Dedicated, highly engaged communities have become a core value proposition for Web3 projects since community members often play a crucial role in governance and serve as the most influential digital flag bearers of the brand.
Community input often helps a project define its market, value proposition, and purpose. As a result, Web3 communities need to cultivate active and sustained followings, to ensure their most valuable assets stick around for the long-haul.
Given the advent of NFTs, social tokens, and DAO governance, emerging Web3 companies treat their users more like co-owners than customers, collectively responsible for (and beneficiaries of) the success of the underlying product or mission.
The past year demonstrated that while some Web2 tools have been critical for the growth of early-stage Web3 communities, notable infrastructure gaps exist that make it harder for Web3 projects and brands to build, maintain, and reward their followings. Novel solutions are required to account for Web3’s intricacies and tackle some persisting unmet needs, including the lack of community analytics platforms and contributor rewards tools.
In response, 100+ companies (DAOs, NFTs) launched that are designed to serve NFT collectives and DAOs as they work to identify and reach their target users, launch their communities (and products) on-chain, reward contributors, and track their growth.
Here’s an overview of the Web3 community tool ecosystem:
The DAO Creation & Management space is one of the most essential (and most crowded) categories across the landscape. These tools provide a foundational layer of infrastructure for any project that aims to be governed by its community, and have rapidly onboarded thousands of projects and hundreds of thousands of users by offering low-cost and accessible solutions.
Syndicate, Boardroom, and Aragon stand out from the pack of competitors due to their expansive feature sets and intuitive UIs.
These platforms (and the 10+ others in this category) have created a comprehensive ecosystem of tools through which aspiring DAOs can quickly formalize into on-chain collectives.
Treasury Management tools help Web3 communities safeguard and deploy their collective capital. Gnosis Safe, Coinshift, and Juicebox, leaders in this category, serve distinct functions for community treasuries but all prioritize security surrounding the transfer of funds.
Gnosis Safe allows web3 projects to designate member sign off on all transactions, providing security and community governance functionality to any crypto wallet. Coinshift, which is powered by Gnosis Safe, provides full-service treasury management tools, including a unified dashboard that helps organizations manage grant and contributor payouts. Juicebox is a decentralized funding platform (like GoFundMe or Kickstarter) that helps organizations raise money in crypto and distribute governance tokens, all within one platform.
Community Governance tools enable organization-wide decision making. This category is dominated by few basic tools that empower holders of particular assets (NFTs or governance tokens) to vote on proposals raised to the group.
Snapshot and Tally allow contributors to craft and vote on proposals by verifying that they hold the requisite token for participation. These platforms also empower community members to delegate their votes to a trusted peer by transferring voting power to another wallet address. Boardroom and Aragon also offer voting functionality within their platforms.
Several pain points persist within this category. Snapshot and Tally are independent platforms, and for Web3-natives, visiting these websites has become part of the normal course of business. But for novices, having to use multiple platforms to participate in a single community makes it harder for projects to foster sustained engagement. Community members also lament the effort required to keep track of upcoming votes – the lack of mobile functionality and preemptive notifications contribute to this issue.
Contributor Rewards tools enable projects to compensate community members for taking certain actions or simply holding an asset. They do so by facilitating airdrops, whitelist spots, token distributions, and community access – giving members more skin in the game. These tools are generally underdeveloped yet critical for any organization that aims to compete for attention in the Web3 space.
It’s important to note that many Web3 communities reward members without utilizing a third party platform. They do so by using data on Etherscan to compile a list of all wallet addresses that hold the associated token. Then, they can distribute additional NFTs (or grant whitelist access) to their list of wallet addresses. However, multiple NFT projects have complained to me that this process can be prone to errors.
We’ll focus on: Reward distribution, access gating, and DAO member compensation.
Reward distribution: Tools like those offered by Glow Labs and Project Galaxy make the reward distribution process easy for NFT communities. Glow Labs promotes the “engage-to-earn” concept – they offer simple tools that help projects distribute rewards to community members, such as gas fee refunds or token airdrops. Glow Labs touts integrations with Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Twitter, and Discord. Project Galaxy also simplifies the reward distribution process through using its system of Web3 credentials. POAP, a mobile app designed to provide NFT mementos to attendees at IRL and virtual events, has also gained popularity across the Web3 space since it provides a simple mechanism for incentivizing and rewarding attendance.
Access gating: “Community access” is a common reward offered by NFT projects. This often takes the form of an invitation to a private channel within the project’s Discord server or Telegram chat. To ensure proper access gating (keeping channels secure and exclusive to applicable members), many projects use plug-ins like Collab.land and Guild. Both of these tools directly integrate with Discord and Telegram and require members to connect their wallet and verify ownership of the associated NFT before accessing exclusive chat rooms.
Member compensation: On the DAO front, platforms like Coordinape and SourceCred support member compensation processes. They are designed to recognize sweat-equity contributions (inputs of human capital instead of financial capital) and provide rewards. These tools both measure and reward value creation with the goal of helping project leaders identify (and quantify) contributions and reward them accordingly.
Community Engagement and Coordination tools utilized by Web3 projects are largely web2 platforms. These platforms enable communities to coordinate activities, facilitate group conversations, and engage members through familiar means.
Discord, Twitter, and Telegram serve as the primary platforms of choice for NFT communities and DAOs alike.
Discord represents the home for most Web3 projects to-date – Its multi-channel functionality empowers project leaders to effectively organize conversations around specific topics. Server administrators can also “lock” certain channels to ensure that accurate information and safe links are available to all. Twitter enables projects to share updates, generate grassroots virality, and host public conversations. Twitter Spaces also serves as an accessible (voice-only) convening mechanism for Web3 communities. Telegram is another favorite amongst Web3-natives, as its group chat interface is easy to digest and encourages fluid conversations.
Despite all of their positives, the platforms in this category are frequently scrutinized by their users. Discord’s user interface is rather overwhelming, as it’s difficult for community members to follow conversations (especially as server size increases) and locate older messages. Community members also have trouble gauging user engagement, determining the best performing content, and measuring moderator and member contributions. Discord servers are also prone to hacks, where bad actors take control and post malicious links.
Algorithm-driven echo chambers and systemic misinformation on Twitter make it difficult for users to count on receiving accurate information. Telegram’s feature set is limited to the bare bones necessary for simple communication.
The Web3 Content Management and Distribution space encompasses both Web2 and Web3 tools, in addition to a new class of Web3 consultants. Consulting agencies offer a range of services that support Web3 communities with marketing and content development. Newsletter and content distribution services help projects engage their followings and share notable updates.
Token Minds is a full-service blockchain and NFT agency that supports Web3 projects with marketing, NFT development, and advisory services. Blockwiz is also a “crypto marketing” agency that offers support with influencer campaigns, social media marketing, content creation, Discord and Telegram community growth, PR, and SEO.
In terms of content distribution, Web3-native platform Mirror and Web2-favorite Substack stand out from the pack. Mirror operates as a Web3-enabled Medium, where creators can publish content, sell related NFTs, and launch crowdfunds all on the same platform. Further, NFT, DAO, and DeFi thought leaders have used Substack for newsletter creation and distribution services – enhancing their effort to deliver compelling content right to the inbox of their followers, while building community and creating a pipeline for NFT and DAO discovery. Notable examples include OurNetwork, The Defiant, and Zima Red.
The Analytics space features a variety of platforms that serve distinct purposes, though none of them have successfully built a suite of tools that provide a holistic, data-driven line-of-sight into a Web3 community. These platforms offer digestible interfaces for tracking token growth, NFT project metrics, DAO happenings, and more.
Nansen, though more geared towards investors, offers one of the most comprehensive vantage points into an NFT project. Its NFT Paradise product displays project-level information relating to token holders, volume, floor price, growth, and recent trades. Messari, a crypto analytics platform designed for institutional investors, recently rolled out a novel product called Governor, which helps DAO communities track the progress of voting proposals and governance token price fluctuations. Dune offers “free crypto analytics by and for the community,” which takes the form of comprehensive dashboards that demonstrate key metrics at the project-level and surrounding notable trends (like “DeFi liquidations”). Highlight combines NFT minting services and creator tools with lightweight community-analytics services, aiming to serve as a one-stop shop for NFT project creation and management.
Notably, none of these platforms allow project leaders to analyze data from both Web2 (social media) and Web3 (on-chain) pipelines in the same dashboard. This remains a pressing pain point across the landscape.
While the rapid pace of innovation across this ecosystem has given projects and brands a strong foundation for establishing their communities, they still face immense difficulties with gauging their community’s ever-evolving health.
Several pain points persist that make it harder for communities to fulfill their promise of co-ownership. Tracking community members’ engagement levels and aligning rewards and contributions loom large as unsolved challenges. Member-to-member and community communication remain top concerns amongst both moderators and active contributors. The analytics space is still overwhelmingly dominated by trading and investing-focused platforms.
As Web3 communities continue to mature (most are not even one year-old), a comprehensive set of management and analytics tools will prove to be more critical than ever.
