In the year 2008, a post was made in a random internet forum titled:
“BITCOIN OPEN SOURCE IMPLEMENTATION OF P2P CURRENCY”
Fast forward 17 years - Bitcoin sits at $2.2T market cap and the Bitcoin community is the strongest community in crypto by far.
Bitcoin is of course the first, largest, and most decentralized cryptocurrency of all time, which definitely contributes to the strength of its community.
However - I believe the secret sauce to Bitcoin’s community is because of ownership.
You are not considered a member of the Bitcoin community unless you physically hold Bitcoin, which requires a value exchange ($$$).
Community members have exposure to upside, when Bitcoin wins, the community wins.
We see examples of this across other major crypto communities as well, most notably being XRP.
Ask any Boomer about crypto - they will likely go on a long-winded tangent about how XRP is going to $10k and it is truly the greatest asset of all time.
Crypto-natives like us are aware that XRP is vaporware backed by nothing but empty promises and bribing Fox News to shill.
But no matter what you tell an XRP community member - they will NEVER believe you. Their delusion is powered by the upside they’ve experienced by holding the XRP asset.
One of the core teachings of the book This is Marketing by Seth Godin is the idea that “People like us do things like this”. This philosophy applies heavily to the XRP community, with most holders being onboarded by friends or family that have experienced upside of XRP the asset.
“People like me hold XRP so I should too”
We can argue all day about whether or not XRP is the greatest MLM scheme of all time, but the core thesis here is that the XRP community is strong because members have experienced upside via ownership powering network effects.
Ownership doesn’t have to = token holdings. Ownership means they would have to give up something that they own to get something else and deal with the consequences of the decision.
Ownership can be social status: does this person hold an exclusive title within the community? Are they respected? Do they have something to lose if they leave?
Social status ownership is trickier because you can’t buy it, there is no clear value exchange.
But that doesn’t mean financial ownership isn’t tricky either. There are many projects out there where community ownership is not meaningful for a variety of reasons.
A common pitfall I see is where projects launch a token but don’t provide any funnels for these users with ownership to take the extra step and actually join the community.
Token holders are great, but if you don’t capture to turn them into deeper members of your community, you’re leaving value on the table.
Some examples of strong funnels:
ICO platform → Verify participation → Add to private Telegram channel
Airdrop claim → Join Discord → Verify token holdings → Role for exclusive channels
NFT mint → Join Discord → Verify NFT holdings → Role for exclusive channels
Once you have these people all in one place, the real work starts. How do you best serve the people that have ownership of your project? How do you empower them to bring new members in and give them ownership?
Maybe I’ll write about it later.
Anyways, check out my other blog posts for more community stuff.