Aspirational Absurdity: The Resupply & Convex Growth arqus

DeFi moves at a breakneck pace and true longevity is a rare commodity. In May, 2026, Convex Finance celebrated its five-year anniversary. To mark half a decade of success, Convex showed genuine gratitude to the people who kept the engine running, airdropping $CVX tokens to their OG and Veteran Discord members who have supported the project since the earliest days.

Leading up to the milestone, Convex Finance and Resupply - the Convex sister protocol built in collaboration with Yearn - launched a multi-month content creator reward initiative. Prizes were awarded monthly to contributors whose high-quality submissions best showcased the protocols in authentic and compelling ways.

Among the flood of entries throughout the six months of competition, one resident anon’s work consistently stood out. Long-time ecosystem member @arqus was crowned monthly winner repeatedly, delivering a unique style of content that was impossible to ignore.

One spring day, regular visitors to the Convex and Resupply Discord servers noticed a shift. The name arqus suddenly appeared in the unmistakable color and role of… Team Member.

Now operating as the official Growth Lead for Convex and Resupply, arqus brings a high-octane, calculated absurdity to the core team. Leviathan News sat down with arqus to trace his journey from anonymous contributor to pseudonymous growth strategist. We explored the evolution of his work and what happens when an ecosystem actively backs its creators and enables them to unleash their power.

Congratulations on taking the wheel for Convex and Resupply growth. What exactly are they letting you loose to do, and how does it feel to be building for this ecosystem from the inside?

My role is to create content, supercharge the social media presence, and bring more users to Convex/Resupply. My strategy is to craft compelling narratives about Convex/Resupply through multimedia content (film, music, visual art) that is both entertaining, educational, and gets people excited to use the protocols.

Obviously, this involves working with generative AI, so much of what I’m doing is experimenting with the new tools being launched every month and seeing what they’re capable of. It seems like every other week there’s a new model breaking the internet, and I’ve hopped around quite a bit from subscription to subscription chasing the hottest new model, but the throughline is that they can and will keep getting better and better. So what’s the potential for content? Recast the entire Twilight movie franchise with Edward Cullen replaced by a hippo? The Michwill Cinematic Universe? The possibilities are endless.

It’s the kind of dream position I’ve wanted for a long time, one where I can pursue my creative visions with a decent amount of autonomy. Generative AI as a technology is also very exciting right now. The possibilities seem endless, like we’re on the edge of some new frontier. So to work with generative AI pseudo-professionally, anonymously, remotely, with a small team of very talented people that I admire, for a set of protocols that I really believe in… it’s hard to imagine anything better than that.

Your style definitely isn't the standard marketing slop. Where did this chaotic creative streak actually come from? Were you raised in some kind of underground art scene?

I grew up in a rural town that was very conservative and very Christian. Right around the time I got to high school, a group of freshmen were attempting to remake Jurassic Park into a musical and during the Velociraptor’s Waltz, one kid accidentally slashed a high-voltage power line with the claws on his dancing shoes, killing him instantly.

A town meeting was called and the city council declared that creative work was now banned, in all its forms, within the city limits. From that day forward, kids weren’t allowed to pursue their art, so I would drive out to an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town and illegally record parodies of famous music videos–my one true passion–away from the prying eyes of those who sought to extinguish that deep, deep burning flame of creation.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2022, when I was lurking around Crypto Twitter and exploring DeFi. I arrived late to the party right as the market was cratering, but I was instantly hooked by the potential of a decentralized, permissionless financial system where corruptible humans were replaced by immutable code. The primary hook was making money, sure, but I genuinely admired the tech and the people building it.

Early 2022 on Crypto Twitter was pure historical chaos! Andre Cronje was launching Solidly, Frog Nation was imploding, and multi-million dollar pixelated apes were running amok. Yet, you bypassed all that noise and gravitated toward the Llama part of town. What was it about this neighborhood that made you want to pitch a tent and stay?

The thing I noticed about the Curve/Convex ecosystem at that time, was that it was full of many like-minded, intelligent, creative, funny people. I frequently felt like the stupidest person in the room chatting with these guys (I still do), which is always a good place to find yourself.

Even though I didn’t understand everything they were saying, I could tell that I was directionally interested in what they knew, what they were about, and that - more or less - we saw the world in the same way. The fact that I would never know their real names or see their faces was an added bonus. I didn’t want to know their personal details, I just wanted to exchange ideas, crack jokes, and occasionally jam on some projects.

Sometimes, if you allow your vibe to flow naturally without any inhibition, and it creates a kind of positive resonance with your environment and the people in it, you’ve stumbled onto something worth exploring. If you’re like me, those kinds of environments are hard to find in meatspace. Even more so in the normie professional world.

Many Discord servers are filled with lurking anons. It’s something else entirely when a community actively builds a culture of support. How did the Convex and Resupply environments welcome you out of the wings and motivate you to channel your own creative energy back into the group?

There are probably three ways of being in the world that I find most natural, that feel the most meaningful, and where I tend to perform most competently: guide, creator, and trickster.

Essentially, I like being of service to people and helping them solve their problems, I like building shit and I like messing with people or situations or systems to shake things up, usually to comic effect. ‘Innovator’ and ‘trickster’ often go together, see Prometheus.

How does that manifest in a Discord server? You teach people how to vote on gauge weights, you contribute some artwork to a community NFT project, and you bait solicitors or scammers into asking what DN means.I think when you do these things well, you naturally create a lot of goodwill, build trust, and form connections quickly. Goodwill and connections lead to opportunities. Sometimes an opportunity comes in the right place, at the right time, that’s perfect for your unique set of skills.

When the Resupply Hippo Creator Pod and Convex Creator Collective reward programs took off, your entries showcased a massive creative side of you that had been unleashed. How did those reward programs line up the perfect runway for your true potential to take flight?

When the Resupply Creator Pod was announced, I saw the description and thought, I can win this. I think people in the community were surprised at my entries those first few months, like, “Where did this come from? Isn’t that the deez nuts guy?” Before the Pod, there wasn’t any financial incentive to produce anything in cryptoland. I admire people who have the time and energy to put stuff out there for, you know, just the love of it or whatever, but creating content that isn’t complete bullshit takes time and - especially now, if you’re using AI - is actually pretty expensive. So whereas before, the Curve/Convex club was just a place where I would hang out, the Creator Pod made it so I redirected my focus to actually doing work.

I’m a lifelong creative, but specifically a creative generalist. I’ve dabbled in a lot of different mediums (mostly music), but also visual art, film, and writing. Traditionally, if you don’t specialize, you can’t get very far in most domains, but what’s interesting about AI is that the generalist is getting the last laugh. The specialist is the one with the narrow and deep skill, which is usually very in high demand, and everyone goes to him for what they need. The generalist is the one with the shallow and wide ‘meta’ skill, the skill that knows how all the others skills fit together, and how they can combine into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Another way to say this is: the specialists each play their instruments in the orchestra better than the generalist ever could; but if the generalist is good, he plays the orchestra. I think that’s a quote from the Steve Jobs movie or something. This is what AI affords: the specialists get replaced by machines, giving the generalist an orchestra that’s cheaper, quicker, and more powerful than was ever available before. That’s why it’s a very exciting time to be a creator.

My advantage wasn't technical knowledge. In the age of AI, intelligence is cheap. Anyone can prompt a chatbot to generate a stale thread explaining how a protocol works. But humor, culture, and original ideas are still expensive. You can’t prompt a machine to capture a highly specific DeFi vibe and get something coherent - that still requires a human element. Why hand a community AI-generated text they could easily prompt themselves? You have to give them something they can’t get anywhere else. And obviously, that’s deepfaked Arnold Schwarzenegger comparing earning yield to ejaculating.

Your content hits a very specific chord with the community. It’s hilarious, bizarre, and it also treats the underlying tech with real reverence. How do you define the aesthetic flavor you're targeting here?

I think DeFi is inherently absurd. I think people who build and use it not only have an appreciation of the absurd, but also a shared distaste for the ‘normal’ world. There’s a clear-eyed view of how stupid everything is, while still holding onto visions of potential, hope, and the belief that even in the swamp of the 21st century, beautiful things can be built that transcend the mess.

So when creating content for this kind of audience, I think the correct vibe to go for is “aspirational absurdity.” Nothing slick or thrilling or emotional or dramatic - but weird, ridiculous, over-the-top, with a pinch of, ‘something interesting is happening here.’

I’ll leave manipulating feelings and emotions to the big budget films. I’m not going to try your patience attempting to impress with technical details.My style is more in line with evoking the feeling of getting caught with your pants down and thinking, ‘Lol, WTF!?’ That’s the moment when someone is primed for exposure to useful info.

A cheap and dirty way to create compelling content is to parody the culture people already live in. It’s the art of satirizing successful IP and making it your own - like a fungus taking over an ant’s brain to pilot it around. An original concept rarely hits the masses as hard as a savage, well-executed parody of a famous song or scene.

https://twitter.com/arqus/status/2005643372254708180

AI is well-suited for absurdity because it doesn’t look good, it looks weird. Weird works for laughs, for novelty, for irony, for the kind of experience you get from watching a B-Movie. All of this is to say: For now, AI should stop trying to be taken seriously and embrace itself as the bizarro simulacrum that it is.

You've got the backing of the team, community support, and an entire AI orchestra at your fingertips. Tell us about the day your name became red, what the future looks like, and what we can expect from you next.

The results of the Creator Competition, month after month, clearly indicated that I was doing something the judges liked, and I was doing it consistently. I was hopeful that maybe Convex/Resupply would want to continue funding my important work depicting hippos on jetskis, but as the Resupply Creator Pod drew to a close after its six-month run, there was still no offer on the table. Sadly, it was clear that my run was coming to an end.

That is until, one day, I noticed on the Convex discord member tab that Winthorpe had been playing the video game 50 Cent: Bulletproof for 16 hours straight. “That’s it,” I thought. “That’s my ticket in.” Obviously, Winthorpe was a huge early 2000’s hip hop fan, and my videos simply hadn’t been catering to his refined musical taste. With just 13 hours left in the month of February, I locked myself in the tool shed where I work, put my head down, and furiously began to prompt. “Heh… arqus, you old fool, you’ve done it again!” I exclaimed as the final cut was exported from iMovie.

Not fifteen minutes had passed after posting Locked in the Convex to Twitter that my phone rang. Brrrrring brrring. It was Winthorpe. “Arqus,” he said. “I haven’t been moved like that since Chingy released ‘Holidae In.’ Welcome to the squad.” It was the best day of my life.

People were very excited for me. Many reached out privately to offer their congratulations and encourage me to keep following my vision, to never forget where I came from. “Stay gold, arqus,” one of them said. “Stay gold…”

Winthorpe has demanded I complete all 33 episodes of Locked in the Convex, so that’ll probably eat up the rest of the year. After that, I have a long list of ideas for experimental videos and various ‘art pieces.’ It might get weird. Other than that, I’m just gonna keep feeling into what this role means, how I can continue to push the boundaries of AI content, how I can grow the protocols, while keeping it real and staying true to my llama roots. Shout out to all my homeboys who believed in me. To all my haters who said it couldn’t be done, WELL LOOK AT ME NOW BITCH!