Aura Finance
I ran the content and social for a DeFi protocol, mostly on my own, for two years.
The role
From early 2024 to early 2026 I ran content and marketing for Aura Finance, a DeFi protocol built on Balancer. It was part-time, about ten to fifteen hours a week, and fully remote. I did it from Beijing and then from Michigan while my family moved back to the States. For a stretch of that time I also did a short marketing stint for Balancer itself.
I applied for a broader marketing role and narrowed it to content, because someone else was a better fit for the cross-protocol coordination work. So the brand’s day-to-day output was mine to run, without much oversight.
The work
Every day I wrote and scheduled the X content and kept the calendar. When there was a governance proposal or a real product update, I wrote the blog post for it. I made the graphics and the video too — starting in Canva, then moving to AI image and video generation as those tools got good enough to use.
A lot of it ran through purple pepe: a recurring character I used across the social images and video, so the crypto-native audience had something consistent to recognize.
One of the videos, made with AI generation end to end:
The scope, and what I got out of it
This was a long bear market for DeFi, and there were stretches where there wasn’t much to say. I had no KPIs and almost no feedback, so I can’t point to numbers. What I can point to is a brand that kept putting out consistent content for two years, mostly with me running it on my own.
The AI-media skill I use now came out of this role. Generating images and video in daily production, not a weekend of experiments, is why I’m good at it and stay current as the models change. When the Balancer hack hit in late 2025 and another person was already covering the marketing, Aura and I agreed it had run its course. We parted on good terms.
