Cross-community development for growth in web3 projects.
With decentralization at the foundation of crypto, the importance of community in the world of web3 can never be overstated. From NFTs to DeFi and even in the use of blockchain technology by web2 companies, every project building in web3 must first identify the importance of community in their development/growth journey.
Particularly in the NFTs sector, community is the most integral feature for a successful project. Besides the worries of sold-out NFTs and maintaining floor prices, the absence of a budding community will eventually fail a project, no matter how long it tries to sustain itself.
Despite projects investing a lot of time and resources into building their communities, community developers still attest to how difficult community building can be. This brings about the need for CROSS-COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT as a strategy for growth.
CROSS-COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT.
Cross community development is a community development strategy that focuses on building and establishing relationships between multiple communities, with the aim of helping these communities achieve their individual goals.
If we look at the producer-consumer market relationship, we find a consistent sense of competition between service providers battling for the consumer’s attention. This form of market relationship creates a somewhat hostile environment for the producers as each company battles, devising means to privatize as much as possible from the consuming community. In turn, this overstretches the consuming community, as they are plagued with consistent pestering from the service providers.
In a bid to develop healthy industry practices and maintain satisfied customers, the need for collaborative effort between service providers rises to surface. It becomes necessary for companies to see the audience as one, and find ways to constructively appeal to them, rather than compete for them.
Cross Community Development in Web3.
Particularly in web3, we can exemplify the OpenSea v. Blur episode as an unhealthy market environment.
This form of competition between both companies in Q1 2023 was obvious to every NFT participant.
To win customers over the competitor, both marketplaces were caught in a fierce battle, making decisions and strategies mostly off the whim. This also affected the consumers (NFT traders) as many blur users lost money to erroneous bids, and NFTs to trickish pool bids, while artists on OpenSea were left out of their creator royalties, and even suffered getting their arts on other marketplaces flagged.
As we all witnessed, adopting this method as a standard for attracting (user) community can result in retrogressive decisions.
Cross community development between web3 projects can be defined as a market situation whereby all partnering projects and brands share the same audience community, and unilaterally work to improve tools, utilities and services for their shared audience.
When there are collaborative partnerships and interactions between organizations providing similar services, the saner and healthier environment will spur growth for the companies and their industry.
This is why projects need to come together to create a synchronous environment for each individual community to work in a friendly and accountable way, and to collectively achieve their community objectives.
Let us look at some examples of cross community development events within the blockchain/web3 ecosystem.
Eth Denver.
Eth Denver is a collaborative #BUIDLathon event that centers around Ethereum developers and the evm community. This event invites developers from the Ethereum ecosystem, and other evm friendly ecosystems to come network and learn from each other.
For one week, dozens of blockchain companies and devs from around the world converge to talk about their EVM ecosystem, dApps, community interactions, infrastructure ideas, and several other evm based improvements that can improve the services available on EVM platforms.
This collaborative practice has resulted in the significant growth and dominance of the EVM developers community amongst other blockchain developer communities. It has also helped maintain EVM compatibility features as essential for dApps and protocols.
Polkadot Decoded.
Polkadot Decoded is an annual event hosted by Parity Technology, founders of the Polkadot substrate network. This event is a cross-community development event that aims at fostering a friendly environment to facilitate collective growth of every participating company in its ecosystem. Every year, project builders, tech leaders and investing companies come together to discuss new tech ideas, present solutions, and interact in order to ensure a growth oriented mindset in every member of the ecosystem.
The cross collaborative effort in the ecosystem eliminates the PvP struggle between companies, and creates a system where they can come together to understand the consumers’ needs and work on solutions to propel growth.
This has led Polkadot to become one of the top blockchain ecosystems leading crypto industry towards the bull run.
Other examples of cross community development events include:
- Tezos art + tech program,
- Miami web3 week, etc.
Benefits of Cross community development.
1. Increased consumer satisfaction.
When consumers are prioritized over market domination, consumers will enjoy a wider variety of options, relaxed industry tension, and healthier customer interaction. The satisfaction of the customer becomes the primary concern of the service providers, and this can be easily collectively achieved.
2. Simplifies visibility and reach challenges.
When multiple communities form a larger one, they have a higher social impact and create a wider audience. This is important for growth acceleration, as audience, visibility and users will come organically, based on the unique services provided by the most outstanding service providers. Thus, simplifying the visibility hurdle for incubating projects.
3. Improved ecosystem standard.
When resources and expertise are pooled for a common good, the impact is always greater than when individualized. What this means is that the benefit of communal development improves the ecosystem more than through individual attempts. Hence, ecosystems that employs cross community development strategies will invariably enjoy improved ecosystem standards.
4. Improved security standard.
Because resources are pooled, there will be a significantly improved security standard. When multiple projects come together to work on security, the combined efforts are always better. Increased security awareness, more security focused personnels and a higher standard of security in the ecosystem of projects is a benefit of cross community development.
5. Collective development.
As resources are shared, the growth within the industry will be favorable to every player. This is as every player will focus on finding problems and solving them, as well as creating ideas and implementing them. A collective growth will be the fate of every ecosystem that comes together to work on its growth.
How projects can take advantage of a healthy market environment.
1. Reorientation.
Projects and projects founders need to change their orientation towards community development and seek more constructive ways to facilitate the development and growth of their community of users.
2. Development of inter-relationship with other projects and communities.
Healthy interpersonal relationship between projects of a similar niche/ecosystem makes it easier for development and the general community growth.
3. Focus on user satisfaction, not market share.
Typically, users will find the most satisfying product and choose for themselves. Rather than working on terms and systems to outsmart competition, enhancing users satisfaction will inevitably attract more users to your system.
Conclusion.
Rather than fight for the community, solving the problems of, and enhancing users satisfaction will always set a brand ahead. Adopting this constructive attitude towards community development will not only save the market from unnecessary pressure, but will properly keep the ecosystem ahead of the curve. With countless benefits and advantages, cross community development will be necessary to enhance ecosystem development and customer satisfaction.
Let me know what you think!
