Paradigm: Community as the Foundation, Five Principles for Building a Warm Crypto Community

Author: Nick Martitsch,Paradigm

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Many crypto teams are overly focused on short-term growth strategies, struggling to turn high-cost user acquisition efforts into an active long-term community. Recently, I explored what drives the network effects of Superchain applications and the rapidly growing Nads ecosystem, as well as how other teams can apply these insights to their early growth efforts.

Here are my five key takeaways on building a sticky user base in the crypto space:

1. Community is the core of your ecosystem growth flywheel

Everyone wants to engage with users where they already exist. When community members promote your project, it signals to application developers and infrastructure providers that the decision risk of joining your ecosystem is lower. These new infrastructures and applications attract new community members and users, creating a virtuous cycle.

Link Marines are a prime example of this phenomenon, promoting chainlink's core value proposition on Twitter, protocol forums, and other mediums discussing oracle provider decisions.

The social proof of the Monad community has become an important selling point for development teams considering where to deploy their applications. Some teams have found that simply tweeting "gmonad" results in their highest engagement posts, thanks to the enthusiastic responses from Nads. Teams in the Optimism ecosystem often mention this, with the slogan: "Community is not everything, it is the only thing," using it as a guiding principle for developer adoption.

Teams should incorporate community experience into their day-one growth strategies and consider hiring community roles in the early stages to kickstart this flywheel—reducing the difficulty of future infrastructure and application business development efforts.

2. Qualitative experiences outweigh quantitative metrics for early community building

Engaging with your community should feel like the beginning of the next wave of the internet, with members actively shaping discussions and influencing development trajectories. Besides spending ten minutes on your Discord/forum to see if you genuinely enjoy the experience and want to contribute to the vision, this feeling is hard to measure.

Many teams mistakenly set goals as hard metrics, such as the number of Discord members and Twitter followers. This approach optimizes interactions with a large group of people who are only interested in surface-level content, which can undermine the genuine interpersonal connections needed to build a community and reduce the likelihood of retaining the most valuable members in the long run.

As the community expands, teams should find key metrics that still align with qualitative experiences. Kevin likes to track the number of high-quality replies to the Monad Twitter account, filtering out "GM" messages to see how many people are genuinely engaged. Binji also enjoys observing the number of replies to follow-up comments in main threads—indicating that real interpersonal interactions are happening among community members.

3. Incentives may be the reason users join, but culture is what keeps them

The crypto industry is not the only one using economic incentives to attract new users. PayPal, Uber, Airbnb, and many other Web2 companies seeking to solve cold start problems have been doing this for a long time. What sets the crypto industry apart is the scale of incentives and the over-reliance on this mechanism to drive short-term adoption.

Any user onboarding program needs to be combined with user retention strategies, a point that too few teams thoughtfully consider. In the process of large-scale onboarding through tasks, airdrops, and other incentive programs, teams may inadvertently dilute the genuine interactions that initially build community by attracting bots and farmers.

If users discover use cases, experiences, or connections that resonate deeply with them, they will stay in the ecosystem. Teams should view the onboarding process as the starting point of the user funnel, focusing on creating unforgettable experiences that encourage users to keep coming back.

4. Promote within the community and optimistically delegate trust

Your community is the most effective leverage for reaching new areas, crowdsourcing product ideas, and going beyond the capabilities of the founding team. To fully harness the wisdom of the community, create a structured process to identify and empower the best community members to take on formal roles.

Optimism has established different contribution paths for data analysts, content creators, developer support, and other key functions, allowing participants to receive retroactive rewards for their hard work. Monad has elevated over 15 community members to key roles to expand and teach the community, without revoking any responsibilities due to loss of trust.

If you do not empower your community, do not expect them to stand up for you.

5. Human-centered onboarding creates a human-centered community

People want to interact with other people, not companies or bots. Look for ways to enhance interpersonal interactions during the onboarding process, even if it seems difficult to scale.

Monad opened a newbie channel on Discord where new users must converse with real people to pass the vibe check. Counterintuitively, this extra onboarding hurdle has led to increased retention rates, as users spend 10 to 15 minutes upon joining, feeling a stronger emotional connection to the Discord channel.

In Optimism, Binji intentionally interacts with the OP community through his personal account at a frequency comparable to, or even greater than, that of the main Optimism account. When community members can communicate with real people and build good relationships, they are more likely to engage in meaningful conversations.