In this post, I break down some of the fundamentals of crypto community building and explain why strong communities are indispensable for the long-term health of decentralized networks.
Let’s first get on the same page about what a community **even is — because how can we talk about building something unless we agree on its definition?
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about a definition of community that is universal for all cryptoassets. It’s not a straightforward exercise, especially when you consider all of the different types of decentralized networks (e.g. currencies, middleware, smart contract platforms).
Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked a number of operators and investors in the space to define the term for me as well. Here is my favorite answer:
Community is about ownership — feeling not just that I am part of something bigger than myself, but that I have some skin in the game. It doesn’t matter so much whether that stake is economic or not — in fact I think non-economic stake (e.g. reputation) can be a much bigger motivator. (source)
— Lane Rettig, Independent Ethereum Core Developer
I like this definition because it’s not too prescriptive and it captures the essence of what it means to be in a crypto community above all else.
We can also go a level deeper with community to identify three types of stakeholders that have skin in the game:
Decentralized networks are open and permissionless, so their communities will always comprise of these groups. And no matter what kind of protocol you’re building, you should be able to characterize your stakeholders into one (and sometimes more) of these groups.
Note: If you’re looking for specific community building strategies, I’ve written about that here.
Most people would agree that only users and builders — not speculators — are indispensable for the long-term health of a decentralized network. I’ll dive into the role of speculators later in this post, but for me, a credible community building strategy should place the highest priority on acquiring users and builders.
Intuitively this makes sense. Decentralized networks without builders will not be able to adequately maintain or upgrade their protocol over time — a recipe for death. Those without users simply don’t have a reason to exist in the first place.
There are challenges with acquiring both groups because they are so often highly specialized. As an example, let’s take FOAM protocol, which is building a consensus-driven map of the world: