case study
How I helped scale a climate crypto startup to $4B in trading volume as Interim Head of Growth, building the ecosystem at the intersection of carbon markets and Web3.
Case Study
Interim Head of Growth • October 2021 – June 2022 (9 months)
Toucan Protocol launched groundbreaking infrastructure enabling tokenization of carbon credits from the VERA registry, creating liquid on-chain carbon markets. I joined post-launch to establish growth foundations during a period of intense hypergrowth and uncertainty.
Interim Head of Growth
October 2021 – June 2022 (9 months)
Toucan Protocol
Post-launch hypergrowth
Led 6 direct reports within organization of 36+ employees
Growth foundations, org design, content creation, ecosystem scaling
Despite massive interest post-launch, Toucan lacked a defined growth strategy and organizational structure. The organization was hiring rapidly without clear objectives, roles, and responsibilities. Engineering was a bottleneck with 7 reports to the CTO and no product management. The ecosystem was fragmented across Klima DAO, Web3 communities, traditional carbon players, and regulators—all in uncharted territory at the intersection of carbon markets and blockchain.
What Toucan's founders had developed was truly revolutionary: An open source bridge between the traditional carbon market and the new world of carbon finance on-chain. This came with an enormous surge of interest and capital, but the rapid growth created significant challenges.
Hired by COO Rob Schmidt as the first employee post-launch, I set expectations for a high-intensity interim engagement to rapidly establish durable growth systems while the market window was open.
Through BCT platform within the first six months post-launch.
Of digital carbon credits at peak per Toucan data.
Achieved within 12 days of launch, emabled by Toucan infra.
The Toucan Bridge was a one-way bridge from Verra to Toucan (TCO2s) that could be pooled into BCT (Base Carbon Tonne) for exchange with USDC. This revolutionary model made a breakthrough in digital carbon markets but had only one major source of demand and only one source of supply.
Toucan, developed in parallel to the pseudo-anonymous KlimaDAO team, launched October 2021 into intense demand for Web3-powered climate solutions. The Toucan Bridge enabled tokenization of VERA-verified credits, with deposits into BCT pools for immediate USD liquidity—a revolutionary model at the time.
Regulation remained uncertain despite our best attempts to build trust with Verra and IETA through constant dialogue. Shortly after my interim engagement concluded, VERA changed terms of service, making the bridging mechanism non-compliant and halting volume. This validated our attempt to diversity supply and highlighted risks at the frontier of market infrastructure.
An interim role maximized impact during the critical launch phase while preserving flexibility amid regulatory risk.
Hypergrowth without structure creates bottlenecks; early OKRs and org design materially improved velocity.
Introducing product management empowered engineering to build the right things with clarity and confidence.
Meta-infrastructure like ReFi Podcast and ReFi DAO proved more durable than specific product wins.
Our dependence on Verra was a primary risk that we identified and acted on early. Unfortunately, other intermediaries followed Verra's lead in banning the tokenization of carbon credits.
This experience set the stage to found and scale ReFi DAO into a global network of 50+ local regenerative startup communities, supporting 300+ founders at the intersection of climate, technology, and systems change.