Jake Bouma aka “starl3xx”
Work Writing Experiments About Contact
Launch film · Reserve

Make Your Move

A man on Wall St. hits “play” and starts dancing; a rewind reveals he one-tapped a purchase of 95% of the crypto market. In partnership with Kraken.
Concept · Script · Creative direction · Production. Dancer: Marquese Scott. Shot in New York City with Rino Arreaza and crew.

I generate the ideas, write the content, and direct the teams behind them

My joy is turning complex, technically dense concepts into things people actually want to watch, read, and share: campaigns, films, and copy, from the lightbulb moment through launch.

Brand & Content Lead at Reserve, former Senior Copywriter for global social at OKX. 40+ outside partners across film, animation, design, experiential, and media.

40+
outside creative partners directed
$630K+
creative & production engagements managed
17
films + original social shorts from one two-day shoot
3.4M
follower global channel, written weekly
See the work Get in touch

DTFs on Reserve

Launch campaign · Concept, scripts, creative direction, casting, production

Challenge
Reserve was launching DTFs (Decentralized Token Funds): onchain index funds that hold portions of the crypto market in a single token. The product is genuinely useful but nearly impossible to articulate without sounding like an IRL finance bro meme.
Idea
Rather than explain the index, dramatize the ease of buying it and make the value prop memorable.
A dancer mid-step on a Wall Street sidewalk, steam rising from a vent behind him.

Make Your Move

Launch film · Concept · Script · Creative direction · Production
A man on Wall St. hits “play” and starts dancing; a rewind reveals he one-tapped a purchase of 95% of the crypto market. In partnership with Kraken. Dancer: Marquese Scott.
A boy in a straw cowboy hat leaning on a paddock fence, watching.

Ride the Market

Concept · Script · Creative direction · Casting · Production
Cowboys attempt to ride a horse named THE MARKET. Cast through Breakdown Services, screening for talent who could actually ride. Shot on location in New York.
The host, holding a bottle of wine, mid-explanation to a guest.

Legs in a Basket

Concept · Script · Creative direction · Production · On-screen
A dinner guest is confused by the mannequin legs placed throughout the host’s home. Shot on location in Mexico City.
Reserve’s former CEO to camera in a Reserve t-shirt, explaining DTFs.

DTFs explained

Concept · Script · Direction
The on-camera explainer: “crypto indexes that work like ETFs,” ft. Reserve’s former CEO. Shot on location in San Francisco.
Six people crowded around, looking down into the camera from above a crib.

Index Protocol teaser

Concept · Script · Direction · On-screen
Teaser promo announcing Reserve’s Index Protocol.
A still from the reactive video: Jake sits in an armchair with a mug, in front of a television playing a fireplace. 2 hrs

Concept to live in two hours

Concept · Script · On-screen
A reactive video for Reserve, from idea to published on X in under two hours.
Brand system
Reserve’s R monogram animating: separate coloured blocks fly in, assemble into the R, and resolve into a single solid mark.

Meaning in motion

Reserve’s monogram had always been static. The company’s whole thing is many assets resolving into one vehicle, so I envisioned the mark doing just that: separate pieces assembling into a single R. I commissioned Asimov Collective and directed it through delivery. It’s now the standard sign-off on Reserve’s films, campaigns, and event displays.

RoleConcept · Commissioning · Creative direction
PartnerAsimov Collective · Design and animation
Experiential
The Reserve booth at ETH Denver: a curtained gold-and-red tent with a tarot reader at a small table, a visitor seated opposite her, and the deck on the table.

Crypto Tarot at ETH Denver

For an industry event in 2025, I proposed a live fortune teller booth as part of our activation, alongside a custom set of crypto-themed tarot cards. I wrote the cards, directed Asimov through the design process, and personally trained an honest-to-goodness fortune teller on the meanings of the deck’s 52 cards. They sold out mid-event, went viral on Twitter, and attracted national press.

A Slack message from Jake Bouma: “What if we have a fortune teller at our booth with a custom tarot deck that’s all memes. They play it super straight though. GET YOUR FORTUNE FREE” Slack, November 2024. Three months before the doors opened.
Crypto Tarot card: To the Moon.
Crypto Tarot card: FOMO.
Crypto Tarot card: Diamond Hands.
Crypto Tarot card: We’re So Back.
Role
Concept · Card list and copy · Art direction · Production
Partners
Asimov Collective (Tarot deck) · Party Action People (Booth production) · Dhyana Eagleton (Fortune teller)

Everyone Wants Sydney Sweeney

Spec spot · Concept and script · Never produced

Challenge
Internally, we were pitching the idea of reaching out to Sydney Sweeney, so I wrote a script we could attach to an invitation.
Idea
Every project on earth was courting the same celebrity, so why not make the courtship itself the ad?

OKX global social

Global social channel · Senior Copywriter · 3.4M followers

Challenge
Provide fresh, insightful content for a global channel w/millions of followers in an industry that rewrites itself daily.
Idea
A weekly crypto-news video series for TikTok and X: researched, written, recorded, and edited. Plus brand spots, including one with Olympic snowboarder Scotty James.
3.4M
followers
15–20K
views per episode
A frame from the weekly crypto-news series: Jake to camera in an OKX shirt, captioned WEEKLY CRYPTO NEWS.

Weekly crypto-news series

Researched, wrote, recorded, edited
A frame from the OKX spot with Olympic snowboarder Scotty James.

OKX × Scotty James

Writer
Brand spot featuring the Olympic snowboarder, written for the @okx channel.

Let’s Do This: Facing Hodgkin Lymphoma

Feature documentary · Co-producer and subject · 2015

The film
A Kickstarter-funded feature documentary about my real cancer journey, documented in real time and screened publicly.
The film’s poster: a stencilled portrait in pale blue and black.
Writing

A writing practice, still running

Fiction, screenwriting, and published nonfiction, going back over two decades.

Painting: Paul Thumann, Luther Burns the Papal Bull, 1872.

2026
Dark Patterns, screenplay title page In Progress
Dark Patterns
Feature screenplay · in development
A behavioral-economics researcher who studies tech’s manipulative “dark patterns” is abducted into an underground prediction market where anonymous users bet on her every move, and the friend who finds the feed must watch her suffer to have any hope of getting her out.
Earlier
Cancer & Theology book cover
Earlier writing: Neon Parentheses, a Substack of fiction and essays (including the serialized novel Jazzwood); Modern Parables, a short-fiction trilogy led by The Mute Monk; Cancer & Theology, a co-edited anthology (Elbow Co., 2014); earlier essays in Immerse Journal and American Theological Inquiry; and educational curricula including Hypotherables (The Youth Cartel) and titles for Sparkhouse.
Experiments

Things I built because I wanted them to exist

Self-directed and AI-assisted. How I stay fluent in the technology I write about.

Let’s Have A Word!

Onchain Wordle-style word game: a Farcaster mini app on Base, with its own $WORD token.

Griddle

Daily word-puzzle game built on pathfinding across a 3×3 letter grid.

walletlink.social

Social discovery for DeFi and NFT users: crypto wallets connected to public social profiles for portable, verifiable identities.
R

Reserve transparency dashboard

Self-service community transparency portal, scoped and built from scratch as part of a company-wide transparency initiative.
About

I’ve spent most of my life making things for the internet, most recently as Brand & Content Lead at Reserve and Senior Copywriter for global social at OKX. I’m a writer first, but the job has expanded over the years: campaigns, films, creative direction, production, and (increasingly) building the tools I wish existed.

Based in Des Moines, Iowa, working remotely.