What We Can Learn from Decentralized Community Building

Over the past two years, we’ve witnessed a meteoric rise in the power of decentralized community-building. In a crypto-native, ownership-first era, users are opting to spend their time in digital places that offer not just a better user experience, but more autonomy and influence, more economic incentives, more connection, and ultimately, more fun.

As a result, from the moment a new crypto-native project idea takes hold, questions of community emerge almost immediately. It begs the question: “As a founder or builder in web3, what do you need to know about integrating community into your project? And what does this look like in a decentralized way?”

Prior to 2020, I’d spent a lot of time analyzing the ins and outs of centralized community-building best practices, largely from the examples of successful web2 networks that I got to know as a user (Foursquare, Meetup, Twitter), as an employee (Stack Overflow), or through osmosis during my time at Union Square Ventures. Last fall, I synthesized many of my web2 community-building observations into a presentation that drew a few parallels (and a lot of open-ended questions) about what those lessons might mean in a web3 world.

But when I started working a little more closely with a web3 builder community, called Zeitgeist, I realized that the questions founders were asking were much more acute.

1. How do we get started?

2. How do we decentralize how work gets done?

3. How do we convert people from awareness to participants to builders?

4. How do we measure success?

To address these questions, I began to explore the best practices from a wide range of decentralized projects, ranging from NFT networks and crowd-funding platforms to games and DeFi. The goal of this post is to distill this research into key insights, with a target audience of both web3 builders and crypto-curious entrepreneurs.

Drawing on advice from community members in many of these spaces, I explored 12 projects, with an eye toward better understanding best practices among crypto-native communities. While I conducted much of the primary research independently, I also spoke with a core contributor at many of these initiatives to validate some of my findings and fill in some blanks.

They are:

• PartyBid  Protocol for buying NFTs as a team Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Juicebox Decentralized funding platform Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Creator Cabins A community of remote cabins for independent online creators Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Index Coop Decentralized investment vehicles for access to crypto tokens Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Uniswap Decentralized crypto trading protocol Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Dark Forest Decentralized world-building game Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Loot Adventure gear stored on-chain as NFTs Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Nouns Creative commons community of on-chain avatars Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Crypto Coven Femme-focused crypto community of Witches Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized [Read the full writeup]

• Helium Decentralized wireless infrastructure Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

• Mirror **Decentralized, on-chain platform for publishing & funding **Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

• Numerai Decentralized hedge fund built upon a data science tournamentFully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

*If you’re totally new to the space, read these primers first on DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, and decentralized gaming.

The primary output of this work includes three components:

1. This overview of best practices for web3 founders & builders to keep in mind when asking the question, “How do I build a decentralized community into my product?”

2. A series of 12 discrete stories, one for each project I explored, to walk through the timeline of how things got started and where they stand as of today (July 2022).I’ll be dropping these out through my Mirror here for the next month. You can find the first one here on PartyBid/PartyDAO.

3. A full, open-sourced library containing all of the links, articles, and resources referenced throughout the course of this entire research project. You can find the full article list here and submit your own links here.

My hope is that this might spur continued interest & exploration, or collaboration from anyone else who would like to pick up some of the loose ends or help me keep this updated over time.

Perhaps the most frequent question I get asked about community-building is also the simplest: How do you start? But the problem with asking people about how they got started is that these stories quickly become part of the romanticized folklore of any startup founding experience. Throughout this research, I did my best to unfurl each project to its starting kernel. Here are the web3 specific nuances and observations that emerged:

One of the strongest tenets of web3 (or at least the phase of the adoption curve we find ourselves in today) is a culture of building before planning. Jon at CabinDAO quite literally built cabins without knowing how he wanted to use them. A builder saw a Tweet containing an idea for a new app called “Partybid” and decided to spend his weekend coding up a v1. There’s an authenticity in doing something “just because” that gives credence to these early cycles.

This “don’t think, just do” approach seems to be particularly true among some of the standout DAOs that began on pure adrenaline and “good vibes.” I’m thinking in particular of SharkDAO, which started with the idea that people wanted to collectively bid on Nouns NFTs, and ConstitutionDAO, which spun up (and spun down) in a single week in their quest to purchase a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Amusingly, in this Verge article about the ConstitutionDAO, the journalist kept pushing on what was going to happen after they bought the U.S. Constitution, asking pragmatic questions like: “Where would it reside? Who would take care of it?” The reality is: That wasn’t really the point. At least, not right away. The most innovative projects I’ve gotten to know in web3 didn’t start with strategy – they started with possibility.

No matter how crypto-native and digital-first your project may be, your end users are still human (even if they embrace pfps and pseudonyms), and the quickest projects to gain traction are ones that lean into basic human psychology. I noticed four key motivators that galvanized people to jump on board with a new project or initiative. (Which, notably have clear parallels with some of the early traction moments in the world of web2.)

1. “You’ll be the first.”

   As one of the first DeFi projects to DAO-ify, Index Coop fully decentralized their governance at a time when the rest of us were still trying to remember what that three-letter acronym stood for. As a result, in addition to unlocking a network of early DeFi evangelists, they also attracted best-in-class community builders, who quite literally quit their day jobs to come up with guiding principles and new org design concepts to experiment with a brand new way of working and collaborating. There’s a real benefit to the first-mover advantage.

2. “You’ll join an incredible community (of builders).”

   This is no secret to web3, but it bears repeating: People want to work with great people. Period. Today this largely manifests as developers wanting to build together – which is a large part of the driving action behind the strength of the contributor communities behind Juicebox and PartyBid, or why securing a place on the Dark Forest leaderboard holds the equivalent of Stack Overflow reputation points in a web3 era. One of Juicebox’s core contributors, Jango, put it best – “devs like to dev with other devs.”

   But it’s also apparent in non-developer networks such as CabinDAO, Crypto Coven, and Mirror. In particular, Mirror’s innovative approach to bootstrapping community through the $WRITE Race brought in high-quality new writers at a manageable, consistent pace. In fact, every single web3 community I explored referred to the caliber of the people in their network. Figure out what “that special thing” is for your community, and harness it to attract more like-minded community members.

3. “You’ll push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

   In one of the more clever twists of incentive structure that meets organizational objectives, the game Dark Forest was literally built to be broken. The only way to win this world-building and planet-claiming on-chain game is to code your way through automations to streamline your gameplay experience. The foundation that funds the game (among other projects), 0xPARC, has a mission to promote application-level innovation on Ethereum. Their open approach to competitive game design has attracted some of the most serious Solidity developers as game players, all excited about the opportunity to push the limits of their code.

4. “You’ll make money.”

   I’ll spare you the full-on “gold rush” analogy, but you can’t deny the power of the potential upside. In an ownership-first platform, incentives are more important than ever – the trick is getting the balance right. While you don’t need to look far to see how NFT projects drive in “community” through price-gouging, rug pulls, and other cheap tricks, examples of utility-based incentives are much more compelling in the long term. Uniswap’s model for liquidity providers (now in v3) is a continual iterative effort to educate, incentivize, and empower this core audience segment to their platform. Numerai, which incentivizes data scientists to contribute successful models to their decentralized hedge fund, amended their incentive structure to reward contributions to their meta model vs. based on individual payouts. The most important advice I received here was simple: Your incentive design must be based around the type of engagement you want. (Easier said than done.)

Whether you call them founders, builders, or core contributors, the sentiment remains the same. Four of the projects I analyzed can attribute at least part of their initial traction phase to the fact that their core team was previously known or trusted in the space. Like it or not, people with an audience and brand are more likely to galvanize community and early traction.

See: Loot, started by Dom, creator of Vine, and Nouns, whose core team of Nounders not only also included Dom but other heavy-hitters like the artist @gremplin and @punk4156, a prominent thinker and investor. Just like in other industries, smart people tend to pop up again in other smart projects. The more people and projects I spent time with, the more I found intersections and cross-project participation as the norm. Look no further than Partybid’s origin story, which literally began as an idea in a single tweet from Denis Nazarov, former founder and a16z crypto partner – not to mention the founder of Mirror, another successful web3 project. One other big benefit of trusted early builders? It’s a surefire way of guaranteeing that the “first follower” effect attracts a high-caliber network of secondary builders and contributors.

BEWARE OF: Speculation & Frenzy

Nearly everyone in web3 knows someone who made the right move at the right time and walked away with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in the bank. Even among the most well-intentioned of projects, you may end up with YouTubers talking about how Helium is a “magic box to earn you thousands of dollars” or that Loot bags containing Divine Robes merit selling for as much as 250 ETH. But the spikey viral peaks of growth (and people seeking profits) actually dilute the community. It can be hard to avoid but still noteworthy to mention. Optimism’s airdrop earlier this year serves as an early example of a project at staving off arbitrage efforts, but there’s still work to be done. There’s something to be said for the bear market we’re in: Despite people objectively losing money, it does provide an opportunity for building over speculation.

Once you’ve started a web3 community, you’ll probably start wondering how much to empower the community – both in decision-making and how that work is executed. While most web3 projects look at how decisions get made as the determining factor around its state of decentralization, an emergent theory from Spencer Graham suggests that the purest form should include both decentralized decision-making and decentralized execution. In other words: “How ‘decentralized’ are you, really?”

Throughout my research, I’ve ranked each project against a 5-point scale – the “decentralization spectrum” – ranging from fully decentralized to fully centralized.

Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

You’ll notice that, at least among this subset of arguably well-known projects, “pure decentralization” (all decisions & actions are taken in a decentralized way) is the outlier, not the norm. And very few start as fully decentralized, with the exception of Bitcoin itself, and possibly also Loot. The vast majority fall somewhere in the middle.

It’s no secret that web3 projects build in public. With open Discord servers, Twitter threads, public-facing governance forums, and voting through Snapshot, nearly every project has a wide degree of open, transparent documentation to their users and community.

But – Just because something exists on the open web does not mean it is equally accessible to all. I first started this project intending to do wholly independent solo research into each web3 community. But I quickly discovered this was not sustainable. As a newcomer to all of these spaces, it took me hours of time to untangle the sometimes cryptic websites, dozens of pages of documentation, and decipher the meaning behind each Discord server’s channel names.

In web2, we attributed broad developer adoption of new technology due in part to a product’s ease of API access and documentation. In web3, we look at their Notion pages, Discord groups, and onboarding flow. A couple of examples stand out here right away in terms of their level of accessibility and robustness of their materials: Index Coop, both in terms of its new member onboarding and handbook; and Juicebox for their Notion, built with both project creators and developers in mind. An honorable mention goes to NFT project Crypto Coven for their community-generated public Library, which aggregates both stories of the “lore” surrounding their network and also the basics of DAOs and web3.

Perhaps one of the most noteworthy trends in decentralized community management is the separation of the community’s influence from that of the core builders. Helium and Uniswap offered the strongest examples of this “church and state” effect in their decision-making frameworks. Both are equipped with a C-corp of core builders and team members and also a non-profit entity (or foundation), which is community-managed.

In Uniswap’s case, their core team Uniswap Labs owns the product (which includes the web app interface, the widget, and any other products they may roll out), but Uniswap the DAO owns the protocol. Decisions about the protocol are managed through a foundation and government through their open governance proposal process. As one example of how this plays out, the recent decision to deploy v3 of Uniswap can be tracked all the way back to conversations that began in March and followed the four steps in their governance: a Temperature check, a Consensus check, and a Governance proposal, ultimately leading to the successful deployment on July 13.

Helium is one of many projects that leverages a proposal process to manage requested changes to their protocol, called HIPs. (Other examples include Ethereum Improvement Proposals” (EIPs), and similar processes at Zcash and Rust.) Managed through Github, these changes are then routed to the core team at Helium, Inc., where most of the core devs of the Helium blockchain are employed. Both of these examples strike a mid-point balance of how to both leverage community engagement and recommendations while still allowing some degree of agility and nimble-ness from a core team.

One interesting tendency among some web3 projects is to intentionally start with “incomplete builds.” A deck of Loot bags dropping as an NFT collection inspired dozens of side projects, teams, and builders to corral around the “player’s deck” and build out the world with additional elements: Maps, Realms, HyperLoot Characters. A 100% creative commons collection of NFTs called Nouns beacons a new wave of designers, animators, and storytellers to contribute to this emergent ecosystem. Dark Forest’s decentralized world-building game was made to be exploited – actively encouraging developers to build plug-ins, integrations, and other boundary-pushing gameplay tactics – even when this sometimes meant acknowledging when things went a little too far. Each of these projects, and many more in the space, serve as magnets in the way they playfulness and collaboration from a community that not only decides what comes next, but also builds it themselves.

In each of these examples (arguably the most truly decentralized projects I explored), getting the starting conditions right is more important than ever. Sina Habibian who helps web3 in Zeitgeist said:

“I think being thoughtful/intentional about the initial conditions actually matters more with decentralized projects like Loot and Nouns. That's because the core team (if a core team even exists) can't course correct as easily after the fact. There is meaningful inertia around the initial choices.”

Nearly every DAO I spoke with had some additional layer of community leadership to help manage their broader network. While the obvious thought may be to simply assign Discord permissions to server members who step up, authentic design for community ambassador programs stems much more organically. Index Coop uses something called “Owl Levels” to designate different levels of seniority in the community (Gold, Silver and Bronze, each with a vote weighting around them). Numerai elected a “Council of Elders” of senior community members who could make decisions more quickly on behalf of the broader network. Creator Cabins has a “City Council” composed of people with at least 500 $CABIN. These designations seem to serve as an extension from common web2 community-building models such as “developer evangelists,” “influencers,” or even just “brand ambassadors” in that they harbor not only titles and perks, but also some influence and authority.

BEWARE OF: The temptation to turn everything into a community vote.

Prolific web3 community thought leader, @rafathebuilder, who has engaged in communities including Creator Cabins and Mirror observed:

"I think there’s a thing of “minimum required decentralization” — there are real trade-offs. Many organizations need to sacrifice efficiency and build decentralization through slow, organic growth. If you’re aiming for decentralization, you’re not aiming to make it cheap. You’re not optimizing on cost to production, you’re optimizing on the resiliency of the network."

One of the most thoughtful essays I read on this topic came from Jon Hills at CabinDAO: How Decentralized Organizations Win (And Lose). In this piece, Jon challenges the notion of “decentralized absolutism” and identifies principles from four (non-crypto-native) organizations that flexibly adapt around the needs of their community, without offering 100% of the power to the people. This tension is one that many crypto-native builders will need to reconcile with among their own projects and protocols – both the opportunities and challenges involved.

In an ownership economy, the active participation of members in web3 communities matters as much as users matter in web2. Many builders and founders are asking: “What’s the web3 conversion funnel? How do I get people to go from an idle observer to a community member to an active participant in my project?” While there’s no magic wand answer to this question (just as there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to classic marketing funnel activities in web2), here are a few observations (and one misconception) I observed from the projects in my research.

The strongest web3 communities I encountered had absolutely no qualms about acknowledging who exactly they were targeting. Crypto Coven perhaps nails this most of all – going after “femme” culture in web3 and positioning themselves as the “anti crypto bro” culture. From the moment you land on their website, you’re transported into a different place – one of witchy language, folklore, premonitions and prophecies.

While you might start out, as Crypto Coven’s team of “High Witches” did, intentionally targeting an audience for your project, it’s far more common for teams to discover this organically. Such was the case for Index Coop, whose audience of DeFi evangelists emerged slowly, with each new product that launched. With each additional product launch, a new sub-community niche emerges on Index, with each contributing in its own way to the DAO.

By contrast, Helium, a project originally founded as an IoT company in 2013, has a very high rate of brand-new-to-crypto people — for many of them, Helium is the only crypto project they’re involved in, which has influenced the flavor of community organizing in a lot of ways. These severe audience differences are also what make it impossible to define one universal approach to community.

I used to believe that most of the power in web3 existed in the inherent incentive structure for every community action taken. Whether you pick up a bounty, refer a new collaborator, or contribute in some other way, I was under the impression that all actions received some incentive or compensation as reward.

But the more I unfolded the layers of these communities that I spoke with, the more I learned that incentives are a bit of a “squishy” area – even in web3. For one, hundreds of people donated to CabinDAO’s original mission – to fund creative retreats for emerging artists – without personally benefiting from that outcome. The 17,000 people who contributed to ConstitutionDAO’s insane crowdfund campaign did so as a mere curiosity, with zero expectation of a return on that investment. But people aren’t just willing to donate money; they also donate time. Danny Aranda, now a core contributor at PartyDAO, started just as any other community participant. He said:

"I was a DAO member like anyone else. I started working on the project pretty organically and pretty unpaid. There was a governance proposal that we should start paying Danny, and then there was more work, and I started getting paid full time."

Danny’s use case is a particularly good example of how projects can assess project-market fit among their community: If people are willing to work for free (at least initially), you’ve found your hook.

In a survey of 400+ DAO members that Gitcoin conducted, roughly half of respondents reported that DAOs are not their primary source of income. (Interestingly, this is the same percent of people who reported having at least 12 months of savings, so the relative financial security of DAO contributors may contribute toward their earnestness to take on unpaid work.) And my favorite example was learning that the “Council of Elders” at Numerai also isn’t exactly paid to do that work – but the reputation of being an Elder stands on its own, and they did gift them cloaks, which the team excitedly wore in solidarity at IRL conferences together.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting that you stop paying your community members for their hard work and labor. Most of these projects made it quite clear to me that there are thresholds of free work to bounty-based work and ultimately to full time, paid work. I’m simply noting that – even in the hyper-tokenized world of web3, sometimes you can get great people to do great things by just buying them some cool-looking cloaks.

To the outside observer, Discord server size serves as a false flag measurement of true engagement. Even for projects with Discord communities in the tens of thousands (Uniswap) or hundreds of thousands (Helium), the relative size of the contributing team is small by comparison. As a project leader, there’s a serious temptation to get sucked into the groundswell of needs, requests, ideas and suggestions from these bottomless communities. But a more disciplined, constraint-based approach to growth can help you stay focused on the North Star for your community. For most projects, the percent of community members who are also core contributors or builders is much smaller than you may think.

The best example of a strategic and intentional rollout of a product-led community strategy is through Mirror’s $WRITE Race. For more than six months, Mirror invited writers to submit content for that week’s competition, and token holders voted to admit 10 new members each week. These new members quickly became early adopters, finding kinship not only in a peer community of high-quality writers but also informing future product & protocol development for Mirror’s core team.

Finally, I’ll note that some DAOs – and many NFT projects – are quick to pick out one simple, easy way for their broad base of members to serve as evangelists. This might be actively encouraging members to rock their swag (like Bored Apes), funding projects that also promote brand awareness (like Nouns) or even actively engaging on Twitter through memes and pfps. One of the main reasons that I chose Crypto Coven as an NFT project to dive into for this research was due to the intense degree of community outreach I received from the network of Witches in my initial Twitter inquiry about community research.

BEWARE OF: Facilitating chatter vs. true community engagement.

It would be a mistake to go through the motions of community, or simply follow suit to “run the playbook” of another DAO or crypto-native project. Conway Anderson, web3 builder and early Loot adopter has observed this in many networks he has been a part of. He said:

“Nothing happens if you just create a Discord and put people there. Nobody really knows what they want to do. The best DAOs / products in the space have usually been a group of people who execute and through that, the broader community starts to go, “What if…?” There’s usually a certain threshold where other people start to come in.”

Part of achieving this level of engagement involves leaning into the parts of your project that are uniquely web3 – and legitimately wouldn’t be possible to build in web2 structures. Rafa noted:

“I think that the reason why web3 feels special is because many protocols weren’t public infrastructure before web3, they were private infrastructure. It’s really hard to build a community around private infrastructure that’s more than just a “fan base” (like Apple). But it’s much harder to maintain that community when it comes to private infrastructure. Today's opportunity to unlock the power of evangelism is of a different magnitude. You have so much connectivity; you can tailor your message, do automatic translations, crowdfunds, anyone can send anyone money or pool resources together.”

Just as every company carries a different definition for success, so does every community. But in this research, I encountered a few grounding principles that seemed to help some projects identify their True North, keep up the momentum, and galvanize ongoing community engagement. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

First – identify your True North Star. Some of the best advice I received during this project came from learning about Rafa’s distinction in building infrastructure vs. engagements. In a real-world example, he challenged me to consider the way that you might cultivate community in a neighborhood. One option is to build infrastructure – parks, churches, community centers – and let people organically self-organize. The alternative is to design activities – block parties, game nights, town meetings – and engage people around events.

As a web3 project leader – there’s a clear choice to make. You can build a community around your protocol (such as how Helium, Mirror, and Uniswap have done), or you can offer event-based programming designed to keep your community members coming back. (The latter is not only the case for most NFT projects but also for the myriad of DAOs, learning communities, and other decentralized, member-based networks in web3 today.) While this choice isn’t necessarily a binary one, it is something you should formulate a thesis around for your particular project.

Second – the web3 equivalent of “move fast and break things” – Say “yes” to new partnerships and opportunities. This happens in real time, all the time: A new connection at a conference becomes an NFT artist for your next project; an errant message on Twitter or Telegram blossoms into a new Discord and a game plan to bid on the U.S. Constitution with a DAO. Due to the quick cycles of experimentation and iteration necessary for this new era, saving some space to say yes to more spontaneous opportunities (and being open-minded about what those might be) is just about one of the best decisions you can make.A few examples: CabinDAO didn’t start as a DAO. Their founder Jon hosted a group of friends for a soft launch at his initial properties once they were completed, and one of the attendees spoke about the opportunity to use crypto to scale the creator co-op that they had all been working on together. Both of the early projects that gave Juicebox their initial traction came from their core contributor Jango jumping right into two fast-moving hype projects (SharkDAO and ConstitutionDAO) – volunteering their product as the means to make it possible. It matters less if you are ready: What matters is that you are there.

Third – make it irresistible to walk away. Let’s be honest: There’s a lot of “un-fun” things about the world today. It’s easy to forget how delightful it feels to have a good laugh or take on something totally ridiculous with strangers on the Internet. But some of the stickiest projects I encountered – the ones you can’t help but root for no matter what – are just fun, plain and simple.

I’ll bet you can’t sit through 10 minutes of “Noun’o’clock” in the Noun Square without cracking a smile. These daily Twitter spaces commentary treats the conclusion of each live NFT auction like a sporting event, complete with wacky sound effects, and witty banter as the group follows along in real time watching potential new Noun NFTs get randomly generated.

(Think a bunch of people shouting at once, things like: “This one’s a messy design but I like it.” “I like the bonsai but not with that shirt.” “The sunglasses flamingo?! Come on!” “I’m still thinking about that pineapple.”)

When I attended DevConnect earlier this year, I sat down with the core contributors behind dfdao, the DAO that came together to collectively compete in the game, Dark Forest. As a non-gamer, I was stuck on one question: “Why?” Why did you dedicate time away from your full-time jobs to compete at a world-building game with anons all over the world? Why were you compelled to make sure you had always had someone to operate as a “pilot” to execute game play around the clock, every five minutes, for a week straight?

It didn’t click until I sat through a presentation from Ivan at 0xPARC about Dark Forest. When discussing community engagement in their game, he paused to talk about how dfdao had exposed a vulnerability that let them directly target an opponent and drain all of the resources from their planet. When he showed what this looked like in the universal map (slide 32 in his deck here), I watched the dfdao team proudly grin at each other ear-to-ear, audibly cackling about their cheeky path to victory. That’s when it finally hit me: To them, it’s all just play. And they are having the time of their lives.

The most fun I had on the Internet last year was watching the livestream of the Sotheby’s auction for the U.S. Constitution. The chat, Discord, and Twitter were simultaneously flooded by memes and inside jokes and speculation. And even when we learned we lost the bid – when the stated goal of the project failed to come to pass – the community pressed on. This interview with Jonah Erlich, a core ConstitutionDAO contributor, highlighted it best:

“Do you have a sense of why people are building a secondary market for this [$PEOPLE] token?”

“People like the memes.”

“You think that’s it?”

Yeah. People like the memes; they like to have fun. I think that one thing that I’ve learned from exploring the crypto world is that it’s very hard to rationalize a lot of the different momentums — things that happen with memes and with the memetic transfer of information. I think if people are having fun and they’re doing their thing, then I don’t try to interpret it too deeply, because I’m just going to break my brain.”

Sometimes, you must throw away rationality and “seize the memes of production.”

BEWARE OF: Being too quick to “call it” a success (or a failure).

The entire web3 ecosystem is moving far too quickly for any project to canonically come out as a de facto “winner” in the space. (Except for possibly, Uniswap, which towers above the rest as the most beloved blockchain-enabled app. That is, at least, for now.) If web2 volatility has taught us anything, it’s that the project that can’t pivot is the project that will fail. Adaptability is key to success.

Suffice it to say, a lot has happened over the past two years. The bull market run-up leading up through late 2021 crowded a lot of these spaces and communities with more energy than web3 has ever seen before – and through that saturation of energy, we witnessed an immense degree of experimentation & iteration. While temperatures have cooled somewhat in the recent macroeconomic environment and slow-down, we find ourselves at an interesting inflection point, one which allows us to take stock, dig a little deeper, and catch our bearings to direct our attention in more deliberate, intentional ways for the next phase of the crypto adoption curve.

As of yet, there is still no clear-cut winner – no single company or project who has “solved” decentralization completely (if that’s even the objective). But it is exciting to see some early patterns and behaviors emerge, ones that might guide the next generation of builders and creators (maybe including you).

I invite you to continue this project with me through both exploring the library of resources I used along the way and contributing your own links.

I’ll be releasing the rest of these individual stories on a weekly cadence here on Mirror. You can read the first one here:

• Read the PartyBid / PartyDAO story

This work would not have been possible were it not for the dozens of people I have connected with over the past several months, both as direct and indirect contributors, including: 0xZakk, Brad, Chris Carella, conway, danny, Jamie Dubs, jango, kenbot, LCap, LFeld, llpresswell, NJ, penryn, Rachel Price, rafa0, Remy Hall, Robleh, Steph Bell, Summer Delaney, Tarun Sachdeva, Timshel, Will Robinson, & Xuannu. Special thanks to Sina, Bruno, and the whole Zeitgeist crew for championing this research.