Beyond the Whitepaper: How to Build, Grow, and Sustain Local Web3 Communities

Transcript

And now we will get into the inside look at community building strategy beyond the white paper built to how to build, grow, and sustain local web 3 communities. Dennis Bashir. >> Thank you. Hello everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking about this topic today because I really think it's very important for the future of our space. To me, this is one of the key levers that we will help and have to help build and scale this and that we can actually work on still while not focusing too much on the technical details. But before we get to the building, to the sustaining and growing, we have to find out why this is actually so important.

And when we think of the future of web 3, we often think of scaling, of throughput, and of the technical properties that we currently have. What What we miss one of the most important layers, and that is actually humans. Humans are actually what make this space. Humans are what the industry also is is basically characterized by and what this space is really different from from other spaces as well. So, why are local communi- communities the key to global growth?

First, we have the human layer. Often, if you speak to people, they're rather skeptic. For example, if you speak to students like I am and if I speak to other students, those will be very skeptic, especially um when it comes to more technical students. So, what we do is really we have to find a way for them to trust us and verify that trust, and that is very very difficult when it comes to online communities. So, basically, if you look on X, right? There's a lot of people who have a pseudonym. And this is very inherent to the whole community.

It's very inherent to blockchain and that is why it's so important that we have local communities. Because if you have a face and a person that is actually attached to the protocol or the community or just the tech in general, it helps to answer questions. You have somebody that explains it to you and this gives you so much more trust. And trust is also really what radically changes how we see um the community we are we are experiencing. So, I have it here as missionaries over mercenaries and what I mean by that is when we have trust, the people that we attract are actually people that have intrinsic motivation.

And that are not there only for a certain short-term financial incentive. And this is also what leads to the resilience that we have. We have different social structures that in online communities are not as strong. We have local communities where you can have a genuine connection, where you can actually have impact locally also and where you have people you can ask. Right? So, we know that our industry really strongly depends on the token prices and we see it every time when we go to events when it's not as high as it used to be.

And what really remains when token prices drops, I still the friendships and the genuine connections. But these are really topics and and really uh points that are in an ideal world. And in the in in real-life world uh Web3 community, it is totally different and we will explore why this is different and this especially um how this is different and and why on boardings fail. Right? So, we have this huge reputational stigma and we have to face it because if engineers look at our space, they usually see hype, speculation, and some short short-term financial incentive. And this is what we

have to change. And this is also where onboardings fail because talent that looks at our space is actually not too sure about why they should enter and we really need to convince them. So, it's one that the industry needs to kind of try to equalize this, but if we look at the way that it's structured right now, we can really see a top-down approach. So, what this means is that we have this classic playbook where for example, you have an online documentation, you have a GitHub repo, and then if you have any questions, you can ask them in a Discord where there's 50,000 anonymous members.

And I can tell you from experience, even if we're sitting in a lecture as students where there's maybe 500 or 600 people where it's also rather anonymous, there's maybe not even 2% that actually ask a question. So, they don't even really expect in an online Discord community where there's such a flood of messages to get an answer back to their beginner question. And if somebody answers, we can't even be sure what the intention is. There's a lot of bad actors, a lot of people who technically and and have the tendency to use other people as exit liquidity, right? So, this is also something we have to think about. And if this is not difficult enough yet, then we have this

overwhelming amount of resources. For example, you look at a new blockchain project or also at a at an older one and what you see are 30 pages for the white paper only, then you have so many extra accounts uh posting about it, and in addition to that, there's a whole flood of links. So, we don't really make it easy for people to actually understand what's happening and we're creating this huge barrier where they actually need to understand it, and then need to be able to pick the right people to trust, and also pick the right players to trust.

And we really had this issue also in Zurich, and that's why we founded the ETH Blockchain Club. We're the first accredited student association at ETH Zurich, which is a very technical university, and this is also what we experience from day-to-day basis, where there's a lot of skepticism. And you have to really understand why people think this way, and also explain to them that it's totally different. Um, and why I'm introducing this is actually because for the playbook we're looking at later, it's a great example, and you have rather more abstract concepts or general approaches that we can then actually translate into examples that we've done at the club.

But to give you a better understanding of what we're doing, we're looking at our mission. So, our mission is really positively shaping the industry, and we do this by empowering students and educating them. We want them to be educators, and actually educate their fellow classmates today, and their colleagues tomorrow. So, this is something that is very important to us. And this is our contribution to the space to make it better, and we believe education is really how we get there. And one thing that when we founded the club were super important to us was this non-negotiable rule.

There's no investment tips, no financial advice. And what this directly translates into is that a lot of negative experiences that you could have had despite price speculation that can be an incentive for people to actually come to the events, and to to also be a member of the club totally vanishes. And it kind of paves the way for a whole um for a whole path of successful education and also curiosity. Because you're then actually there for the technical education, and not to not to get some sort of uh alpha to buy the next coin.

So, what does this look like in practice? We have these three pillars here. So, we learn and educate. What this means is we break down complex topics so that students understand them and they can also then, once they've understood it and become an expert, they can also give this topic or give a workshop on this topic and educate other students as well. Then, we organize. What does this mean? We have workshops. We had idea funds, we wanted to hackathons, and we had expert talks or panels. And what this helps with is that people like actually getting inspired and they get an idea of what is actually happening in the space and what experts think on it.

So, the last point is connecting. And you might know how important a network is, especially in the job market, especially in the blockchain space. There's a lot of opportunities or there are a lot of opportunities that are just coming through from the network. And this is why we try to connect students with professors, with industry leaders, and also with other students so that they can actually collaborate on research papers or even on industry implementations and open-source work. And when we talk about connecting with industry leaders and strong industry partners, then we really mean it. You can see here that we've worked with the academic secretariat of the Ethereum Foundation, also with Nosis VC, which we

had a panel on with some other participants, where we explored explored real use cases and the future of blockchain. Then, we did a more hands-on workshop with Chain Security, where we actually had students explore vulnerabilities easier vulnerabilities um to give them idea an idea of how technical it actually is. And last semester, this is only a selection, last semester, we actually worked with Liquity Dialectic to bring DeFi closer to students. So, with Dialectic, we looked at primitives, and with Liquity, we actually looked at the protocol and what's possible in the decentralized finance space.

And looking at these partnerships, you might get the idea or think, "Okay, this is just one local success story." But, the truth is we've reverse-engineered the the playbook we've used to to actually make this applicable for everyone and to make it repeatable. And I call it the four-pillar playbook. This is or these are only four pillars, and there's a lot more to it. Before we actually dive into it, I think it would be important that it's to to basically highlight that it's important to work with the right people. So, when we founded the club, what to me was super important is that we actually have people who who have who we can trust,

right? Who have the right vibes, the right mindset, and actually the right vision. This doesn't mean you all have to be on the same vision, but it has to be a similar vision where you can combine your strengths, your powers to actually build this. And this is something that was also, in the beginning, super important because to me, the worst thing that could have happened is that we actually lost our identity as a club in the beginning phase and that we lost our mindset and our vision because we had the wrong people on board. So, whenever somebody applied, whenever somebody um tried become uh becoming a member of the club, we made sure that they actually aligned with what we're standing for and are for example not there for for short uh financial gains or incentives.

But now, let's look at the other four components. So, we have visibility and reach, a low barrier entry, a consumer-to-builder environment, and bear market resilience. To me, these are really the ideal pillars for a successful and sustainable community. And what we mean with visibility and reach is that we actually want people to be able uh to attend the events. If we're trying to build this local community, it must uh consist of of strong members, right? So, we need to be able to be visible to actually read reach out to people and help them discover our events and offers.

Next, we have the low barrier entry, right? Now, we've reached the right people, but we need them to be able to come as become in as easily as possible. We want them to to not be overwhelmed, as I've mentioned at the beginning, when they come into a community. So, while we have this low barrier entry, we need to create um an environment where people are happy to ask questions, and we're looking uh at that later in in more detail. Then, we have the consumer to build an environment, right? Now, we've reached them, we've enabled them to get a good entry, and now we at want to um create basically translate them or convert them from passive members to uh active members. And how we do this is actually

giving them ideas and giving them moments of success that they create themselves. So, we really want to empower them in this in this moment and uh make it possible for them to build. But then also, as this space is very uh dependent on token prices, we need a defensive pillar as well. And that is what bear market resilience is for. And that is something that I would uh where I'm convinced it is true is that with local communities, it becomes much harder to die in comparison to online communities. Because if you have regularity, you have genuine connections, and you have a social structure where it's not only about crypto, but it's also about the people that are there, becomes much easier to also meet

outside right? So, we will look into more detail now, and on the left here, you can see the general approach, and on the right, you basically see what we've done at the ETH Blockchain Club. The first point I want to make make is actually meeting your target audience where it is. And we're so used to Telegram, to Signal, and to X. But maybe the people that we want to reach are not even there. And this is something that we've seen at at ETH Zurich as well is that people are usually on WhatsApp, they're on campus, and we can reach them via email. And while I wasn't so sure how we would reach them on campus, one of the ideas was actually having to

go into lectures and saying what we had to offer and telling them about about our events. And what worked even better sometimes is that we had posters where they could just sign up via Luma and do it within like 30 seconds, and that was super important as well. Then you have to speak their language. We're so used to actually having this crypto lingo where we talk about different kinds of uh topics and we expect people to directly know. But if you're a beginner, you might not really understand what is happening. And that this is something that you have to um also discern when you advertise because you don't have to use too niche words.

It's easy and simple if you just use normal words that are maybe not as uh related to crypto and catch them this way right? Then we want to enable a zero friction entry. People should be able to come as simply and easily as possible. And this is something we really have to work on because sometimes sign-ups have like 10 questions and half the way people already lose motivation because they're like, "Okay, am I somewhat signing up to go to the White House right now? What is happening, right?" So, make it as complex as necessary and as easy as possible. What this means for us is, for example, the panel event I mentioned, we had not only students coming but also professionals. So, we really wanted to have a good kind of ratio and that is why we added more

questions, but we left some out that were were necessary, right? We can still send them afterwards if people want to give us feedback, but in the beginning it's most important to actually have them there and enable them to come. The last point I want to make sounds a bit generic and simple. Tailor your events to your availabilities, right? I mean that's something you would probably hear in in marketing all the time, but it is actually super hard and it's super important. Should look at it and if especially if you look at at students doing it, it is super hard to actually guess, okay, when do they have the exams?

Because our club is mostly computer scientists with some people also in pharmaceutics or in mechanical engineering, but we have so many more disciplines at ETH. So we really need to find Sorry, find out when they actually have exams, when the most stressful times are and adjust our communication start, the event frequency and the intervals. And this is only half the battle because once you've reached them, we want them to also stay, right? And not have any friction when it comes to their motivational and knowledge barrier. So what I like to call this is call it is culture over curriculum.

And what this really means is kind of cutting down on the content, making it maybe less dense, but at the same time also allowing for uh stupid questions like people like to call them and I really think there are no stupid questions. So we want them to ask to be able to feel comfortable by asking whatever they want to ask, maybe having a little bit of depth, but enabling them to actually do it. And another thing that is important there is that you actually also allow them to maybe bring other topics into discussion and be open to criticism because I think the best way we can deal with criticism is by directly addressing it and and basically discussing it and showing that there's actually also different ways in crypto.

Next, contextualized learning is super important. So what this means in basic is that we want people to see abstract topics and to connect them to real life examples. So, what we did was for example, when we had this introduction to Ethereum, where we spoke about smart contracts, a concept that people never really heard about maybe, we used vending machines, which are rather equivalent to smart contracts to to actually explain the topic. And I think this is something that is quite important here.

Then, use also audience friendly language and do the events as audience friendly as possible. Here again, we dropped the crypto lingo and the most important thing that we did at ETH is actually estimating the level of the audience. And this is something we're still working on is providing an educational hub. So, when this event happening, you will be able to find the slides, you will be able to find links to photo resources, and you'll be able to find a glossary maybe online for the newer people, so they can follow as best as possible during the whole event. The last point is strategic event curation.

Don't do too much, right? You don't have to flood people as they're flooded online. It's okay if you do less events and then select them by hand. So, this can also mean that you reject some offers that might not fit your audience and that you actually check, okay, which people are we reaching right now? What they're What are they interested in? Maybe are there some high and hot topics? And then really just choosing those, right? And this is something I can't stress enough because I see people and realize, okay, this is not the right way because they're partnering with companies that might not have the best intent. And unfortunately, there are some in this space.

The next thing I want to mention is now after that we've allowed them to have this low entry or low barrier entry is actually making them active. You have to enable micro contributions. If somebody is a beginner or doesn't have a lot of time, it still doesn't matter if if that person only maybe does a little and becomes still active. And what this means could be that they maybe explain something to a beginner if they have some knowledge or they maybe write an article for our website or actually proofread an educational hub entry. And not only can they proofread it if they're a beginner, but they can actually give us feedback that if this is not understandable, we can also adjust it.

Then, the next point I want to make is shared ownership. What this means is really sharing your community. And I think this is very inherent to blockchain because here, also with DAOs, it's totally natural that we kind of do this together, right? We take the decisions together as much as possible or as necessary as possible, depending on on the situation. And once people have skin in the game, they really want to work on their own, right? If they know they're part of the owner owners, they it also feels like something that that they own and that they actually have access to. And this makes it more clear. And for us, this really means um shaping the the club's direction by becoming an active member.

The last point for this slide is incentivize building involvement. How this can happen is actually that you allow people and send them to hackathons without them actually needing to spend any money, right? Like we want them to give uh we want them to be able and to have the opportunity to test their skills, see what they're still missing, and even be inspired, right? For example, when we did the idea fund, it was super inspiring to me what all the people came up with, what kind of uh ideas there were, and what kind of uh movements and directions people had uh thought of. But also having access to internships and job openings, which we have also advertised already, for our community is super important, especially in this job market, right?

So, don't also forget to actually give real incentives, especially if you want people to have a career in blockchain. Now, we come to the bear market resistance, which I think at this point in time is maybe one of the most important ones. We want to build a true social space. It shouldn't feel superficial. And it should make sense to actually also see it as a group of friends that we try to do at the ETH blockchain club. For us, if you have those true genuine connections, it actually makes so much more fun working on on uh It is actually so much more fun working on on difficult problems and maybe learning and studying together or building something together. This can

also mean organizing unrelated events. For example, this semester we've done a barbecue, last semester we do some cooking events, etc. And then people are able to really get to know them on a different level and really get deep connections. Maybe you go play some sports, do something similar. Make it as less effort as possible to actually go to the event and see it less as a crypto event, but more like maybe like an event that is just a social gathering. And this will then allow you to uh really have those genuine connections, right? That are not just superficial.

But we also have to highlight intrinsic values. We can't highlight the financial ones, right? So, what this means is actually giving people the perspective where we re- remove the financial incentives, but what we add are the self-improvement and the social incentives. For us, this means really understanding our mission, understanding the vision, and seeing that despite token price changes and maybe low token prices, it doesn't really matter in the short term, those financial incentives doesn't really matter. And it helps us to actually uh lead and continue leading and also gives us a good overview of technical developments.

And the technical skills that we actually want to acquire. The last one, and I've mentioned it already, is fostering long-term vision. We have to make it understandable and align it so well that every member in our community really understands it and can stand behind it to a certain degree, right? It has to be a high degree so people actually understand it. And for us it really means continuing regardless of market cycles. So, we've covered a lot of different topics today. From how onboardings fail to actually how we've engineered it at ETH Zurich, right? So, the takeaways I want you to take with you if you leave the room and maybe if you forgot some of them,

actually three of the following ones, right? Radically adapt to your audience. Currently we're using losing a lot of different talent to AI actually and we want and need to fight for every talent and make it make it very simple and understandable why blockchain is the is the way for their career, for example. Leverage existing hubs. What this means is that we need to use the hubs or the the social structures that we currently have. We don't need to reinvent the wheel wheel, right? Like if there's WhatsApp groups that we have where you can advertise events, we don't need to create new new possibilities for that. We can just use them. And what I forgot to mention here is that we as blockchain communities are

really at a highly scrutinized position. If we do a mistake, right? And people from outside of the space see it, they will be even more skeptical. And having this adaptation is really our unfair advantage to to pull them closer to us. And the last one, the culture outlives the market. What this means is we don't want to build a community on speculation, on hype, or short-term financial incentives, but we really want to give them a perspective where it's a long path for them forward, whether it's in privacy, finance in a sense where they can actually develop applications, but not investments, or just being part of this local community and wanting to pursue it further.

And this is what we do when we enable them to have genuine human connections. Because when the charts really turn red, what remains are the friendships and the technical technical skills that you've built. And this really leads us to the core thesis of of this talk and everything we talked about. If we want to scale the space and onboard maybe the next million of builders, we really need to take it seriously and move from the digital space to a physical space and build this physical space.

And in my opinion, the local nodes are really the foundation of the global networks. And we really have to stress this. And therefore my call to action is pretty simple. We need to stop relying on the automated online marketing. We need to start investing into local hubs. So, if you're working for a protocol, if you're working for certain company or want to want to really build the local community and connect to others, you have to find them. You have to find the right people. You have to advise them and you have to empower them.

Thank you. >> Um we only have time for one question. Is there any one? Okay. So, thank you again. >> [snorts] >> Mhm.