The Situation
DFINITY brought me on to run marketing for OISY Wallet in October 2024, working as an independent contractor directly under the Chief Business Officer. No marketing team above me, no internal hierarchy to clear decisions through. I set direction, owned the budget, hired the contractors I needed, and made the calls myself. The app wasn’t live yet. There was no strategy, no community, and no users, only a designer and a contracted engineering team building toward a launch date.
The stakes behind that structure were real. DFINITY was funding several initiatives at once, and resourcing tended to follow whichever project was showing the clearest momentum at a given time. Before OISY, the foundation’s own wallet option was the NNS front-end dapp, an interface built for governance and ICP holdings rather than for a mainstream multi-chain audience. Giving one person full ownership of OISY was a deliberate bet that a product could hold its own even if institutional focus moved elsewhere. It moved anyway, about a year in, when Caffeine AI became the foundation’s next flagship, and OISY had to keep growing without that attention.
The product itself justified the bet. OISY is a fully on-chain wallet: no browser extension, no app to download, the interface itself running on the Internet Computer rather than served from a company’s own server. Chain Fusion technology let it hold and transact Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and ICP natively, without bridges or wrapped tokens. The line I wrote for the PR brief was “5G where before there was 4G. A bridge where before there was only a ferry.” The technology was ready. Nothing else was.
What I Saw
Four structural problems stood between OISY and the goal of becoming the leading application on the Internet Computer.
Discovery: wallets get found through app stores, and the founder’s position was that OISY would never be one, closing off the loop every competitor relied on.
Onboarding: every wallet that succeeds lets someone try it before committing, seed phrase import first, identity later; OISY asked for an Internet Identity commitment up front, the inverse of Phantom or MetaMask, and the users who pushed hardest for mobile access were consistently the community’s most engaged members rather than casual browsers.
Retention: with ICP’s price falling through most of my tenure, a wallet that only let people hold tokens gave them no reason to open it twice.
Distribution: there was no cultural moment to point new users toward, nothing playing the role Madlads played for Backpack or an IDO played for a new exchange wallet.
Two of those four problems sat entirely outside what marketing could fix. The founder controlled the app decision, and engineering controlled the onboarding architecture, and I had no authority over either timeline. Retention and distribution were the two levers I controlled myself, and everything I built afterward ran through one of those two, alongside a third lever that sat between product and marketing: which features shipped next, and how hard I pushed for them.
What I Built
The clearest signal for what to push next came from something almost trivial. We’d added a button with an Earn motif to the interface. Pressed, it showed a “coming soon” popup, and near every user who clicked it clicked it again, going back to something they wanted a second time. That repeat click told me more about intent than a survey would have. I took the data to leadership, reopened a stalled conversation with a lending partner using the momentum it created, and used a presentation slot at the World Computer Summit to announce Earn and NFT support together, in front of the founder. The session became the most-viewed at the summit, and the public announcement gave engineering a deadline both features had to meet. Multichain swaps ran on the same push: gasless execution, so a user swapping an asset never had to first go acquire a second token just to pay the fee. I kept it moving alongside Earn because together they turned OISY from a place to park tokens into something closer to a full financial surface. Pay moved on its own track. I built the case, got it approved, and once it had real momentum I let leadership take the public announcement themselves. The feature mattered more with the foundation invested in its success than it would have with my name on the copy.
Lending and earn integrations carried a genuine tension underneath that push. Part of the ecosystem wanted OISY to route users toward protocols with informal ties to former team members, and a flagship wallet promoting a project is real distribution, so the pull made sense. I prioritized protocols that had proven themselves over time instead: live for years, real assets locked, a security record users could check for themselves rather than take on trust. A flagship product doubles as the clearest evidence an ecosystem has for how good its own technology is, and that evidence only holds up if what the product actually runs can survive scrutiny on its own terms.
I built the brand as something distinct from DFINITY’s own voice, which had grown more corporate and, given the token’s price drawdown, less trusted inside the community. A weekly sign-off session with the head of legal let me run a conversational, product-forward identity while staying inside DFINITY’s compliance boundaries. The positioning I settled on, incubated by DFINITY, borrowed enough credibility to matter with builders while keeping OISY’s own story separate from the token price conversation.
Retention ran through Sprinkles, an episodic rewards program with the eligibility bar raised each round: log in, hold a minimum balance, complete a couple of transactions, with referral and multi-chain requirements layered in over later episodes once the early mechanics showed users settling at the exact minimum instead of engaging with the product. The final episode’s requirement to hold tokens across two chains is what moved the token mix and multi-chain adoption, more than the reward payout itself.
Distribution was where most of the remaining work went. Paid acquisition looked productive on a dashboard and wasn’t: with no onboarding preview and no app store presence, campaign clicks were landing on a product experience most users abandoned before they ever held a token. Rather than keep scaling spend against that ceiling, I split the paid audience into four tranches by clustering the top twenty crypto-adoption countries by regional interest, running creative tailored to the interest driving each cluster: Solana integration in one, ledger-grade security without hardware in another, airdrop access in a third, chain-key tokens in a fourth, instead of one generic message run everywhere.
The larger bet was infrastructure over individual users. Getting a protocol or a payment product to implement OISY meant its users arrived already converted, a multiplier no amount of one-to-one outreach could match. OpenCryptoPay was the clearest result: they whitelabeled OISY into their payment product for cash registers across Switzerland, making OISY the infrastructure behind tokenized Swiss franc transactions at the point of sale. Caffeine AI’s launch gave me a second opening, and I positioned OISY as the payment layer builders on that platform would use, working the line into the Caffeine narrative wherever I could place it.
Events ran on the same logic as the paid budget: don’t spend to be everywhere. I chose not to pay for conference attendance, WalletConnect placements, or Spaces slots, because the ecosystem already had plenty of projects talking about what was coming next, and I wanted OISY’s visibility to track only what had actually shipped. Presence at conferences stayed deliberately minimal: stickers, flyers, no booth, no sponsored stage time, aside from the World Computer Summit moment described above. A live activation at ETHDenver, run by the ICP Hubs network rather than by me, spun a wheel and handed out token airdrops on the spot; it moved signups for a day and confirmed that free tokens don’t make anyone come back. After that I set the terms for hub engagement myself rather than following whatever format a hub proposed, and built a standing integration document with ICP Portugal that let an entire protocol’s user base onboard at once instead of one wallet at a time.
What Happened
OISY approached six figures in active wallets and eight figures in assets held at peak, spanning ICP, Solana, and Polygon users rather than ICP holders alone. The token mix shifted from roughly 90% ICP to 60% ICP over the engagement, driven by partner co-marketing and by the final Sprinkles episode’s multi-chain requirement. Community grew from zero to an ecosystem of supporters and testers, and DFINITY itself asked how that momentum had been built, since OISY was the only Internet Computer product carrying any. Cost per acquired user opened at around $4 and took weeks to decrease to the $2.50 benchmark I’d carried over from prior work, a fair number given the product had no onboarding preview or app store listing to make that spend efficient. Sprinkles ran under budget across four episodes, focussing more on quality than exhausting funds for metrics or hollow usage. Earn and gasless multichain swaps both shipped, Pay launched with the foundation’s own team announcing it, and the OpenCryptoPay partnership put OISY behind real point-of-sale transactions rather than wallet downloads alone.
What I’d Do Differently
I’d push Earn, Pay, and multichain swaps into the product faster. Earn took roughly eleven months to ship once I’d identified the demand, and NFT support took close to twelve; a harder push in month one, rather than building the case gradually through data and side conversations, would have put real usage in front of users six months sooner.
I’d pressure-test a reward program’s edge cases against gaming behavior before launch rather than after. The early Sprinkles gaming was predictable in hindsight, and fixing the mechanics inside a live program cost real engagement that a harder look beforehand would have caught.
I’d push earlier and harder for the budget case on higher-value creator spend in specific regional markets, rather than letting a promising channel go unfunded because the case wasn’t made forcefully enough the first time.
A marketing function with full ownership of a product is only as strong as the organization’s willingness to fix what marketing can’t reach on its own. I could move retention, distribution, and the case for what shipped next as far as they’d go. Discovery and onboarding needed decisions that weren’t mine to make, and the ceiling on what I built sat exactly where those decisions stopped.