How Surgence Labs Took Goldfish From 4K Followers to 60K+ and the #1 Dashboard on Dune: A Web3 Marketing Case Study

When Goldfish came to Surgence Labs in December 2024, they had a product most Web3 marketing agencies wouldn’t know how to position: a gold-backed stablecoin with $124M+ in verified collateral, institutional-grade custody through Fireblocks, and a 5:1 overcollateralization ratio; but almost no one knew about it.

Twitter sat at roughly 4,000 followers. Telegram had fewer than 1,000 members. The on-chain data was strong, but nobody was looking at it. The gap between what Goldfish had built and how the market perceived it was enormous.

Fourteen months later, Goldfish has 60,000+ Twitter followers, 40,000+ Telegram members, the #1 trending dashboard on Dune across every timeframe, a governance airdrop that pulled 15,000 users in 24 hours, and press coverage across The Defiant, HackerNoon, Blockonomi, and Coin Edition.

This Web3 marketing case study breaks down the strategy behind the growth and sets a new benchmark for how Web3 marketing agencies operate today.

Goldfish isn’t a meme coin. It’s a gold-collateralized digital asset where each $GGBR token represents 1/1000th of a troy ounce of physical gold. The reserves sit in institutional custody. The collateralization status is verified on-chain. The token is listed on XT.com and Bitrue.

But in crypto, having a real product doesn’t mean having real attention.

When we started working with Goldfish, the challenges were clear. First, the RWA (Real World Asset) narrative was heating up, but Goldfish wasn’t part of the conversation. Second, there was no community infrastructure — no active Telegram, no Discord rituals, no creator flywheel generating content. Third, and most critically, the on-chain transparency that made Goldfish special was invisible. The proof-of-reserve data existed, but it wasn’t packaged in a way that the crypto-native audience could discover, share, or rally around.

Most crypto marketing agencies would have started with a KOL blitz — throw money at influencers and hope something sticks. We took a different approach entirely.

The first thing Surgence Labs built for Goldfish wasn’t a campaign. It was a Dune dashboard.

This might sound counterintuitive for a Web3 marketing agency, but it was the highest-leverage move we could make. Goldfish’s core advantage ( $124M+ in verified gold collateral backing a 25M token supply) was locked inside smart contracts that only technical users would ever inspect. We needed to make that data visible, shareable, and narratively powerful.

The Surgence team designed and deployed a comprehensive Dune analytics dashboard displaying Goldfish’s risk parameters in real time: total $GGBR supply, collateral pledged in USD, the live GGBR price, ION.au collateral units, market cap, and collateralization status. Every metric updates on-chain. Every metric is public.

This wasn’t a vanity dashboard. It was a trust engine.

By making Goldfish’s overcollateralization verifiable in a single click, we gave every community member, every creator, and every potential investor the same toolkit. When someone on Twitter asked, “Is this legit?” the answer wasn’t a whitepaper link; it was a live dashboard showing $124,678,750 in collateral pledged against a 25,000,000 token supply.

In February 2026, that dashboard hit #1 on Dune across all timeframes — 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day trending. Not because we paid for it. Because we built something the community actually used.

Growing a Web3 community from under 1,000 Telegram members to 40,000+ doesn’t happen with a single campaign. It happens when you build systems.

Here’s how Surgence Labs approached community growth for Goldfish:

Narrative architecture came first. Before running a single ad or activating a single creator, we defined the positioning. Goldfish wasn’t competing with Tether or USDC — it was offering something fundamentally different: gold-backed stability with on-chain transparency. Every piece of content, every community message, every creator brief is anchored to this core narrative. Consistency compounds.

Creator distribution was layered, not blasted. We activated crypto creators across Twitter/X, YouTube, and Telegram, but we didn’t just hand them talking points. We gave them the Dune dashboard, the proof-of-reserve data, and a narrative framework that let them tell the Goldfish story in their own voice. Authentic creator content outperforms scripted shilling every time.

Community rituals drove retention. Growing Twitter followers means nothing if engagement collapses after the campaign ends. We built engagement loops within the Telegram and broader ecosystem; recurring touchpoints, educational content, and participation mechanics that gave community members a reason to stay active daily, not just during token pumps.

The result: Twitter went from 4,000 to 60,000+ followers. Telegram went from under 1,000 to 40,000+ members. And these aren’t bot-inflated vanity numbers — these are communities that engage, that share the Dune dashboard organically, and that showed up in force for the GFIN governance airdrop.

Community attention is valuable, but for a DeFi-adjacent protocol, the metric that matters most is Total Value Locked. Followers don’t secure a protocol. Capital does.

From the Dune data, Goldfish’s TVL trajectory tells a clear story. As of February 7, 2026, total TVL reached approximately $6.98M — composed of $5.8M in Goldfish TVL (USD) and 1.16M+ in cumulative staked GGBR. The growth curve on Dune shows a consistent upward trend from near-zero in early November through a sustained climb across December, January, and into February.

Surgence Labs drove a 30%+ increase in Goldfish TVL and a 20%+ increase in staking activity through a coordinated approach. We didn’t run isolated liquidity mining campaigns. Instead, we connected the community growth engine to on-chain participation by educating users on staking mechanics through creator content, surfacing TVL growth on the Dune dashboard as social proof, and designing participation pathways that funneled engaged community members toward on-chain action.

When your community can see the protocol growing in real time on a public dashboard — and they were part of that growth — it creates a flywheel that no amount of paid media can replicate.

In February 2026, Goldfish announced $GFIN, the governance token for the Goldfish protocol. While $GGBR serves as the gold-backed stablecoin at the protocol’s base layer, $GFIN sits above it as the coordination and governance layer — aligning users, builders, and partners around long-term protocol growth.

Surgence Labs designed and executed the go-to-market for the GFIN airdrop, including the social tasking leaderboard that would determine eligibility. The leaderboard wasn’t a generic points system. It was built around behavioral alignment — rewarding sustained ecosystem engagement rather than one-time speculative activity.

Within the first 24 hours of the leaderboard launch, 15,000+ users registered. That’s not a paid acquisition number. That’s the direct output of fourteen months of community building, narrative consistency, and trust earned through transparent on-chain data.

The airdrop press rollout secured coverage across major crypto publications, reinforcing the narrative that Goldfish was launching governance over real, functioning infrastructure — not speculative vaporware.

Here’s the full picture of what Surgence Labs achieved with Goldfish from December 2024 to February 2026:

Community Growth:

• Twitter/X: 4,000 → 60,000+ followers (15x)
• Telegram: <1,000 → 40,000+ members (40x+)

On-Chain Metrics:

• TVL growth: 30%+ increase driven by Surgence-led campaigns
• Staking growth: 20%+ increase in cumulative staked GGBR
• Total TVL: ~$7M as of February 2026
• Collateral pledged: $124.6M+
• Collateralization status: Verified sufficient (1:1+)

Distribution & Visibility:

• #1 trending Dune dashboard across all timeframes (24H, 7D, 30D)
• GFIN airdrop leaderboard: 15,000+ users in first 24 hours
• Press coverage: The Defiant, HackerNoon, Blockonomi, Coin Edition, Globe Newswire, Manila Times

The Goldfish engagement illustrates something most crypto marketing agencies get wrong: they treat marketing as a layer you add on top of a product. Campaigns, KOL posts, and press releases — all disconnected from the protocol itself.

Surgence Labs operates differently. We embedded with the Goldfish team and built the growth system from the infrastructure up: first the Dune dashboard (making the product’s strength visible), then the narrative framework (giving the community something to believe in), then the creator distribution (amplifying the story through trusted voices), then the on-chain participation loops (converting attention into TVL and staking), and finally the governance launch (turning the community into stakeholders).

Every layer is connected to the one below it. That’s what full-stack GTM execution actually looks like.

“Surgence Labs didn’t just market Goldfish — they built the systems that made growth inevitable. From engineering our Dune dashboard to orchestrating the GFIN launch, they operated as an extension of our core team. The results speak for themselves.” — Goldfish Team

If you’re building a Web3 protocol and the gap between what you’ve built and how the market perceives you feels enormous, that’s exactly the problem Surgence Labs solves.

We work with DeFi protocols, L1s, L2s, infrastructure projects, and consumer crypto teams as an embedded growth partner — not a vendor. Strategy, execution, and distribution run as one connected system, with every decision grounded in on-chain outcomes.

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Surgence Labs is a Web3 go-to-market agency headquartered in Dubai with a global team of 40+ specialists across strategy, growth, content, community, design, and technical marketing. We’ve partnered with 100+ Web3 teams and driven $300M+ in client revenue.