TrueFi
How to Build and Operate a Global Marketing Department for an Institutional Finance Technology Platform
Industry: Credit Infrastructure, Institutional Lending, Financial Technology
Engagement: PR & Earned Media, Education & Content, Community & Governance, Growth Engineering, Sales Enablement, Events
Timeline: Multi-phase engagement over three years, through hyper-growth and market stress
The Growth Engine
$1.7B+ Loans originated, with $35M+ paid out to lenders, on blockchain technology
7 Full marketing workstreams built and operated with decision-level authority
182,535 Binance Academy course completions driving ~108,000 new token holders (~70% growth)
120,000+ Qualified email, social, and crypto wallet leads from a partner-driven growth campaign
Tier-1 Earned media across WSJ, Reuters, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, CoinDesk, and 9+ more
Credit, not speculation. Reputation, not hype. Trust engineered at scale.
The Challenge
TrueFi was a category-defining on-chain credit protocol operating at the intersection of decentralized finance and institutional lending. It was among the earliest platforms to operationalize under-collateralized and uncollateralized lending at scale, supplying credit to professional counterparties (market-makers, funds, and institutional trading firms) at a time when on-chain credit markets had no established precedent.
At peak, TrueFi publicly reported $1.7 billion in loans originated and $35 million paid out to lenders. These figures mattered not as vanity metrics, but because they represented real credit risk taken on-chain, under public scrutiny.
TrueFi emerged from the TrustToken ecosystem, which had already built crypto finance infrastructure products, providing the technology and credibility foundation to attempt on-chain credit before the category was normalized. TrustToken was one of the earliest fully-compliant stablecoin issuers, predating most decentralized finance primitives.
The marketing challenge was structural. TrueFi operated across four distinct audiences simultaneously, each with different trust thresholds and informational needs:
Portfolio managers who needed to understand cost reduction, on-chain liquidity, and operational advantages like deep portfolio control and 24/7 global lender access
Borrowers drawn to competitive rates, no collateral lockup (a first for decentralized finance), anonymous borrowing options with future zero-knowledge proof support, and on-chain credit history accumulation
Lenders seeking risk-adjusted returns, transparent tracking of every dollar loaned, default protection through TrueFi SAFU and staked TRU, and exit liquidity (most opportunities had no lockup)
Retail users, developers, and governance contributors participating in protocol direction
Truth Cartel’s mandate was to build and operate a global system capable of educating the market on a new financial primitive, credentialing the brand with institutional legitimacy, empowering business development, coordinating community and governance operations, and driving measurable adoption during extreme market volatility.
This was decision-level authority, not advisory support. Here’s why the engagement mattered:
Scaled trust in the hardest possible category. Truth Cartel delivered growth for a credit protocol, where reputation, risk, and credibility are existential, rather than a speculative consumer token.
Education that converted at internet scale. A third-party, academy-grade education initiative drove hundreds of thousands of verified completions and translated directly into wallet-level adoption.
Tier-1 credibility as a growth primitive. Earned coverage across top global business media and leading industry publications was operationalized into distribution, not left as passive PR, influencing buyer behavior, brand awareness, and public markets.
A full global marketing function built and operated under pressure. Truth Cartel was entrusted with hiring, staffing, training, management, budgeting, and execution across regions.
The Strategy & Results
Truth Cartel built and operated TrueFi’s full marketing function across seven interconnected workstreams:
Education & Content: Build conversion-oriented educational content, including a Binance Academy course that drove 182,535 completions and approximately 108,000 new token holders
PR & Earned Media: Credential the brand through earned coverage across The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, CoinDesk, and 10+ additional top-tier outlets
Growth Engineering: Design and execute the "Truly Optimistic" campaign on Optimism via Galxe, producing 13,133 NFTs minted, 120,000+ qualified email signups, and verified on-chain participation
Community & Governance: Operate 24/7 global community management with governance-aligned communications across Discord, Telegram, and Twitter
Sales Enablement: Build institutional sales materials, PM-focused 1-pagers, borrower assets, and lead generation campaigns to facilitate business development outcomes
Events & Ecosystem: Execute presence at Permissionless, Money 20/20, ETH Denver, ETH Amsterdam, Devcon, and ETH Warsaw (approximately 1,000 attendees)
Fractional CMO: Hire, train, manage, and budget a global marketing team across NA, Asia, and EU with contractor-to-full-time transitions
All seven workstreams operated simultaneously across retail, institutional, developer, and governance audiences during one of the most volatile periods in decentralized finance history.
Results at a Glance
$1.7B+ Loans originated on-chain, with $35M+ paid out to lenders
182,535 Binance Academy course completions from 242,446 impressions, driving approximately 108,000 new token holders (roughly 70% growth)
120,000+ Qualified leads with opt-in personal data from the "Truly Optimistic" growth campaign (~124,000 email and wallet identities captured across campaign lifecycle)
13,133 NFTs minted during the Optimism Layer-2 launch, with approximately 25 ETH in secondary market volume
45,000+ New Twitter followers (roughly 2x growth from a baseline of approximately 37,000)
17,000+ new Discord members (roughly 3x growth from approximately 5,000)
Tier-1 Earned PR coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Business Insider, TechCrunch, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Blockworks, Bankless, The Block, The Block Research, Decrypt, Delphi Digital, and The Defiant
7 Global Workstreams: Full marketing function built and operated with decision-level authority across education, PR, growth, community, BD, events, and team operations
The result was trust engineered at scale: education converted into holders, press converted into institutional credibility, community converted into governance participation, and campaigns converted into verified on-chain adoption.
The Playbook
1. Education That Converts: Academy-Grade Content as an Adoption Engine
Most marketing content exists to generate awareness. TrueFi needed content that generated crypto holders. The difference matters: awareness fills a dashboard; adoption fills a protocol.
Truth Cartel built a conversion-oriented content system, not a content calendar. The centerpiece was a Binance Academy course on TrueFi, distributed through one of the largest education platforms in the industry. Over a 21-day window, the course generated 242,446 impressions and 182,535 completions. During that same period, approximately 108,000 new token holders were added, representing roughly 70% growth. This was third-party, platform-distributed education turning learning into measurable wallet-level outcomes.
Beyond the Binance Academy course, Truth Cartel produced litepaper-grade explainers and protocol education, product roadmaps and institutional narratives, and academy-style educational content tied to adoption milestones. The content operated as infrastructure rather than collateral. Each asset served a specific conversion function across retail, institutional, or developer audiences.
2. Earned Media That Credentials an Institutional Brand
For an on-chain credit protocol, reputation is not a nice-to-have. It is the product. Every lending decision, every institutional partnership, and every governance vote is downstream of whether the market trusts the brand. Truth Cartel treated PR as a trust engine, not a press release machine.
Earned media spanned the full spectrum of business and financial coverage: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and TechCrunch on the institutional side, alongside CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Blockworks, Bankless, The Block, The Block Research, Decrypt, Delphi Digital, and The Defiant across industry-specific outlets. PR output was intentionally sequenced around campaign launches, governance milestones, and institutional narratives so that each placement reinforced a broader credibility arc rather than generating isolated mentions.
PR was moved in-house during the engagement, with direct relationships owned across top outlets. This meant Truth Cartel controlled timing, narrative, and distribution rather than outsourcing to an agency that would treat TrueFi as one account among dozens. The coverage influenced buyer behavior, brand awareness, and public market sentiment.
3. Growth Engineering Through Incentive-Aligned Campaigns
The "Truly Optimistic" campaign was TrueFi’s Optimism launch: the protocol’s first Layer-2 deployment, executed as a full-stack ecosystem growth campaign using a free-mint NFT drop distributed via Galxe. The campaign ran for approximately 45 days with 24/7 coverage across Discord, Telegram, and Twitter, with three full-time community managers dedicated to the drop and direct coordination with both Galxe and Optimism throughout.
Core mechanics included a free-mint NFT drop on Optimism, wallet-connected participation and qualification, partner-driven traffic loops, and sustained community programming including live activations through Twitter Spaces, Telegram AMAs, Discord AMAs, newsletters, and social reposts.
Results: 13,133 NFTs minted. 120,000+ qualified email signups. Twitter grew from approximately 37,000 to over 82,000 followers (roughly 2x). Discord grew from approximately 5,000 to over 22,000 members (roughly 3x). The drop generated approximately 25 ETH in secondary market volume, validating organic demand beyond free participation. Credential-verified engagement included 21,000 retweets and 15,000 likes.
Email acquisition was tied to wallet activity, capturing ENS and wallet identity signals as part of the growth funnel. Internal reporting referenced approximately 124,000 emails and ENS identities collected across the campaign lifecycle. This campaign became a reference point for incentive-aligned growth rather than incentive farming.
4. Global Community and Governance Operations at Scale
Truth Cartel treated community not as engagement metrics but as infrastructure and risk management. For a credit protocol where governance decisions carry real financial consequences, community operations are an extension of the product.
Truth Cartel coordinated global community managers across regions and time zones, built internal moderation frameworks with escalation paths and response playbooks, and maintained narrative alignment during periods of extreme market volatility. Three full-time community managers supported scale during peak campaign periods, with 24/7 coverage across Discord, Telegram, and Twitter.
Governance infrastructure included a Discord revamp with wallet integration, self-serve contributor documentation with "how to help" flows, and sequencing and support for on-chain governance announcements, nonprofit entity announcements, off-chain governance, and board announcements. DAO and governance coordination ran in parallel with marketing operations, ensuring that community and protocol direction stayed aligned.
5. Institutional Sales Enablement and Business Development
TrueFi needed institutional counterparties to trust the protocol enough to borrow, lend, or build on it. That required more than awareness. It required sales-ready materials that spoke directly to the financial and operational concerns of portfolio managers, borrowers, and lenders.
Truth Cartel delivered institutional website flows, fintech-focused lead generation campaigns, and a full suite of conversion-driven sales enablement materials: a sales deck, Portfolio Manager 1-pagers, institutional positioning documents, borrower-facing materials, and PM-focused value propositions covering cost reduction and operational efficiency. Internal planning explicitly tied marketing output to lowering the cost of institutional customer acquisition through trust and credibility.
For portfolio managers specifically, the positioning emphasized reduced fund overhead by servicing expensive fund components on-chain, access to on-chain liquidity covering billions of dollars globally at competitive rates, deep portfolio control over lender selection, fee structure, strategy, and duration, and 24/7 global lender access with a transparent transaction record as an operational advantage. These were not marketing messages. They were business development tools designed to shorten sales cycles.
6. Events and Ecosystem Presence as Distribution Infrastructure
Truth Cartel used events as credibility and distribution surfaces, not brand theater. Every event served a specific function in the broader go-to-market: developer proximity, institutional conversations, press touchpoints, or ecosystem partnership development.
Events and activations included Permissionless (US), Money 20/20 (EU), ETH Amsterdam and Devcon, ETH Denver, and ETH Warsaw, where TrueFi hosted a large-scale event with approximately 1,000 attendees. The partner ecosystem referenced across internal materials included Binance, Optimism, Galxe, Gemini, Balancer, and the Ethereum Foundation.
Event presence was coordinated with PR timing and campaign launches so that each activation amplified the broader credibility narrative. Business development conversations, developer engagement, and press coverage all fed back into the marketing system rather than existing as standalone activities.
7. Fractional CMO: Hiring, Training, Budget, and Operational Authority
This is what separates an agency engagement from an operating partnership. Truth Cartel was entrusted with building and running TrueFi’s marketing department, with decision-level authority over hiring, staffing, training, contractor management, budgeting, and execution across regions.
Scope included hiring plans across North America, Asia, and Europe. Contractor sourcing, onboarding, and management. Contractor-to-full-time transitions. Training, onboarding, and workflow design. Budget prioritization and trade-off decisions. An internal headcount snapshot from Q4 2022 noted a marketing department of 2 full-time employees with a net change of negative one, alongside explicitly flagged risks: headcount attrition, skill mismatch, split focus across rebrand and protocol needs, and lack of dedicated marketing headcount budget.
Despite these constraints, measurable growth and credibility outcomes were delivered. Specific roles recruited, managed, and trained included global marketing leadership, Asia marketing and communications and partnerships coverage, developer evangelism and event marketing ownership, community leadership for North America and governance and community support, an institutional marketing function, and a content manager function.
The operating model ran as a marketing flywheel: Build, Community, Education, Adoption, Credentialing. Audience allocation was structured by function: 80% retail and 20% institutional for global marketing, 70% retail and 30% institutional for Asia, 50% tech and 30% retail and 20% institutional for developer and events, 100% retail for community, and 90% institutional and 10% retail for institutional marketing.
Operational artifacts included marketing strategy documents, Asana boards and event calendars, budgeting summaries, a marketing knowledge base, and quarterly planning and culture pre-reads. This was not advisory. This was the marketing department.
Why Truth Cartel
Truth Cartel deployed all capabilities simultaneously and 24/7 for a single client, during one of the most volatile periods in the history of decentralized finance. For TrueFi, that meant:
No agency-client distance. Truth Cartel operated as the marketing department with decision-level authority, not as a vendor submitting deliverables for approval.
No single-channel thinking. Seven workstreams ran in parallel across education, PR, growth, community, governance, business development, events, and team operations.
No growth-at-all-costs shortcuts. Adoption was measured at the wallet level. Press was sequenced for credibility, not volume. Community was governed, not just grown.
TrueFi’s team focused on protocol development, lending operations, and institutional relationships. Truth Cartel built and operated the marketing system that made all of that work legible to the market, credible to institutions, and adoptable at scale.
