Crypto Coven Community Synopsis

This is the fifth of a series of 12 discrete stories about how a variety of web3 projects (ranging from crowd-funding platforms and NFTs to DeFi and gaming) have approached decentralized community building. You can read an aggregated overview of insights across all of these projects here.

Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

On Halloween in 2021, the first WITCHES wandered the weird wilds of the world and were forged. Er, I mean, minted.

Welcome to the mystical intrigue of the Crypto Coven. Formed by a group of 5 pseudonymous individuals (the so-called “High Witches”), the team set out to build a “femme-forward PFP project” – an NFT project that specifically set out to capture an inclusive audience of people who identified as femme.

The 9,906 Witches in the collection were constructed with an eye toward diversity & inclusion in mind and feature 3 body types and 7 skin tones. According to Xuannu, one of the High Witches, these NFTs have three primary objectives: “They’re the faces of the characters in the world we’re creating, they’re an open, interoperable interface for these characters’ metadata, and they represent a financial stake in the part of the metaverse in which they exist.”

Where NFT projects like Bored Apes often look to splashy partnerships and hype installations to drive brand awareness and affinity, Crypto Coven sought to compete on a different level: the quality of the art and the narrative of their community. The storytelling (or “lore”) is incredibly detailed and thematically aligned, leaning deep into the world of charms, spells, and Tarot-style premonitions, even rebranding language commonly used in most other web3 projects. (For instance, Witches aren’t “minted” they are “forged.”)

“We wanted the WITCHES to feel alive and bolstered by narrative—something new and exciting in this space,” said High Witch Keridwen, in a Mirror post. “I started drafting ARTICULATIONS, or WITCH descriptions, with scalability in mind. Our goal was 9,999 WITCHES, more than could be hand-composed without some sort of magic-making. I decided to break down the descriptions into five sentences each: an intro, a hobby, a magic origin, an archetype-specific trait, and an exclamation. I wanted a structure that would give each WITCH an identity made particular, idiosyncratic, and strange, that still unified the archetypes, created an overall tone for the voice of the project, and delivered our ethos of individuality.”

While the brand and ethos of the coven was largely centralized among the High Witches, the team sought out feedback from the community along the way. For example, to drive early traction, the High Witches announced sought out community input to have people submit “mood boards” that would contribute to some of the vibes & attributes of the witches. The first phase of the project ran from Oct 31 - Dec 4, and they were sold out by December 12. While hard to assess the true demographic details of their wallet holders, Xuannu has observed anecdotally that their members include a lot of people from marginalized groups.

Today, Crypto Coven has close to 5,000 unique wallet holders and a Discord of 7,000+ members. Like a lot of NFT projects, community is core to the ecosystem and resiliency of this network, which is largely driven through a variety of Discord engagement tactics, Twitter spaces, and IRL events at conferences such as NFT NYC.

One interesting distinction within the Crypto Coven community is that many of their members are new to crypto. Xuannu shared that half of wallet-holding Witches have fewer than 40 transactions, and 8% of wallets that minted Witches did so as their very first Ethereum transaction.

There’s a balance to strike among crypto projects that engage such a high percentage of new entrants to the space: Your project must toe the line of accessibility while also retaining some element of intrigue. Crypto Coven strikes this duality in a particularly compelling way.As a newcomer to the space, it definitely comes off initially as both mystical and mysterious. Just click around on their website – which is complete with sound effects, intriguing stories, quizzes, and games – and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

A lot of members have organically formed friendships on their own, which manifests through in-person local meetups or even building things together. A few examples of projects that stemmed from bottom-up community efforts include Coven Cats, an NFT collection of 9,999 cats for Witches, and Pocket Coven, an NFT collection of pocket-sized Witches. The Coven Librarians is also an entirely community-run project that has now woven its way into the broader discourse of the core team. Xuannu expects more of this to take place in the future.

“It’s really important to us to have a vibrant community of people who are writing stories, creating art, imagining this world we are building, and getting involved,” Xuannu said. “We are looking for people who want to build stuff, and I think we have one of the strongest communities of people like that. Almost everyone is a talented artist, writer, or engineer.

Crypto Coven has taken its time to build an engagement-first community from an incredibly deliberate and thoughtful series of steps around brand-building, making it a prime example of an “audience-first” approach to community building. While not exactly decentralized (after all, nearly all of the strategic decisions today are still managed by the core team of High Witches), they have effectively galvanized a unique subset of web3 audiences that’s different from many other projects.

By leaning deep into the ethos of the Witch subculture, they accessed not only a more emergent cohort of web3 users, but also crafted an alternative to the “crypto bro” culture. Everything they do is 110% dedicated to their brand, and they leave no detail overlooked. My favorite example of this was reading about an early glitch in the smart contract when they initially deployed Crypto Coven, which prevented anyone from minting on that contract. They turned that into a crafty piece of “lore,” galvanized the community around it, and even converted the bug into a new type of art piece.

The impact of their detailed documentation on the creation and art process (including the Crypto Coven Library) is an incredibly brand-loyal community who not only uses their Witches as PFPs but also openly shares about their own positive experiences as part of this collective. (Notably, when I initially posted on Twitter about setting out on this community research project, more Crypto Coven Witches replied to me than anyone else.)

Today, the High Witches make nearly all of the big, strategic decisions about Crypto Coven and the future of this community – this project was founded upon a strong creative vision, which is still being acted upon today. Over time, Xuannu expects to encourage more of their community members to flesh out their own ideas and explore them. The High Witches help amplify side projects and collaborations that they feel align most with the vibes of their community.

• Thoughtful world-building (to create a place that felt “other-wordly” and welcoming)

• Broad, inclusive access to non-crypto-native newcomers

• Grassroots community contributions to new projects & artifacts

“We chose to listen to our intuition and spend our time building what we wanted to build, rather than what other people expected or wanted from us. It’s really easy to come up with ideas—it’s hard to execute on them. That’s one reason we’ve been hesitant to hand over our roadmap, what we personally spend our time doing, to a more decentralized governance structure. What we envision long-term is a scaled-up version of what’s already been happening: creating the conditions where decentralized efforts that emerge out of the community can really take root and grow, where the people with the idea also execute on it. It aligns incentives in a meaningful way, and it creates an environment where lots of people are contributing work, which I think is ultimately what needs to happen to have real impact.” -Xuannu

Special thanks to Xuannu for their help on this narrative. You can also view the complete repository of articles and references across all projects as part of this study.