Analyzing how leading public chains achieve differentiated operations from three dimensions

Author:

Zolo, Shenchao TechFlow;

linda Zhengzheng, SuiWorld Co-Founder

Recently, several popular images have shown the number of developers and daily active users across various public chains, allowing us to intuitively see the data differences between different public chains/projects.

There are many reasons for these differences. Beyond the inherent appeal of the protocols themselves, a deeper exploration reveals many operational differences. The success or failure of a public chain has both internal and external factors.

External factors include events like the FTX collapse, which impacted Solana; Binance's traffic boosting the growth of BNB Chain; and the highly impressive backgrounds of teams and investors that garnered early attention for Aptos. However, delving into external factors is not the purpose of this article. Instead, we will explore more internal factors from the perspectives of official website modules, social media, and community operations of different public chains, understanding what operational constructions public chain projects should focus on and what differentiated cases are worth learning from.

Three Major Dimensions of Public Chain Operations: Developer, Ecosystem, Community

We prioritized sorting out the operational modules of several popular public chains and summarized them as follows:

We marked the similar parts in gray, and it can be seen that although the names may differ, each public chain must cover the three sections of Developer, Ecosystem, and Community, each occupying a significant proportion. Here, Ecosystem primarily refers to the project ecosystem, showcasing the dApp situation within its ecosystem and assisting in dApp promotion/services. Community focuses on user communities rather than developer communities.

From a construction logic perspective, it generally starts by attracting developers through unique technical advocacy, leading to a prosperous ecosystem, and ultimately, good applications can attract a large user base.

Developer: To Win Over Developers is to Win the World

Whether it is Layer 1 or privacy public chains, all emphasize their technological leadership or differentiation. In this regard, each public chain showcases its strengths, such as Solana's PoH, which tells you it's Super Fast; Avalanche has been promoting its new consensus protocol and the ability to "one-click customize chain" with Subnet.

In addition to hardcore technical narratives, effectively operating for developers essentially means better onboarding for technical personnel, so at least the following areas need to be developed:

1. Comprehensive development documentation and use cases, essential materials like document/github, etc.;

2. Convenient development tools and selection guides;

3. Technical exchange forums for sharing and solving technical issues;

4. Developer activities, such as Hackathons, Roadshows, and other showcase platforms.

Moreover, BNB Chain/Polygon/Solana have clearly categorized and presented various tools available for developers on their networks.

Ecosystem: The Application Layer Makes Public Chains Stand Out

This part mainly showcases and flexes muscles, with common practices including clearly categorizing projects and providing an entry point for building DApps.

In contrast, BNB Chain's ecosystem section is the most developed and distinct. They are building their ecosystem section with the concept of an "app store." You can think of it as a DappRadar that includes "news + reviews" functions. It not only presents projects but also showcases data, user feedback, and even provides an Alert function for risky projects. BNB Chain's ecosystem operations have already created a larger gap compared to other public chains.

Community: Turn Users into Your Advocates

Community building is crucial for Web3 projects. A community is not just about simply creating social groups and holding weekly Town Halls. From the operations of several public chains, at a high level, it should at least include:

1. Community News - News

2. Community Interaction - Social Media

3. Community Suggestions - Forum

4. Community Activities - Events

To better activate community vitality and turn more users into advocates for the public chain, public chain operators often set up ambassador programs for individuals, encouraging more loyal users to participate. BNB Chain and Solana have established the Martians Program and The Collective, respectively, providing both spiritual and material incentives.

The role of building a community, aside from advocacy, is to create a "big family" for project teams and investors, yielding the following potential benefits:

1. Helping early projects quickly find quality early users, acting as a booster for project development;

2. Serving Web3.0 developers and nurturing innovators of DApps;

3. Incubating Web3.0 entrepreneurs, discussing token economic systems, improving Web3.0 products, building crypto communities, etc., helping Web3.0 entrepreneurs become excellent teams;

4. Investors can more easily find innovative project teams, etc.

Thus, from the project's perspective, an outstanding public chain community is also creating an incubator "resource pool," gathering members who share common ideals and mutual improvement. Under such a vibe, community cohesion is higher, and the ecosystem's vitality and attractiveness are stronger, naturally enhancing developers' and teams' loyalty to the public chain.

The above are the common modules and better cases in the construction of various public chains. Additionally, each public chain actually has a commonality: they all operate their own Foundations to promote ecosystem development through funding and resources. In the next section, we will discuss cases related to foundations.

Tools for Ecosystem Development: Foundations, Grants, and Treasuries to Promote Ecosystem Growth

Almost every public chain has grant funding programs for developers and early projects, typically selecting open-source projects. Besides receiving a small amount of funding, they also get technical support for building the mainnet, market promotion, media PR, and regional community incubation, accompanying the project's growth. Most public chains' funding decisions are made by their foundations, with the exception of EOS, which established a secondary crowdfunding platform, Pomelo, encouraging community fans to vote on projects using a DAO model, increasing governance rights.

However, there are several common issues with grant distribution:

1. Projects that don't lack funding often overlook grants;

2. Projects applying for grants are often highly homogeneous;

3. Some projects show low loyalty, hopping from chain to chain to grab grant funds.

To address this issue, public chains can initiate developer training programs to cultivate supportive developers within the community, enhancing long-term loyalty.

In addition to grants distributed by foundations, Polkadot has adopted an innovative treasury mechanism, pooling funds from a portion of transaction fees, a portion of inflation from non-optimal staking ratios, a portion used for cross-chain communication auctions in parallel threads, and funds penalized (slashed) for node misbehavior into a treasury for the development of the Polkadot ecosystem. This is more sustainable than the previous approach of raising funds through financing and then using those funds for ecosystem development. Polkadot's treasury mechanism may serve as an innovative model that other public chains can reference.

Of course, the previous surge in Polkadot's popularity was also driven by some external factors; here, we mainly discuss the innovation of the treasury.

In the competition with established public chains like ETH, new public chains often increase funding support for developers through aggressive ecosystem investments. However, ecosystem building is a long-term process, and relying solely on funds raised from initial private token sales is unsustainable. The treasury mechanism provides a new idea for public chains, designating a portion of the funds from normal blockchain operations and governance as a treasury, and then using governance to decide how to use this money for proposals that benefit the public chain's ecosystem development. With these funds, the public chain can be built better, attracting more users, and the treasury will continue to accumulate funds, thus forming a virtuous cycle. This can solve the funding issues for ecosystem development while also using governance to regulate the inflation situation of the chain, potentially even adopting a DAO format to reduce centralization issues at the governance level. This may be a multi-faceted reference mechanism.

Of course, when it comes to the specific operational modules and development stages, each public chain will have its unique considerations. Below, we will list some of the better differentiated aspects.

Operational Differentiation Among Different Public Chains

The blue-marked sections below highlight the main operational differences we observed among various public chains.

Although many good practices of BNB Chain have been listed earlier, when you delve into its content strategy, you will find that BNB Chain rarely discusses its technological breakthroughs, while Polygon, Solana, and Avalanche tend to emphasize their technological innovations more. Solana, due to the differences in development languages, has also created Blockchain and Solana 101 to better onboard developers. Aptos, being the youngest public chain, has placed significant importance on grants and provided clear rules.

While BNB Chain doesn't focus much on technological innovation, many people should be familiar with BNB Chain's MVB, incubation programs, etc. In fact, this part belongs to the Developer Program's support for developers, and BNB Chain even has separate Monthly Grants for developers. Additionally, to accommodate more new projects deploying on BNB Chain, a Migrate module has been added to the official website for guidance.

The Migrate module is, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect. Web3 inherently has few developers and users, and both developers and users tend to be disloyal. You often see early projects participating in Hackathons across various public chains, and Web3 users following applications or profits rather than sticking with a public chain.

Thus, while industry "Builders" talk about expanding the pie, they also need to capture existing users.

The goal of Migrate is not to attract new projects but to entice existing projects to migrate. Upon entering the module, it attracts you by highlighting the support available for developers, high user engagement, TVL data, etc., along with successful case studies to make you anticipate achieving similar success after migration. Finally, it adds "Build on BNB Chain" for lead conversion.

In terms of To B marketing, BNB Chain has a solid understanding of the customer journey for project parties, and its operations are better. Perhaps more public chains can consider the content setup of "Migrate."

Polygon has done a lot of technical integration, so it has set up a Solution module to present different technical solutions. Of course, many people are most impressed by Polygon's appeal to traditional brands, with NIKE and Starbucks collaborating with Polygon. A simple analysis of the reasons previously indicated is as follows:

Therefore, if more Web2 brands choose to build on Polygon or are willing to enter Web3, Polygon could consider creating its own "Partner Wall + Case Interpretation" to attract more brand collaborations, serving as a strong BD resource library, similar to a high-end version of Avalanche Subnet Case Study.

Traditional brands have a large user base, and the more such collaborations, the more user foundation Polygon can gain, as seen with Reddit. From a more detailed operational content perspective, considering that Aptos/Sui are relatively new and easier to review, we will take Aptos as an example to examine its operational content and focus areas from the announcement in February to the present.

In-depth Discussion Using Aptos and Sui as Examples

From Aptos's Twitter/Medium/Discord, the information on Twitter essentially encompasses all content from other channels, so we first mapped the operational content on Twitter and summarized the key parts.

For Developers, the official updates revolve around testnet progress, weekly MoveMonday, and irregular Aptos/Move advocacy;
For Ecosystem, in addition to announcements from various partners, they have directly planned the "Aptos Ecosystem Highlight" theme to share ecosystem projects built on Aptos irregularly;

Currently, not much has been done for the Community.

However, it is worth noting that early on, Aptos founders participated in various events to advocate, and after the mainnet launch, the official updates have shifted focus from Developers to Community and event-related content.

In terms of quantity, as mentioned earlier, although Developer/Ecosystem/Community are all operational focuses, the order of priority should be Developer > Ecosystem > Community. Thus, most of Aptos's operational content is related to the first two. Additionally, while it was mentioned earlier that new public chains place more emphasis on grant operations, Aptos has raised the priority of grants on its official website, but its exposure on social media seems somewhat insufficient.

In contrast to Aptos, Sui conducts weekly AMA updates on Discord regarding technical progress and advocates for the Move language; besides online activities, the team holds Happy Hour meetups in the US, Portugal, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan; in promoting ecosystem projects, Sui emphasizes support and progress in the GameFi sector, partly due to the ecosystem lead Koh Kim's extensive experience in gaming, although there are also many other types of projects.

Although Sui's social media started a few months earlier than Aptos, it has consistently shown significantly less engagement. Through the review of Aptos and Sui's official Twitter operations, it is clear that Aptos focuses on promoting the progress of various ecosystem projects, while Sui shares more of its technical documentation and advocacy for Sui Move. We know that developers constitute a much smaller proportion of the entire crypto user base compared to retail investors, which may explain Sui's relatively lukewarm social media presence.

In summary, after traversing BNB Chain, Polygon, Solana, Avalanche, and Aptos, we find that the operational focus of public chains needs to build three major foundations: Developer, Ecosystem, Community. Among these, a well-constructed foundation will serve as a good catalyst. Subsequently, based on differentiated characteristics and development stages, operations should be strengthened in areas such as grants and community growth.

At the same time, regarding the phenomenon of a large number of users on BNB Chain, aside from the traffic from Binance itself, it can also be seen that BNB Chain is currently the best constructed in terms of developers, ecosystem, and community. Although Avalanche has consistently discussed its innovations in consensus/Subnet, its user base and ecosystem have not grown, which may reveal several operational shortcomings.

Of course, the scope of public chains is not limited to the aforementioned Layer 1s but also includes more specialized public chains like Aleo and Mina, or broadly defined projects that require developers and self-built ecosystems. The construction cycle for public chain projects is long. This article attempts to explore some practical methodologies by sorting out the operational modules of relatively leading projects and highlighting better cases, hoping to assist in long-term project construction.