Five Lessons from Building Sticky Crypto Communities
Recently, I hosted a roundtable discussion with Monad and Optimism to uncover what drives the network effects of Superchain applications and the rapid growth of the Nads ecosystem. We explored how other teams could apply these insights to their early-stage development. Here are my five key takeaways on how to build a sticky user base in the crypto space:
1. Community as the Foundation for Ecosystem Growth
People naturally gravitate toward platforms with an established user base. When community members advocate for your project, it sends a strong public signal, making it easier for application developers and infrastructure providers to decide to join your ecosystem—since the perceived risk is lower. This influx of new infrastructure and applications, in turn, attracts more community members and users, creating a positive feedback loop.
The Link Marines are a prime example, consistently promoting ChainLink’s core values across Twitter, protocol forums, and other media discussing oracle providers.
In the case of Monad, social proof from their community has become a unique selling point for developers deciding where to deploy their applications. Some teams have discovered that simply tweeting “gmonad” garnered their highest engagement posts, thanks to the enthusiastic response from the Nads community. Optimism’s ecosystem team often emphasizes, “Community isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” using this principle to guide developer attraction strategies.
Teams should prioritize community experience as a core part of their growth strategy, considering the early hiring of community roles to keep the growth flywheel spinning—reducing the burden of future business development efforts to attract infrastructure and applications.
2. Qualitative Experience Over Quantitative Metrics in Early Community Building
Joining your community should feel like being at the forefront of the next wave of the internet, where members actively shape the narrative and influence the growth trajectory. This feeling is difficult to quantify, beyond spending 10 minutes in a Discord or forum to see if you genuinely enjoy the experience and want to contribute to the vision.
Many teams make the mistake of initially targeting hard metrics, such as the number of Discord members and Twitter followers. These metrics often attract shallow engagement, similar to bot-like interactions. This focus can stifle the authentic relationships needed to kickstart a community and prevent you from retaining your most valuable long-term members.
As the community scales, continue seeking metrics that anchor these experiences. Kevin from Monad likes to track the number of high-quality replies to Monad’s Twitter account, filtering out generic “GM” responses to see how many people are truly engaging. Binji from Optimism also pays attention to the number of replies to follow-up comments in main threads, indicating meaningful person-to-person interactions within the community.
3. Incentives Attract Users, but Culture Keeps Them
Cryptocurrencies aren’t the only industry to use economic incentives to attract new users. Web2 companies like PayPal, Uber, and Airbnb have long used similar tactics to solve the cold start problem. What sets crypto apart is the scale of incentives and the overreliance on this mechanism for driving short-term adoption.
Any user acquisition strategy needs to be paired with a retention strategy, something most teams overlook. While pursuing mass onboarding through bounties, airdrops, and other incentive programs, teams might inadvertently attract bots and farmers, diluting the genuine interactions that originally defined the community.
Users will stay in an ecosystem if they discover use cases, experiences, or relationships that resonate deeply with them. Teams should view onboarding as just the beginning of the user journey, focusing on creating memorable experiences that entice users to return.
4. Promote Within the Community and Trust Optimistically
Your community is your best resource for reaching new regions, crowdsourcing product ideas, and achieving goals beyond the founding team’s capacity. To fully leverage the community’s consensus, create structured processes to identify and elevate the top community members to official positions.
Optimism offers different contribution paths for data analysts, content creators, developer support, and other key roles under the NERD program, where participants can earn retrospective rewards for their hard work. Monad has promoted over 15 community members to key roles in expanding and educating the community, without having to revoke any responsibilities due to trust violations.
If you don’t empower your community, don’t expect them to support you.
5. People-Centric Onboarding and Communities
People want to interact with other people, not with companies or bots. Look for ways to enhance non-bot interactions in the onboarding process, even if it doesn’t scale easily.
Monad has implemented a newbie channel on Discord where new users must converse with a real person to pass a vibe check. Counterintuitively, this added friction in the onboarding process has led to increased retention rates because users become more invested in the Discord channel they spent 10–15 minutes joining.
At Optimism, Binji consciously engages with the OP community through his personal account, often more than through the main Optimism account. When communities can draw inspiration from real people and build genuine rapport, they’re more likely to engage in substantive conversations.
Conclusion
By learning from these lessons, crypto teams can build more resilient communities that not only attract users but also retain them through meaningful experiences, authentic interactions, and a shared sense of purpose.