covered, require “your real personal information (first and last name, email address, country of residence, and full address)” before any payment, and let you choose a weekly or monthly interval. Earnings sit in a pending balance for seven days first, “in order to avoid traffic fraud”. The live become-a-publisher page tells a different story to the same reader: it promises to “guarantee instant payouts”, lists “Instant payments” as a feature, and states that “the minimum withdrawal amount is 0,01 BTC”, a figure that has not been worth twenty dollars at any point since 2017. The contract wins; the landing page is legacy copy that nobody has taken down. Stablecoin payouts, the thing that would put Bitmedia level with HypeLab for publishers, were announced as “coming soon” in the 5 March 2026 post that added USDC deposits for advertisers, and had not arrived by 30 September. Publisher inactivity is punished harder than advertiser inactivity: six months without a login and clause 5.13 lets Bitmedia delete the account with unpaid earnings, the restoration clause returning 60% of earned amounts only if you come back within a month. On the integration side the two are closer than the payout terms suggest. Bitmedia’s publisher guides cover a Prebid.js header-bidding setup, in-app placements, adaptive units and a Floor CPM control that keeps unsold inventory from dragging the average down. Where each network sits for a site owner choosing one is set out in our publisher ranking.

HypeLab’s own comparison page, checked against Bitmedia’s documents

On 2 March 2026 HypeLab’s founder, Joe Kim, published “HypeLab vs Bitmedia (2026): Performance, Targeting, and ROI Compared” on hypelab.com, one of a dozen such pages covering Coinzilla, Cointraffic, A-ADS, Blockchain-Ads and the mainstream platforms. Every network is entitled to its comparison page. This one is worth reading with Bitmedia’s own pages open beside it, because several of its factual claims are contradicted there.

The page’s table lists Bitmedia’s targeting as “Geo + device + OS + browser” and the text says “Bitmedia cannot detect whether a user has a crypto wallet, trades on DEXes, or participates in DeFi.” Bitmedia’s FAQ lists “Web3 audiences” among its targeting options, its wallet-targeting product was announced on 22 October 2024 with a quote from its chief executive, and its dashboard guide walks through buying audiences segmented by wallet balance and holdings, at $200 a day. The table lists Bitmedia’s minimum budget as “Not publicly disclosed” and its pricing as “custom pricing, contact sales”; Bitmedia’s FAQ publishes the $300 deposit, the $0.25 and $0.30 bids and the bank-transfer route on one page. The page says Bitmedia has “No” AI optimisation and “basic filtering” for fraud; Bitmedia’s home page advertises “Smart Bidding, AI-optimized price discovery”, “4-step verification layers” and postback conversion tracking, and its FAQ says its anti-fraud team “checks most of the clicks manually”. We cannot vouch for how well any of those features work, at either network. We can say that they are documented on Bitmedia’s site and that HypeLab’s page says they do not exist.

The page is also inconsistent with HypeLab about HypeLab. Its table says the minimum budget is “None ($10 to start)”; four paragraphs later the text says “a $500 minimum budget”; the contract says $100. Its “real campaign results” are HypeLab’s own case studies, which is fair to cite, and we cite the best of them too: the MetaMask Portfolio launch, “under $70” per transacting user and 15 million unique users reached, attributed by name to Tom Sargent, Head of Paid Media at MetaMask. The page then notes that “Bitmedia does not publish detailed case studies with specific conversion metrics”, which is true of the pages we read, and is also true of most networks that let clients speak for themselves on Trustpilot instead. None of this makes HypeLab a worse network. It makes its comparison pages marketing, which is what they are, and it is the reason this page exists.

Trustpilot, and the profile that is not there

Bitmedia’s claimed Trustpilot profile stood at 3.7 across 146 reviews on 30 September 2026, up one review since 28 September: 83 five-star, 51 one-star, and only twelve in between, with 25 reviews in the last twelve months. That shape, loyal publishers and angry ones with nobody lukewarm, is the normal shape for an ad network, and the one-star column is where to spend ten minutes before you deposit; the recurring theme is payout timing, not a pattern of publishers never being paid. HypeLab has no Trustpilot profile; the address returns Trustpilot’s “Whoops!” page, as it did when we reviewed the network. Four years of operation with no public complaint is quietly notable, and four years with no public praise beyond the company’s own site means every number in the previous sections that begins with “HypeLab says” ends there. Enter at the minimum and let your own analytics write the review nobody else has.

Side by side

	HypeLab	Bitmedia
Company	Hype Network, Inc., Delaware law	Bitmedia Ltd, England, reg. 09469636
Where ads run	Inside wallets, explorers, DeFi apps and crypto media via SDK	Crypto and finance websites, Telegram and in-app placements via tags
Wallet targeting	Installed-wallet detection and connected addresses in the SDK; about 20% of traffic carries a wallet signal	Audiences built from wallet connections at partner sites, segmented by balance, holdings and interest
Advertiser minimum	$100 in the terms; $500 on the blog; “None ($10 to start)” on its vs page	$300 by card or crypto, BTC exempt; under $300 not processed
Daily minimum	None published	$200 for Web3-audience campaigns
Buying model	CPM/CPC self-serve; published benchmarks $3–$15 standard, $20–$40 wallet-targeted	Auction from $0.25 CPC / $0.30 CPM; wallet audiences on CPM only
Advertiser payment	Card, crypto, bank wire	BTC, USD, USDT, USDC, BNB, TRX, ETH; bank transfer by invoice
Refunds	All amounts non-refundable	All amounts non-refundable; refund only if Bitmedia terminates without cause
Idle balances	Forfeited after 12 months (cl. 7.3)	Access suspended at 6 months, deleted at 9; 60% restored as ad credit inside the window
Publisher payout	USDC, USDT or wire, Net-30, from $50, no platform fees	“Mostly” BTC from USD 20 (terms) or 0,01 BTC (landing page); USDC “coming soon”
Revenue share	Not published	Not published
Trustpilot	No profile	3.7 across 146
Our rating	7/10	6.5/10

Which door for which campaign

Pick HypeLab when the product lives in a wallet or a dApp and the conversion is on-chain: a DeFi protocol, a bridge, an L2, a wallet itself. Its inventory is where those users already are, the $100 door makes a real test cheap, and its measurement is built for a wallet connection rather than a form fill. Pick it too if you are a publisher of an explorer, tracker or crypto tool: stablecoin or fiat on Net-30 from $50 with no fees is the best written offer in the niche, with the wallet-detection default reviewed before launch.

Pick Bitmedia when you want breadth first and the wallet layer second: an exchange, a token listing, an iGaming operator, anyone whose buyer reads about crypto more than they transact in it this week. Its auction starts low, its targeting menu is the deepest of the web-side networks, and it sells Telegram and in-app formats from the same dashboard. Budget $300 to enter and $200 a day for the wallet audiences, and read the six-month clause before you park money there. Between the two of them and Coinzilla, the placement network neither of them is, the working answer for most launches is still the one in our Coinzilla vs Bitmedia head-to-head: a brand layer on the crypto press, a performance layer on wallets, and the split decided by your own numbers after a fortnight.

The bottom line

These are the two live, self-serve, wallet-aware networks worth a founder’s time in 2026, and they are complementary more often than they are rivals. HypeLab wins on the contract: a lower door, cleaner publisher terms and a targeting method it is willing to explain, offset by a twelve-month forfeiture and a public record that consists entirely of its own pages. Bitmedia wins on reach and on the paper trail: a decade of operation, a Trustpilot page with 146 witnesses, published prices, and a wallet product HypeLab’s comparison page would prefer you not to know about, offset by a $300 entry, a $200 daily floor on the interesting part, bitcoin-only payouts and a landing page that still argues with its own terms. Our ratings, 7 and 6.5, are half a point apart because the documents are, and where both sit against the rest of the field is in our 2026 ranking.

HypeLab vs Bitmedia FAQ

Is HypeLab better than Bitmedia for crypto advertising?

For campaigns aimed at people inside wallets and DeFi apps, HypeLab is built for the job and costs $100 to test. For campaigns that need reach across crypto websites with a wallet segment on top, Bitmedia sells both from one account for $300, plus a $200 daily minimum on the wallet audiences. We rate HypeLab 7/10 and Bitmedia 6.5/10; the gap is the contract terms and the publisher payouts, not the targeting.

What is the minimum deposit at HypeLab vs Bitmedia?

HypeLab’s terms set $100, paid in advance; its blog says $500 and its own comparison table says “$10 to start”, so confirm at sign-up. Bitmedia’s is $300 by card or in crypto, waived for bitcoin deposits, and anything under $300 is neither credited nor refunded. Wallet-targeted campaigns at Bitmedia also need a daily limit of at least $200.

Do HypeLab and Bitmedia refund unspent balances?

No. Both contracts declare all amounts paid non-refundable. HypeLab forfeits unused funds after twelve consecutive months of inactivity. Bitmedia suspends access after six idle months, deletes the account after three more, and restores 60% of the balance as advertising credit if you return within that window. Bitmedia refunds unused funds only when it terminates the agreement itself for reasons not attributable to the advertiser.

How do HypeLab and Bitmedia pay publishers?

HypeLab pays monthly on Net-30 in USDC or USDT to a wallet, or by bank wire, from a $50 threshold with no platform fees; the revenue share is not published. Bitmedia pays “mostly” in bitcoin from USD 20 under its publisher terms, weekly or monthly, after a seven-day pending period, with conversion and transfer fees deducted; its become-a-publisher page still states a 0,01 BTC minimum, and USDC payouts remain “coming soon”.

Does Bitmedia offer wallet targeting?

Yes. Bitmedia’s FAQ describes its Wallet Targeting Technology, launched in October 2024, which assigns an anonymous device ID when a user connects a wallet at a partner site and segments audiences by balance, holdings and interest. HypeLab’s comparison page states that Bitmedia cannot detect wallets; Bitmedia’s own dashboard guide, which sells those audiences on CPM at $200 a day, says otherwise.

Reviewed in full

• Bitmedia 6.5/10

  The Web3 ad veteran with deep targeting — and a thinning footprint on premium crypto media.

• HypeLab 7/10

  Ads where the wallets already are — the most engineering-dense young network in the niche.

• Coinzilla 9/10

  The default choice in crypto advertising — quietly displacing older rivals.

• Cointraffic 7.5/10

  Premium crypto inventory and the friendliest payouts in the niche — three doors in, from €500 marketplace to €3,000 managed.

• A-ADS 7/10

  The 2011 original — still anonymous, still cookie-less, still paying in BTC every day.

• Blockchain-Ads 4.5/10

  The biggest claims in crypto advertising — behind a $10,000 door and a 2.7-star record.