Author: 137Labs
Many people's first encounter with Galxe leads them to perceive it as a typical Web3 Quest platform: users complete tasks such as following on Twitter, joining Discord, and engaging in on-chain interactions to receive NFTs, points, or airdrop privileges. On the surface, this logic doesn't appear fundamentally different from the numerous task platforms that have emerged in recent years. Even in terms of product form, Galxe's interface seems very "light," more like a standardized activity tool. However, a closer look at the growth trajectory of Web3 over the past few years reveals an intriguing phenomenon: whether it's Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, or emerging ecosystems like Berachain and Movement Labs, almost all have used Galxe as a core growth platform. In other words, Galxe is not a marginal tool, but has gradually become one of the infrastructure components of the Web3 ecosystem's growth system.
This also means that what Galxe truly provides is not just "completing tasks and earning rewards," but a more fundamental capability: it is gradually productizing, systematizing, and datafiing the originally highly fragmented, short-cycle, and non-reusable growth processes of Web3.
The Growth Dilemma of Web3
Looking back at the development of the internet over the past decade, we find that the most mature capability in the Web2 world is not product development, but rather the growth system. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, recommendation algorithms, user profiling, and membership systems together constitute a complete industrialized traffic system. Any internet company can acquire and filter users at low cost, and continuously optimize conversion and retention, through advertising platforms, data analysis, and recommendation algorithms.
However, the Web3 world has long lacked this capability.
While most Web3 projects possess tokens, communities, and on-chain data, they consistently lack a mature user growth infrastructure. Project teams struggle to distinguish between genuine users and airdrop hunters; there's no unified identity system or cross-platform user profiling; and many growth methods remain reliant on Twitter, Discord, airdrops, and community-driven growth. Consequently, the industry has gradually fallen into a typical dilemma: projects can quickly acquire traffic through incentives, but struggle to truly cultivate long-term users.
The emergence of Galxe essentially fills this gap in "growth infrastructure." Originally named Project Galaxy and founded in 2021, Galxe's core vision wasn't simply to be an event platform, but to build an open Credential Data Network, aiming to help developers and projects identify users through on-chain and off-chain behavior. In 2022, Project Galaxy officially changed its name to Galxe. This brand upgrade wasn't merely a visual change; it signified a shift in its positioning from a single product to a complete ecosystem built around identity, growth, and distribution.
Founding team and product roadmap formation
Galxe's two core founders, Harry Zhang and Charles Wayn, are not typical cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. They previously co-founded the live streaming platform DLive, a product heavily reliant on community, creator incentives, and user growth. Harry Zhang has also been involved in projects like Lino Network, giving them a strong understanding of internet product thinking regarding "how to grow a community" and "why retain users."
This is why Galxe, from the very beginning, didn't resemble a pure on-chain protocol, but rather an internet growth product. It possesses a very clear gamified structure: a growth system, levels, identities, points, task chains, and continuous incentives—mechanisms derived from proven growth experiences in the Web2 world. In a sense, what Galxe does is essentially transplant the growth logic of Web2 to Web3.
Compared to many Web3 projects that emphasize "protocols," "decentralization," or "technical architecture," Galxe focuses more on user behavior itself. It doesn't attempt to change users through complex mechanisms, but rather gradually drives users from passive observers to active participants and ultimately to long-term retention through lower-barrier participation methods, more continuous task structures, and clearer feedback mechanisms. Because of this, Galxe's subsequent product evolution has consistently revolved around the same core: how to ensure that user behavior can be continuously recorded, verified, and reused.
Analysis of User Behavior Assetization Mechanism
When analyzing Galxe, many people tend to focus on Quest itself, because Quest is the product form that users see most directly: the project team posts tasks, and users complete actions such as following, forwarding, joining the community, and interacting on-chain to obtain NFTs, points, whitelisting, or airdrop privileges. However, if one only stays at this level, Galxe will be understood as a "task outsourcing tool," ignoring its true growth logic.
The key to Galxe is not having users complete a single task, but rather transforming these originally scattered, short-term, and non-reusable user behaviors into long-term identity data that can be recorded, verified, filtered, and reused. In other words, Quest is merely the entry point for users to enter the system; what is truly accumulated is the user's behavioral history across different projects, chains, and scenarios.
In traditional Web3 growth, airdrops and tasks often present a problem: users come for the rewards, complete the action, and then leave. Project teams ultimately gain short-term data rather than long-term relationships. For example, a user might join Discord today for an airdrop and complete a transaction tomorrow to get whitelisted. After the task ends, these actions often don't generate further value, and project teams find it difficult to determine whether the user is a genuine contributor, a short-term airdrop hunter, or a potential core user.
Galxe's approach is to turn every action into an accumulated record such as Credential, OAT, Passport, and Score, so that user actions are no longer one-time consumption, but are entered into a long-term identity account system. After completing a task, users not only "receive a reward", but also obtain an on-chain or off-chain resume that can be displayed, verified, and used in subsequent activities.
This mechanism changes the mental accounting of user participation. Previously, when users completed tasks, they were essentially contributing to the growth of projects; however, in Galxe's system, completing tasks also enriches the user's identity record. A wallet that has participated in ecosystem activities such as Optimism, Linea, and Arbitrum may have completely different weight than a brand new, empty wallet when it comes to qualifying for activities and being recognized by projects. As a result, users gradually develop a "retention" mentality: the richer my wallet history, the more complete my participation record, and the more identity credentials I have, the higher the probability of obtaining future benefits.
More importantly, this assetization of behavior not only serves users but also project teams. For project teams, Galxe provides not just simple traffic, but a user pool with tags, history, and filtering capabilities. Project teams can filter users based on their past on-chain interactions, community behavior, task completion, and identity credentials to better suit their goals. For example, a DeFi project might focus on wallets that have used cross-chain bridges, DEXs, or lending protocols; a new public chain might prefer users who have participated in testnets, completed developer tasks, or have a high activity record; and an NFT project might prioritize collection history, community activity, and dissemination behavior.
From this perspective, Galxe's competitive advantage doesn't lie in the Quest page itself, as task pages, reward mechanisms, and NFT badges can all be imitated; what's truly difficult to replicate is the user identity data and behavioral network accumulated over a long period. As more projects launch activities on Galxe, users' behavioral records become increasingly complete; and as more users store their participation records on Galxe, project teams will be more willing to use Galxe to filter target users. Ultimately, a mutually reinforcing growth relationship will form between the platform, projects, and users: more projects, richer behavioral data; richer data, more precise user filtering; more precise filtering, and project teams will become more reliant on the platform.
Gamification growth path and ecosystem synergy
Another key capability of Galxe is that it didn't design growth as a simple "complete task - claim reward" process, but instead reorganized the originally fragmented growth actions into a continuous behavioral system. Most Web3 projects often fall into two extremes when it comes to growth: either the barrier to entry is too high, requiring users to connect wallets, cross-chain, trade, or provide liquidity from the outset; or the barrier to entry is too low, only involving lightweight behaviors such as following, forwarding, and joining the community, ultimately making it difficult to generate real product usage.
Galxe's brilliance lies in breaking down these behaviors into a progressively escalating task ladder, allowing users to unconsciously transform from "spectators" to "participants" and then to "ecosystem users."
This path typically begins with low-cost social actions. These include following official accounts, sharing content, joining Discord, and browsing project pages. The purpose of these tasks isn't to demonstrate user quality, but rather to lower the psychological barrier to first-time participation and expand the activity's reach. Once users complete these initial low-cost actions, Galxe can continue to encourage them to connect their wallets, claim NFTs, complete identity verification, or access designated dApps through subsequent tasks. The goal at this stage is to shift users from Web2-style observation to Web3-style participation, converting social traffic into identifiable wallet users.
After users complete wallet connection and basic on-chain operations, tasks will escalate to higher-value on-chain behaviors, such as cross-chain transactions, Swap, Mint, lending, voting, staking, and using ecosystem applications. These behaviors are the truly meaningful data for the project team because they not only represent user awareness of the project but also demonstrate a user's willingness to invest time, gas costs, and a certain level of operational risk. Galxe breaks down these complex actions into achievable small goals through a task chain, providing users with feedback and rewards for each step completed, thereby reducing the psychological resistance associated with complex on-chain operations.
In a sense, Galxe is more like reorganizing growth behavior using gamification. Users aren't suddenly pushed into high-barrier operations, but rather gradually enter deeper ecosystem participation as they complete tasks, receive feedback, and accumulate achievements. This is why Galxe's growth model often produces significant results in large-scale ecosystem events.
Taking Layer 2 or new public blockchain ecosystems as examples, the most difficult aspect of an ecosystem isn't getting users to "know about it," but rather getting them to actually experience the various applications within it. If it's just a project team's individual promotion, users might only remain at the cognitive level. However, through Galxe's task system, the ecosystem can package multiple applications into an exploration route, allowing users to experience different modules such as wallets, cross-chain bridges, DEXs, NFT marketplaces, games, and social applications in sequence. In this way, growth is no longer about acquiring new users at a single point, but rather becomes an organized ecosystem tour. While completing tasks, users are actually undergoing ecosystem education, product trials, and behavioral data accumulation, while project teams simultaneously gain traffic, interaction data, and potential user screening.
Looking deeper, Galxe's task system also addresses the "incentive-behavior mismatch" problem in Web3 growth. Many projects, when offering rewards, can only broadly incentivize a single outcome, such as a transaction, a Mint reward, or joining the community. However, such incentives easily attract a large number of low-quality users. Galxe's approach is to break down outcomes into processes, design these processes as paths, and then use different rewards to correspond to different levels of behavior. Low-barrier tasks offer light rewards, high-value tasks offer more scarce benefits, and continuous task completion earns higher-level qualifications or identity credentials. In this way, user quality is gradually filtered out during the task process: those who are only willing to forward remain at the shallow level, those willing to connect their wallets enter the middle level, and those willing to continuously interact and complete complex tasks become higher-value users.
Therefore, Galxe is not just doing event operations, but redesigning the engagement path for Web3 users. It transforms the previously chaotic growth process into a gamified system with entry points, progression, feedback, and filtering. Users experience completing tasks and receiving rewards, while the project team gains user education, behavioral guidance, data accumulation, and user segmentation.
Data flywheel and platform strategy
As its products continue to evolve, Galxe is no longer content with its Quest platform positioning. It has gradually launched products such as Passport, Starboard, Earndrop, and Gravity, hoping to cover the entire Web3 growth chain: Quest is responsible for user behavior guidance, Passport for identity verification, Starboard for community data analysis and contributor identification, Earndrop for reward distribution, and Gravity further extends into the underlying infrastructure.
This means that Galxe is gradually evolving from a task tool into a complete growth operating system.
What makes Galxe truly difficult to replicate is not the task page itself, but rather its gradually forming data and ecosystem network. As more and more projects connect, Galxe accumulates increasingly rich user behavior data, helping projects to filter more precise user groups; and as more users accumulate their identities and historical behaviors, the user profiles on the platform become increasingly complete.
Ultimately, Galxe developed a typical platform flywheel: the more projects, the more users; the more users, the richer the behavioral data; the richer the data, the more precise the user selection; the more precise the selection, the more willing project teams are to continue investing growth resources in the platform.
In a sense, Galxe doesn't aim to be the largest task platform in Web3, but rather more like Google Ads in the Web3 world—it doesn't really operate tasks, but rather a growth network built around identity, behavior, and distribution.
Conclusion
If the growth of Web3 in the past was essentially still in the "traffic-driven" stage, then the emergence of Galxe means that the industry is beginning to truly attempt to establish an "identity-driven" mindset for the first time. In the past few years, a large number of projects have relied on airdrops, community building, and token incentives to achieve a cold start, but the problems with this model are also obvious: users come because of the rewards, and they will leave when the rewards end. What projects often gain is only short-term data, not long-term relationships.
What Galxe truly changes is that it begins to imbue user behavior with continuously accumulating value. A wallet is no longer just a one-time interaction tool, but gradually transforms into a long-term account with historical records, participation history, and identity credit. The ecosystems a user has participated in, the actions they have taken, and their long-term activity will gradually accumulate into a verifiable and accumulative identity asset.
This is why Galxe's value lies not only in Quest, NFTs, or airdrops themselves, but also in its driving the Web3 growth logic from "reward-driven" to "identity-driven." As more and more projects begin to design growth around user history, and as more and more users begin to value their on-chain history rather than just short-term gains, the way Web3 grows will be completely different from the past. Many people see it as a task platform, but Galxe is more like building a new growth order: user behavior is recorded over a long period, identity value is continuously accumulated, and growth is no longer just a one-off traffic transaction, but will gradually become a long-term relationship network built around identity.
