author:
Zolo, TechFlow TechFlow
linda Zheng Zheng, SuiWorld Co-Founder
Several pictures have been popular recently, showing the number of developers of each public chain, daily activity data, etc., allowing us to intuitively see the data differences between various public chains/projects.
There are many reasons for this difference. In addition to the attractiveness of the protocol itself, we also found many differences from an operational perspective . The success or failure of a public chain has both internal and external causes.
External factors such as FTX’s thunderstorm affected Solana; Binance’s traffic was denied to the growth of BNB Chain; the overly bright team and the background of the capital made Aptos gain a lot of attention in the early days. But entanglement with external factors is not the purpose of this article. This article will start more from the perspectives of official website modules, Social Media, and community operations of different public chains, explore more internal factors, and understand what operations and differentiation should be done well as a public chain project The Case is worth learning from.
Three dimensions of public chain operation: Developer, Ecosystem, Community
We prioritized the official website operation modules of several popular public chains, summarized as follows:
We marked the same parts in gray, and we can see that although the names will be different, basically every public chain must cover the three sections of Developer, Ecosystem, and Community , and they all account for a large proportion. The Ecosystem here focuses on the project ecology, that is, to show the dApp situation in its own ecology, to help dApp promotion/service, etc. Community focuses on the user community, not the developer community.
From the perspective of construction logic, developers are generally attracted through unique technical evangelism. After having developers, there will be a prosperous ecology, and finally only good applications can attract a huge user group .
Developer: the developer wins the world
Whether it is Layer1 or privacy public chain, both of them will emphasize their technological leadership or differences. At this point, each public chain has its own unique skills, such as Solana’s PoH at the time, telling you Super Fast; Avalanche has been spreading new consensus protocols and Subnet that can “customize chains with one click”.
In addition to the hard-core technical narrative, to operate Developer well, the essence is to better complete the onboarding work for technicians, so at least the following parts need to be built:
1. Complete development documents and use cases, document/github and other necessary materials;
2. Convenient development tools and selection guidelines;
3. Technical exchange forum to share and solve technical problems;
4. Developer activities, such as Hackthon, Roadshow and other display platforms.
In addition, BNB Chain/Polygon/Solana is also very clear and categorized to show developers the various types of tools that can be used to develop on their own network.
Ecosystem: The application layer makes the public chain out of the circle
This part is mainly to show and show off the muscles. The common practice is to clearly list the projects by category, and at the same time provide an entrance to guide the construction of DApp.
In contrast, the ecological part of BNB Chain is the most complete and different. They are building their own ecological section with the idea of "app store" . You can understand him as a DappRadar that includes the "information + comment" function . It not only presents projects, but also presents dimensions such as data and user feedback, and even provides an Alert function based on risky projects. The ecological operation of BNB Chain has opened a bigger gap with other public chains .
Community: Let users become your evangelists
Community building is the top priority of the Web3 project. The community is not just a simple social group. It ends after the town hall is held every week. From the perspective of the operation of several public chains, starting from large modules, it should at least include :
1. Community News - News
2. Community communication - Social Media
3. Community suggestions - Forum
4. Community Activities - Events
In order to better activate the vitality of the community, let more users become evangelists of the public chain. The public chain side often also sets up some ambassador plans for individuals to allow more loyal users to participate. BNB Chain and Solana respectively formulated the Martians Program and The Collective, and configured spiritual incentives + material incentives .
In addition to evangelism, the role of community building is to create a "big family" for project teams and investors, and to obtain the following potential benefits:
1. Help early projects quickly find high-quality early users, which is a booster for project construction;
2. To serve the developers of Web3.0 and cultivate the pioneers of innovative DApps;
3. Incubating Web3.0 entrepreneurs, jointly discussing the token economy system, improving Web3.0 products, building encrypted communities, etc., to help Web3.0 entrepreneurs become excellent teams;
4. It is easier for investors to find innovative project teams, etc.
Therefore, from a project perspective, an excellent public chain community is also creating a "resource pool" for incubation and acceleration , which gathers members who share common ideas and help each other improve. Under such a Vibe, the community cohesion is higher, and the ecological vitality and attractiveness are also stronger, which will naturally increase the loyalty of developers and teams to the public chain.
The above are the common modules and better cases in the construction of various public chains. In addition, each public chain actually has one thing in common. They will operate their own foundations to promote the development of the ecology from the perspective of funds and resources. In the next section, we will talk about cases related to foundations.
Ecological development weapon: Foundation, Grant, treasury, promote ecological development from the perspective of funds and resources
Almost every public chain has a Grant funding plan for developers and early projects. The selected ones are usually open source projects. In addition to receiving a small amount of funding, the project will also be given technical support for the construction of the mainnet and market promotion. Development, media PR, incubation of regional communities, etc., accompany the growth of the project. Most of the public chains have the right to speak about funding by the foundation. The exception is EOS, which established the secondary crowdfunding platform Pomelo , and uses the DAO model to encourage fans in the community to vote for projects and increase governance rights.
However, there are several common problems with Grant issuance:
1. Projects that are not short of money look down on Grant;
2. The homogeneity of projects applying for Grant is serious;
3. Some projects have low loyalty, so they go to each chain to collect a little Grant wool and leave.
In response to this problem, the public chain can initiate a developer training program to cultivate and support its own developers in the community and improve long-term loyalty .
In addition to the Grant issued by the foundation, Polkadot adopts an innovative treasury mechanism, which uses a part of the transaction fee, a part of the inflation when the Staking ratio is not optimal, a part of the cross-chain communication auction in the parallel thread, and The funds that nodes are punished (Slash) for misbehavior are pooled into a fund pool to form a treasury for the development of Polkadot ecology. This is more sustainable than most previous projects raising funds through financing and then using these funds for ecological development. Polkadot's treasury mechanism may be an innovative model that can be used for reference by various public chains.
Of course, the popularity of Polkadot was unprecedented before, and there were also some external factors to promote it. Here we mainly talk about innovations in the treasury.
Because under the competition of mature public chains such as ETH, new public chains usually use money to build ecology to increase financial support for developers, but the construction of ecology is a long-term process, and only depends on the initial private sale of tokens. funding is not sustainable . The treasury mechanism provides a new idea for the public chain, which allocates a part of the funds for the normal operation of the blockchain and governance as the treasury, and then decides the use of this money through the governance of the council for those who are responsible for the public chain. In terms of proposals that are helpful for ecological development, with these funds, the public chain can be built better. As more people use it, the fund pool will continue to accumulate funds, thus forming a virtuous circle. It can not only solve the funding problem of ecological development, but also use the governance method to regulate the inflation of its own chain, and even make it in the form of DAO to reduce the centralization of the team at the governance level. This may be a reference mechanism that kills multiple birds with one stone.
Of course, in terms of subdivided module operation and development stages, each public chain will have its own unique considerations. The following will list some better differentiated parts.
Operational differentiation of different public chains
The parts marked in blue below are the main differences in the operation of various public chains that we have seen.
Although there are many good parts of BNB Chain listed above, when you delve into its content strategy, you will find that BNB Chain seldom talks about its own technological breakthroughs , but Polygon\Solana\Avalanche will highlight its own technology more innovation. Due to the differences in development languages, Solana also created Blockchain and Solana 101 to better onbording developers . Aptos is the youngest public chain among them, so Grant is specially placed in a very important position and given clear rules.
Although BNB Chain doesn't talk much about technological innovation, many friends should be very familiar with BNB Chain's MVB and incubation plans. In fact, this part belongs to the support for developers in the Developer Program, and BNB Chain even has separate Monthly Grants for developers. At the same time, in order to undertake more new projects to be deployed to BNB Chain, a Migrate (migration) module has been specially added on the official website to guide .
The setting of the Migrate module is the most interesting part in my opinion. There are not many developers and users in Web3, and developers/users are not loyal. You will often see an early project participating in Hackthons on all public chains, and you will also see Web3 users follow the application or revenue instead of following the public chain .
Therefore, although the "Builders" in the industry say that they want to make a big cake, they also need to snatch existing users .
The goal of Migrate is not for new projects, but for existing projects to attract them to migrate. After entering the module, he will tell you that there is more support for developers, users, TVL and other methods to attract you. At the same time, with the successful case, you will also start to expect that you will also gain after the migration. Same success. Finally, Build on BNB Chain is added for lead conversion.
For To B's Marketing, BNB Chain has a good understanding of the customer journey of the project side, and the operation is better. Perhaps more public chains can also consider the content setting of the "Migrate" part .
Polygon has done a lot of technical integration, so the Solution module will be set separately to present different technical solutions. Of course, what many people are most impressed with is Polygon’s attraction to traditional brands. NIKE\Starbucks have all cooperated with Polygon. There was a simple reason analysis before, as follows:
Therefore, if more Web2 brands choose to build on Polygon, or are willing to enter Web3. In view of such unique advantages, Polygon can also consider doing its own "Partner Wall + Case Interpretation" to attract more brand cooperation . As a strong BD database, it is similar to the high-end version of Avalanche Subnet Casestudy.
Traditional brands have a large number of users. The more such cooperation, the more user base Polygon can bring, refer to Reddit. From the perspective of more detailed operation content, considering that Aptos/ SUI is relatively new, it is better to review, so we will take Aptos as an example in the following part to see the operation content and direction of Aptos from the official announcement in February to the present focus.
Taking Aptos and SUI as examples for in-depth discussion
Judging from Aptos’ Twitter/medium/Discord, Twitter’s information basically includes all the content of other channels, so we first mapped the content of twitter’s operations and sorted out the key parts.
For Developers, the official will focus on the progress of the testnet, the weekly MoveMonday and the occasional Aptos/Move sermons;
For Ecosystem, in addition to the official announcements of various partners, the theme of " Aptos Ecosystem Highlight " was directly planned to share the ecological projects built on Aptos from time to time;
Not much has been done for the Community so far.
However, it is worth noting that the founders of Aptos in the early days would participate in various types of activities and preach everywhere. After the mainnet launch, the current official dynamics for Developer have weakened, and the content of community and activities has been increased.
In terms of quantity, as mentioned above, although Developer/Ecosystem/Community are the focus of operations, but in terms of order, it should be Developer > Ecosystem > Community, so you will see that most of Aptos’ operations are related to the first two. In addition, the previous article mentioned that the new public chain paid more attention to the operation of Grant in the early stage. Although Aptos has raised the priority of Grant on the official website, its exposure on social media is slightly insufficient .
Different from Aptos, SUI will conduct AMA on Discord once a week to update technical progress and preach Move language; in addition to online, the team holds Happy Hour meetings in the United States, Portugal, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, China, etc.; in ecological projects In terms of publicity, SUI almost only announces the support and progress of the GameFi track. The reason is not unrelated to the senior experience of Koh Kim, its ecological director, in games, so other types of projects are rarely seen.
Although SUI 's social media started a few months earlier than Aptos, its popularity has been obviously insufficient in comparison. Through the above review of Aptos and SUI 'Official Twitter operation history, it can be clearly found that Aptos focuses on publicizing the progress of various ecological projects , SUI is more about sharing its technical documents and SUI Move's sermons . We know that the proportion of developers in the entire Crypto users is much lower than that of retail investors, which may explain the relative tepidity of SUI's social media. reason.
Generally speaking, after traversing BNB Chain\Polygon\Solana\Avalanche\Aptos, we found that the operation focus of the public chain needs to build three major foundations: Developer, Ecosystem, and Community. It's a nice catalyst. After that, according to the differentiated characteristics and development stages, we will strengthen the operation of Grant and community growth.
At the same time, in view of the large number of BNB Chain users, in addition to the traffic of Binance itself that we often think of, we can also see that the current BNB Chain is the best in terms of developers, ecology, and community. Although Avalanche has been talking about its consensus/innovation on the Subnet, the number of users/ecology has not increased , and perhaps from an operational perspective, it can be seen that there are indeed many shortcomings.
Of course, the scope of the public chain is not limited to the above Layer1, but also includes more public chains with special attributes such as Aleo and MINA , or projects that require developers and self-built ecology in a broad sense. The construction cycle of public chain projects is long. This article attempts to explore some practical methodologies by sorting out the operation modules of relatively leading projects, and highlights and shares better cases, hoping to have some impact on long-term project construction. Help, welcome to DM Twitter @zolo_hands \ @linda_guagua to communicate together.
