Community is central to everything we do at Dispatch, so it’s a priority for us to go to as many conferences as we can to meet the builders, creators and founders helping shape web3. Members from team Dispatch have been to 5 conferences this year alone, from ETHDenver to Solana Miami to EthCC in Paris, and are hitting the road again this fall. We’re learning a lot and we wanted to share our takeaways on the biggest shifts we’re seeing in the web3 world via these events and where we fit in.
1. Utility is king
While the recent crypto market rout makes for grim headlines, we’ve generally found spirits to be pretty high at conferences and a greater focus from builders on providing utility. Many of the people we spoke to at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference, NFT.NYC and, EthCC, are building projects rooted in real-world use for holders and users.
A major key for utility is making sure you’re providing the right tool to the right users. Sounds obvious, but this gets trickier in web3, which is rooted in anonymity, and is where Dispatch has pinpointed a clear need for analytics and on-chain communications.
2. Community is alive and well
The crypto downturn right before NFT.NYC didn’t impact the mood at the conference, which felt particularly upbeat. Retail NFT holders were out in full force and as enthusiastic as ever about their favorite communities.
NFT projects like Moonbirds, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Doodles all had events that were packed. The Moonbirds and Doodles events were also holder-only events and still sold out, a litmus for the strength of these communities.
As NFT growth exploded exponentially across 2021 and into 2022, so did the size of web3 communities. Project owners have a lot of new users to better understand.
To know your community, administrators have to be able to answer questions like: Are users NFT-curious? A liquidity provider? What percentage of their community is brand new? What percentage of the community are long-time holders?
Once you can answer those questions, you can better understand them and get them the timely information they need. You can, for example:
● Invite them to a holder-only event
● Send an invite to mint your newest to your most loyal holders
● Learn more about their interests by sending them a poll
3. Web2 communications don’t cut it in web3
Since there have been several high-profile projects that got their social media accounts hacked, resulting in their followers falling for scams, there seems to be a growing wariness around web2 communications and social media platforms supporting web3 communities.
To top it off, targeted engagement in web3 communities isn't really happening on these web2 platforms, which are limited to more of a “one-size fits all” approach. Engagement is handled more like unsegmented mega blasts of messages where project owners aren’t sure who got the message, who read it, and whether they took any action on it. Since these platforms are unable to map web2 users to their web3 identities, they can’t provide proper segmentation.
What if communities had a way to reach all of their holders with timely or important messages in a way that leverages the same security features that have made web3 so popular? And what if communities could customize and segment to reach the right holders, in the right place, at the right time and see to see how many messages were delivered, opened, and engaged with? These are exactly the questions that Dispatch wants to answer.
It’s been a wild year so far, but we love the direction so many projects are moving in and their emphasis on utility and real-world use. We’re proud to be a part of the communities we’re already working with, and we’re excited to bridge the worlds of web2 and web3 communications together.
Let’s go! 🔥