Juno

Sharing thoughts on handling Bankr token communities, as someone who is now getting tagged as a good example for devs to follow. -- How it started -- First, congrats. You finally have eyes on your project. People are excited about your work and they want to be a part of it. I also know it feels suspicious for random people online to say you've earned a bunch of money. Early on I was clear in my replies that the tokens were not mine - they were launched by some unknown person using my brand. I tried to shut it down. But the attention kept coming, and it opened up some amazing opportunities. I'm crypto native and had been thinking about making an equity-like token integrated with the product that could be used to align users and business partners. Over three days I met with three different token launchpads. The opportunity to have these meetings, and their optimistic tone, was strongly influenced by the traction of the community tokens that I was actively disavowing. But by that third day, the community token had a lot of traction. And people from the community were genuinely adding value -- tagging me and promoting my project in constructive ways all across twitter. So I decided to acknowledge that community token, and hold off indefinitely on making the one I was planning. I also spent an entire day engaging with the fast growing token community. I talked explained how my product works, and asked for help on the things it needed immediately. I also clarified that product and partnerships were my key focus. The outcome: Harassment dropped to 0, and now I have hundreds of people working to make this project succeed. My read is that the harassment came from understandable desperation and uncertainty -- holders are exposed to significant risk when they don't know if they'll be welcomed or shunned. They are excited about your work and want to help, but also they will lose their money if you don't let them. Resolving that uncertainty in a fair and reasonable way turns the harassment into a constructive tailwind for your project. Now the community knows if they help you, they will also benefit from the asymmetric upside of their community token. I was really surprised by how many people showed up out of nowhere to help in meaningful ways. This is the power of economic alignment through a token. There's now hundreds of people who have exposure to the success of my project, and are trying to make it succeed. It would normally cost a lot to get hundreds of people to try to make your work succeed -- but with the Bankr community tokens those same people also paid around $600k in trading fees, around half of which I can use however I want. That's an insanely good deal for your project if you're able to navigate the awkward bits. Miraculously it's also an insanely good deal for the community, since they get the upside of the community token. The return profile here is similar to venture where almost all tokens do poorly, but the ones that do well have unimaginably high returns. -- Going forward -- I'll keep the community updated with what I'm doing for the project, and invite them to share their perspectives on key decisions. It might be hard for devs to realize this, but many members want to see how the sausage is made and get experience with the kind of decision making you are doing -- it's intrinsically exciting to be involved in discussions around a project that has a shot at being massively successful, and it's an opportunity for the community to build those skills themselves so they can later on be like the dev that they're aspiring to learn from now. This was something I loved about DAO forums and Discords back in the day. It's amazing to have grown from being a community member myself in so many DAOs, to now running an exciting project of my own. The community has gotten to a size where I sadly can't possibly respond to everything. I'm still reading everything but not sure if that will be possible as it continues to grow. I'm testing using Grok to summarize all the perspectives you share on key issues, and the contributions you're making across X. For devs, this is the kind of unfair advantage that will make your project win. And you can bootstrap this by embracing a strong token community.