Friends With JPGs

How to Be Sticky

Yesterday in Proof of Update, we discussed what it meant to be a “sticky” community. If you happened to miss that edition, feel free to check it out here for context as to what we will be discussing today:

The TL;DR of the above is that stickiness in this context is referring to how likely someone is to remain in a community or a project’s ecosystem. With everything in web3 being a constant battle for attention, often this somewhat unquantifiable metric can be one of the most important things to look at when it comes to whether or not a project is going to survive.

While there are a lot of ways to contribute to a community’s stickiness, however, it’s important that projects do so in a way that is not seen as punitive to its users or holders. So how can you make a community or protocol more sticky, without doing so at the cost of your userbase? Let’s take a look at some good examples.

The Right Way

Reward Holding Streaks

The nesting streak implemented by PROOF for Moonbirds was a genius move for many reasons, but two reasons really stand out.

  1. You can “unnest” and sell at any time
  2. It ties rewards in to how long you’ve nested

The first aspect is really important, as it does add an element of stickiness to the community, but in a non-punitive fashion. You don’t have to wait X amount of days to join an exit queue once you unnest, nor do you have to commit to a certain time period of nesting from the start. If you need to, you can simply sell at any moment.

In addition to this, there are rewards tied into the cumulative length of the streak (tokens?) which doesn’t interfere with someone’s ability to unnest as mentioned above. However, it still makes people second-guess the sale of their asset.

Exclusivity

Another way to make a community a place people want to be is simply by gating it and making it an “exclusive club.” While this may seem silly on its face, the simple fact is that people like to belong, and being part of a community that’s generally closed off to the public makes you feel like you belong to something special. There is a reason people are always trying to enter private Discords with people, and it’s not always just because of alpha.

Utility

Possibly the most overused term in NFTs and one that has generally lost its original meaning at this point, NFT utility nonetheless keeps people around when it comes to a community or protocol. Whether it’s by receiving art drops from holding a Collective Pass or farming tokens by staking your DeFi coins, providing a perceived benefit to a userbase for participating in an ecosystem is one of the best ways to keep people around.

The Wrong Way

Time-Locking Tokens/NFTs

A sure-fire way to make your community more sticky is to require a certain amount of lock-up when it comes time to stake your tokens. While this will keep some people around longer than they would have been without a lock-up, it also will certainly keep another subset of people away.

Exit Queues

Maybe one of the most famous cases of an exit queue gone wrong would be the @templedao project. To make a long story short, the people who locked their money up first in a sort of IPO to purchase the cheapest $temple tokens were also the ones who got to sell first when the tokens were unlocked. There was an exit queue to do so, but it basically became one huge cluster as everyone rushed to sell their tokens at the highest prices. This resulted in the team pausing their custom AMM (not allowing anyone to sell) as they feverishly worked on a solution, which ultimately resulted in the destruction of all trust in the project. It also resulted in one of my favorite charts of all time (as someone who escaped early, luckily).

Sell-Shaming

If you’ve been around NFTs for any length of time, then you know how tribal these communities can be. One of the worst things a community can do is to publicly shame or call people out who exit a community. It reminds me of my old neighbor who came out and screamed at my wife, child, and me because we were selling our house. He was worried an AirBNB would move in, and so he confronted us one day as we were walking up the stairs to our home (I have a great Ring Doorbell video of the interaction if you’re ever interseted🤣). Well, that reaction certainly didn’t convince me to change my mind and stay, and the same thing is true here.

Notable News

Credit to NiftyNoon Daily NFT Update

  • Art Blocks Curated is officially ending

  • Azuki teases the next release in their ecosystem

  • Kevin Rose recently spoke with Tim Ferriss on The Random Show

Extras

The new PROOF events page is live! You now also have the ability to submit a request for community-led events (that PROOF will sponsor) via the events page. Check out the below announcement for more information!

That’s all for today – I hope you have a great Wednesday!

bitfloorsghost

Friends, Assemble!

If you’re looking for some friends with JPGs to work with, learn with, or just hang with, reach out…

This space feels right for a call-to-action, so why not subscribe to THE coolest new podcast on the block?

Go ahead… click that beautiful podcast cover art that will send you to the apple podcasts link.

You know you want to.

You’ll get to know cool people, too. It’s a people show!