When I began working with Fira, the protocol was built but had no launch strategy. Three audits done. Code production-ready. A fixed-rate lending market designed to replace the third-party infrastructure Usual had been paying $700,000 a year to use. Everything was ready except the part where people find out about it and show up.
My job was the go-to-market. Not just the announcement. The entire framework for how Fira enters the market, earns credibility, attracts liquidity, and positions itself for the long game.
The challenge
Fixed-rate lending is a hard sell. Variable-rate protocols have simpler stories: deposit, earn, withdraw. Fixed-rate requires understanding maturities, bond tokens, coupon tokens, secondary market pricing. The product was good. The audience needed a reason to care about something more complex than what they were already using.
The existing USL had proven demand, $400 million in organic loans in six months. But that demand lived on Euler’s infrastructure, paying Euler’s fees, following Euler’s rules. Fira was Usual taking that demand home. The narrative needed to be about ownership, not innovation. We’re not building something new. We’re building something we should have owned from the start.
There was also the migration question. Users with positions on Euler needed a path to Fira without friction. The technical solution was clean, automatic migration, no manual intervention. But users needed to understand what was changing and why before they’d trust the process.
What I built
I designed a phased launch framework. Not a single announcement. A sequence.
The build-up started weeks before launch. Protocol documentation published early so power users could read the mechanics before capital moved. Whitepaper dropped as a credibility signal for the technical audience. Community moderators briefed on what was coming so they could answer questions without needing to escalate everything.
Launch day was coordinated across channels. Press release to financial and crypto media. Blog post at fira.money explaining what launched, what markets were open, and how positions worked in plain language. A protocol walkthrough AMA led by the engineering team so users could see the mechanics demonstrated live. KOL briefings one-to-one, embargoed until launch, so coverage arrived simultaneously rather than trickling out.
Post-launch was about sustaining momentum. First usage metrics shared within 48 hours. Follow-up content showing real positions, real rates, real outcomes. A simulator tool for users to model scenarios before committing capital. The goal wasn’t a spike. It was a steady build toward the kind of depth that makes a lending market functional.
I also mapped the content strategy across channels. YouTube for protocol walkthroughs and product demos. Twitter for real-time launch updates and community engagement. Discord for direct Q&A and community management. Blog for long-form explanations. Each channel had a specific role in the sequence.
The execution plan ran week by week. Pre-launch tease content in week 11. Launch week with coordinated press, blog, and AMA. Post-launch metrics and reinforcement. The timeline was detailed enough that anyone on the team could execute their piece without needing to understand the full picture.
What the protocol achieved
$450 million in TVL within weeks of launch. The growth came from USL migrations and organic deposits, not incentives or airdrops. Users moved to Fira because the rate was better, the infrastructure was owned, and the migration was frictionless.
The zero base rate worked. Borrowers paid 0.10% APR versus the 2% to 15% that variable-rate platforms charged on similar collateral. Certainty was the product, and it delivered.
LP deposits exceeded projections. The fixed-rate pools offered predictable returns that variable markets couldn’t match. Four rolling maturities gave liquidity providers flexibility without fragmenting the market.
Revenue came in smaller than the old USL peak. But it was clean. The reflexive selling pressure that had plagued the token was gone. A stable foundation for the protocol to build on.
What I positioned next
Before my engagement ended, I left the team with a detailed marketing strategy for the scale-up phase. Global vision. Regional expansion. Content partnerships. Community growth framework. The strategy was designed to take Fira from a successful launch to a protocol with sustained, organic growth across multiple markets.
The launch was the proof point. The strategy was the roadmap for what comes after. A protocol that owns its infrastructure needs a go-to-market that matches the ambition. Fixed-rate lending is a $145 trillion market in traditional finance that DeFi hasn’t cracked because nobody’s built the rate curve properly. Fira’s design addresses that gap. The marketing strategy was about making sure the right people understood that.
The execution plan, the content framework, the community protocols, the PR relationships, all of it was built to be handed off. The goal was never to be the permanent voice. It was to build the system and train the team to run it.
What I’d change
The floating-rate market should have shipped alongside UZR. Fixed-rate only at launch meant users who preferred variable rates went elsewhere. Capturing both from day one would have pulled more of the Euler migration.
The DeFi integrations needed to be locked before the governance vote, not after. Every week without aggregator visibility was a week of missed organic discovery. The integration pipeline was treated as a follow-up when it should have been a precondition.
And the content strategy should have started building earlier. Protocol documentation and community education take time to land. Starting the content engine three weeks before launch instead of six meant some of the groundwork was rushed.
Building a launch framework is different from running a campaign. A campaign has a start and an end. A framework is something the team runs forever. The press relationships, the content pipeline, the community protocols, the KOL network, all of it was designed to outlast my engagement.
The protocol team did the engineering. The DAO voted to acquire it. The community provided the liquidity. My job was making sure all three happened in the right sequence with the right story attached.
The go-to-market that matters is the one the team can sustain without you.