I recently hosted a roundtable discussion with Monad and Optimism to better understand what drives network effects in Superchain applications, the rapid growth of Nads’ ecosystem, and how other teams can apply these lessons in their early development stages. Here are my five key takeaways on how to build a sticky user base in the crypto space:

1. Community is the foundation for flywheel growth in an ecosystem

People tend to gravitate toward places where there’s an existing user base. Having community members promoting your project is a public signal that makes it easier for app developers and infrastructure providers to join your ecosystem, as it presents lower risks. These new infrastructures and apps, in turn, attract more community members and users, creating a virtuous cycle.

The Link Army is a perfect example. They champion ChainLink’s core values on Twitter, protocol forums, and other media that discuss oracle providers. Monad’s community also provides strong social proof for developer teams deciding where to deploy their applications. Some teams posted “gmonad” on Twitter, only to find it became their highest engagement post, largely thanks to Nads’ enthusiastic responses. Optimism’s ecosystem team often highlights this with the phrase, “Community isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” which serves as a guiding principle for attracting developers.

Teams should prioritize the community experience as part of their growth strategy and consider hiring community roles early on to keep the flywheel spinning, easing the burden of future business development efforts in attracting infrastructure and applications.

2. Early community building: qualitative experiences outweigh quantitative metrics

Participating in your community should feel like being at the forefront of the next wave of the internet, with members actively shaping the narrative and influencing the growth trajectory. It’s hard to measure this feeling 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 mistakenly target hard metrics from the start, such as the number of Discord members and Twitter followers. These metrics favor shallow interest and bot-like interactions, potentially stifling the genuine relationships needed to get a community off the ground and preventing you from retaining long-term, valuable members.

As the community scales, people continue seeking anchor experiences to measure. Kevin (from Monad) prefers tracking the number of quality replies on the Monad Twitter account, filtering out simple greetings like “GM,” to see how many people are genuinely engaged. Binji (from Optimism) also likes to look at the number of replies to main threads, which indicate substantial human-to-human interactions within the community.

3. Incentives draw users in, but culture keeps them around

Cryptocurrency isn’t the only industry to attract new users with economic incentives. PayPal, Uber, Airbnb, and many other Web2 companies that aimed to solve the cold-start problem have done so. What sets crypto apart is the scale of these incentives and the heavy reliance on them to drive short-term adoption.

Any user acquisition strategy must be paired with a retention strategy, something few teams take the time to deeply consider. In the pursuit of mass onboarding through tasks, airdrops, and other incentive programs, teams risk attracting bots and farmers, harming retention and diluting the genuine interactions that built the community initially.

Users will stay if they find use cases, experiences, or relationships that resonate with them deeply. Teams should view onboarding as the beginning of user inflow and focus on creating memorable experiences that encourage users to return.

4. Promote within the community and optimistically build trust

Your community is your best asset for reaching new regions, crowdsourcing product ideas, and achieving feats beyond the founding team’s capabilities. To fully leverage the consensus within the community, we can create a structured process for identifying and appointing the top community members to official positions.

Optimism offers distinct contribution paths for data analysts, content creators, developer support, and other key roles under the NERD program, where participants are retrospectively rewarded for their hard work. Monad has promoted over 15 community members to critical roles in expanding and educating their community, while still holding them accountable to the trust invested in them.

If you don’t empower the community, don’t expect them to support you.

5. Human-centered onboarding, human-centered community

People want to interact with other people, not with companies or bots. Look for ways to enhance human-to-human interactions in the onboarding process, even if it doesn’t scale perfectly.

Monad’s Discord has a dedicated onboarding channel where new users must engage in real conversations with community members to pass a vibe check. Paradoxically, this additional friction has increased retention, as users feel more invested in a Discord channel they’ve spent 10-15 minutes joining.

At Optimism, Binji intentionally interacts with the OP community from his account as much, if not more, than he does with the Optimism main account. When the community can connect with real people, they’re more likely to engage in meaningful conversations.

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