In late 2021, Catie Romero-Finger and Nastya Adamova set out to make an NFT project led by women. This was not, at the time, an eccentric plan. NFTs had turned group chats into companies and cartoon avatars into membership cards. The pair did the groundwork. Then they noticed the more useful business hiding next to the one they intended to build.
Web3 had no shortage of projects. It had a shortage of companies. Founders could explain the contract, the chain and the token, but not always who would pay, who would return or why a person outside the Discord should care. Romero-Finger later reduced the problem to three ordinary questions: How will you make money? Who is the audience? Which partners do you need? A technically impressive product without those answers, she argued, goes nowhere.
So the collectible receded and the agency arrived. BABs formally launched in March 2022, with Romero-Finger as CEO and Adamova as COO. The first idea was retired before launch. The founders changed their minds before mistaking momentum for a market. That is the first useful thing to copy from BABs: a pivot does not need a funeral.
The campaign ends where the wallet begins
BABs now describes itself as a Web3 growth lab. The phrase is deliberate. A conventional agency can report impressions, mentions, clicks and sentiment. A crypto company leaves another trail: active wallets, transactions, liquidity, total value locked and trading volume. BABs combines on-chain intelligence with creator distribution and experiments, then asks whether attention produced any of those behaviors.
This does not make marketing scientific by decree. A wallet is not a person, a transaction is not loyalty and volume can be manufactured. It does make one old evasion harder. If a campaign reached a million people and almost none of them did the thing the product exists for, reach is a poor alibi.
Client and partnership totals are company-reported. The six service lines are growth strategy, PR, influencer marketing, branding, product development and strategic advisory.
The service menu is broad because the agency sees the pieces as interdependent. Growth strategy can include positioning, tokenomics and partnerships. PR supplies the narrative. Creator marketing finds distribution. Branding makes the complicated thing legible. Product advice turns campaign feedback into a roadmap. Strategic advisory keeps fundraising, launch timing and market entry in the same conversation.
The BABs growth loop
The buyers are not people looking for a clever television spot. They are protocols, wallets, exchanges, infrastructure companies and teams in DeFi and tokenized real-world assets. BABs' site carries testimonials tied to Stellar Development Foundation, Titan and Cheeze, and shows work or relationships across names including RAAC and other crypto companies. The firm says it has served more than 200 clients and built more than 400 partnerships.
“You have to think that you are not creating a project, but a company.”Catie Romero-Finger
A community is not a crowd
The distinction matters most in influencer marketing. Crypto has made a small industry of accounts called KOLs - key opinion leaders - whose audiences may be enormous, anonymous and difficult to price. The naive purchase is a follower count. BABs' approach is to examine the health and fit of an audience, using on-chain and off-chain signals, and to favor creators whose communities might plausibly use the product.
Romero-Finger offered one company-reported example in 2026. For real-world-asset project RAAC, BABs helped launch a utility NFT tied to a VIP community. She said the NFT rose twelvefold in its first week and that the community represented about $300 million in estimated on-chain wealth. Price appreciation is not the same as customer retention, but the example reveals what BABs wants to measure: not how many people passed the billboard, but who entered with capital.
Romero-Finger has argued for micro-influencers and thought leaders who educate rather than merely broadcast. The economic idea is simple: trust inside a smaller relevant group can be more useful than rented visibility inside a giant irrelevant one. The cultural idea is older. BABs began as a women-led firm talking about unheard voices, “Unsung Heroes” and intentional diversity. In a 2022 interview, Romero-Finger said its name originally stood for “Bad Ass Bitches.” The current website speaks more often of funnels, whales and liquidity, but the preference for overlooked networks remains visible.
Crypto marketing becomes interesting when the dashboard is allowed to disagree with the campaign.
The seams are where launches split
A token launch can involve a brand studio, creator agency, market maker, exchange adviser, law firm and community team. Each can complete its assignment while the launch fails as a whole. In 2026, BABs partnered with Infinilex to join growth and liquidity work with legal, compliance and entity structuring. Their proposed readiness grade looks across trust, yield, incentives and legal preparation, followed by a prioritized list of repairs.
It is a revealing addition. BABs is not trying to win by becoming the narrowest specialist. It competes with crypto-native firms such as Coinbound, Lunar Strategy, MarketAcross, Serotonin and Unhashed by offering a wider operating system, then using data to keep that breadth from becoming a heap of disconnected services. Earlier partnerships followed the same network logic. Semoto named BABs a marketing partner in 2024; websh3 gatherings with Project Zero and Hola Metaverso brought founders, funders and underrepresented builders into the same rooms.
The business itself is straightforward: tailored business-to-business engagements, scoped after a strategy conversation. The company publishes no menu of fixed packages. Customers are buying a mix of judgment, execution and access to a network - the kind of inventory that does not sit neatly on a shelf.
Four things another founder can borrow
- Name the business behavior before choosing the marketing metric.
- Vet creators for audience fit, not just visible size.
- Put narrative, incentives and measurement in one operating plan.
- Change direction when the adjacent problem is larger than the original idea.
Useful proof has conditions
The BABs method is most persuasive when the desired action is observable and economically meaningful: a wallet activates, liquidity arrives, a user returns. It is less decisive when adoption happens offline, identity is deliberately obscured, or a short-term transaction says little about durable demand. On-chain data can sharpen a question; it cannot decide which question deserves to be asked.
The integrated model also asks more of the client. A campaign cannot repair a product people do not need, and an incentive can buy temporary behavior without creating attachment. The approach fits teams willing to change the product, offer or launch plan when evidence is unkind. It fits less well when “data-driven” means finding a number that approves a decision already made.
BABs' own evolution offers the neatest demonstration. It began with identity and inclusion, grew into a wide communications shop, and now presents itself in the language of market systems. The vocabulary changed because crypto changed. Yet the question underneath remained stubbornly ordinary: after everybody has looked, posted and applauded, what happened?
The most valuable thing a marketing dashboard can do is ruin a beautiful theory.