Building a category from scratch for DeFi liquidity

In August 2024 I joined Turtle as head of marketing. The function was two people, one X account with 4,000 followers, roughly one channel, and no community programme. Two years later the account is past 200,000, the brand named its own category, and the token is listed on Binance. Nobody called it liquidity distribution before we did. This is how the category got built, in four eras, with the receipts linked: what worked, what I would do again, and what the attention was actually for.

Pedro Verdades · October 2026

Disclosure: I run marketing at Turtle. Every number below comes from public posts, public dashboards or press, and is linked where a link exists. Nothing from the deal desk.

Two desks pushed together in an empty office at night, laptops open, the river behind the window — Two desks. That was the marketing team in August 2024.

If you only read one thing

Buy the audience with things people want to hold, not with giveaways. Two NFT mints did more for the base than a year of posting would have.
Name the category before someone else does. "Liquidity distribution" was a decision, not a description.
Ecosystem launches are the best co-marketing there is. You borrow the whole chain's attention and give it liquidity in return.
A token launch is a week, not a post. Order the days so each one points at the next.
Build the community engine before the token, so the launch lands on people who already show up weekly.
Impressions are a diagnostic. The number I actually watch is whether capital and followers are still there ninety days later.
Thesis posts only start working once the account is big. Earn the right to have opinions in public.

01Audience foundation, August 2024 to February 2025

The first era had one job: get people in the door. A 4,000-follower account cannot carry a narrative, so I did not try. We ran acquisition at the top of the funnel through things that give a user a reason to connect a wallet, and we made sure every one of them had an onboarding path on the other side.

October 2024, the Scroll NFT mint. A co-marketing mint across X and community channels, built so that minting led straight into using the product. That one campaign brought in more than 100,000 new users. January 2025, the Berachain badge mint, tied to participation in the Berachain ecosystem ahead of its incentives: 6,900 badges, oversubscribed, and a large share of that ecosystem onboarded before anyone else was talking to it.

I think mints are underrated as acquisition and overrated as collectibles. The difference is whether the thing you mint is a key to something or a picture. Ours were keys.

receipts: scroll mint · berachain badge mint

02Category creation, March to June 2025

With a base in place, the second era was about what Turtle is. We settled on a line, the liquidity distribution category, and then spent four months proving it on other people's launches. The pattern was the same each time: a chain or ecosystem is about to go live, it needs liquidity on day one, and Turtle runs the campaign that routes LPs into it. Three of those, in order.

March, The Summoning, the full-ecosystem campaign for the TAC launch with vault provider Veda. Across the ecosystem it reached $800M in TVL on internal tracking; on DefiLlama the TAC chain peaked at $214M. May, the $6.2M seed round, announced across X and the crypto press with 170,000 views and a Bitcoin.com story. Also May, Samurai's Call for the Katana chain launch, which took Katana from $12.6M to a $711M peak.

Those two chain launches are, to me, the strongest argument for the category. Nobody had to be convinced that Turtle distributes liquidity. They watched it happen on a public dashboard.

receipts: the summoning · tac chain, defillama · veda, defillama · seed announcement · bitcoin.com · samurai's call · katana chain, defillama

03Brand and token, July to October 2025

The third era is the one people ask about, so here it is as it ran, in order. The sequencing is the point. Each step gave the next one something to stand on.

July 2025 Rebrand: Turtle Club became Turtle. The brand had outgrown the word club, and the announcement film did 105,000 views. Everything after this launched under the new name.
September 2025 Creator leaderboard: Before the token, a weekly engine: activities and rewards for creators and active members, scored and published every week. It is now in season two. This is what made launch week land on people who already turned up on Tuesdays.
September 2025 $TURTLE launch: A multi-channel launch anchored on X. 1.84M impressions, 28% engagement, 3,034 new follows on the account in the window.
September 2025 Binance Booster: Co-marketing with Binance Booster around the listing, run as its own moment rather than folded into the launch post. 1.92M impressions, 2,984 follows.
October 2025 Airdrop phase I: The conversion step, turning audience into holders, paired with a token sale. 372,000 impressions.
October 2025 Avalanche Awakening: The first big liquidity campaign after the token, with vault provider Lagoon, taking programmable liquidity onto Avalanche. $75M in liquidity reached, 110,000 impressions.
October 2025 Airdrop checker: A self-serve allocation checker shipped live, so people had a reason to come back rather than ask. 1.34M impressions, the second-biggest number of the quarter, from a tool rather than an announcement.
October 2025 +$5.5M raise: The round extended to $11.7M in total, with coverage in The Defiant. Momentum, announced while there was still momentum to announce.

I would run that order again. The two things I would not change are the leaderboard before the token and the checker after it. One builds the crowd, the other gives the crowd a reason to return. The launch post itself is the least important item on the list.

receipts: rebrand · leaderboard · season two · token launch · binance booster · airdrop phase i · avalanche awakening · liquidity proof · lagoon, defillama · airdrop checker · raise · the defiant

04Institutional positioning, November 2025 to today

After a token the audience changes. A good share of the people reading are now holders, and a holder wants to know what the company thinks, not only what it ships. So the fourth era moved the account toward doctrine: fewer announcements, more positions.

April 2026, a token-versus-equity thesis, published as an article and distributed on X, 56,000 views. May 2026, a Chainlink CCIP cross-chain risk framework, 27,000 views, and the piece that made the account a reference on cross-chain risk rather than one more voice on it. June 2026, the account crossed 200,000 followers.

There is a rule hiding in that sequence. When I audited sixteen accounts for the Hare launch this autumn, thesis posts did badly for every account under fifty thousand followers. Turtle's thesis posts work now because the account earned the audience first. In 2024 the same pieces would have reached nobody. The order matters more than the content.

receipts: token vs equity · ccip risk framework · the hare audit

05The turnaround, as a diff

What the marketing function looked like in August 2024 against what it looks like now, in the format I actually keep it in.

- followers        4,000
+ followers        200,000+
- monthly reach    minimal
+ monthly reach    up to 5.7M
- channels         ~1
+ channels         7+
- co-marketing     a handful
+ co-marketing     100+ campaigns, lombard, euler, decibel among them
- community        no programme
+ community        ambassador programme, weekly creator leaderboard
- brand            limited
+ brand            defined and named the liquidity distribution category

Over the twelve months from June 2025 to June 2026 the account did 15.9 million impressions, with 707 Kaito smart followers and 63% net sentiment at the end of it. I quote those because people ask, not because they are the goal. Impressions tell you whether a post travelled. They say nothing about whether the capital it brought is still there in ninety days, and that second number is the one I run the function on. Four eras, fifteen campaigns, and the thing that compounds is not reach. It is the share of people who came for a mint, a chain launch or a token, and stayed.

Turtle is a liquidity distribution protocol. I have run its marketing since August 2024. All figures are public and dated in the linked sources; the TAC ecosystem TVL is Turtle's own tracking and is marked as such. Nothing here is investment advice.

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