Lijin: How to Build Emotional Attachment in Web3?
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Lijin: How to Build Emotional Attachment in Web3?
In Web3, this is a missing factor for tokens and networks and products owned by users.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Lijin, Variant
Translated by: TechFlow
This article discusses how ownership must be felt and accepted, not merely granted technically. This factor of "psychological ownership" is a key input behind the retention and success of many Web2 products, and the author argues that it remains a missing piece for tokens and user-owned networks and products in Web3.
Every early December, social media comes alive with the annual flood of Spotify Wrapped. It's one of the more creative examples of viral marketing, where Spotify spends no money on advertising. Instead, users spontaneously share their personalized listening recap—compiled by Spotify—for entertainment, pride, or other emotional reasons.
Spotify Wrapped leverages a behavioral concept known as "psychological ownership"—a sense of possession or "my-ness" toward a product or service. Over the past decade, psychological ownership has become central to how we interact with digital products. Despite lacking physical or legal ownership, digital goods and apps cultivate user loyalty and psychological ownership through personal investment, control, mastery, and alignment with users’ self-identity. Tech products that successfully foster this "my-ness" are more likely to retain users, sustain engagement, and encourage contributions.
For cryptocurrency and Web3 projects, psychological ownership should seemingly complement actual digital asset ownership. Yet in practice, crypto projects often face the opposite: user interest tends to be temporary, utilitarian, and fleeting.
As next-generation internet products evolve features enabling real ownership via crypto tokens, developers can learn from other product/service categories about psychological ownership. By applying this lens, crypto projects can cultivate stronger feelings of psychological ownership alongside actual digital asset ownership, thereby improving user retention and ecosystem sustainability.
Why Is Psychological Ownership Important for Companies and Products?
Think about all the products or apps you use daily and the emotions they evoke. Some physical and digital products feel functional and forgettable: the car you ride in during an Uber trip or a one-off meeting app likely won’t trigger any deep sentiment. Others inspire loyalty or attachment due to personal investment: your carefully curated music playlist or your Twitter profile, for instance.
This mental state of feeling like an owner differs from legal ownership: people can feel ownership without being the legal owner of a product or service, and vice versa. For example, my social media profile or favorite sports team reflect a sense of ownership, yet there’s no formal title. Conversely, people may legally own things but lack psychological ownership: holding stocks or ETFs rarely evokes emotional connection to the company.
Over the past decade, new digital products, services, and business models have disrupted traditional consumer relationships with goods/services—shifting from direct purchase and ownership to access and subscription models. This changing relationship offers new levers and expanded design space for cultivating psychological ownership.
Psychological ownership matters because it changes behavior. Research shows it increases customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, and willingness to pay. In public domains, high psychological ownership enhances responsibility and stewardship, encouraging behaviors like cleaning trash from public lakes or donating to causes. In digital communities, psychological ownership leads to “increased satisfaction, self-esteem, and contribution quality.”
A study on music streaming is particularly revealing. The shift from physical ownership of music (CDs, vinyl, tapes) to digital ownership (purchasing singles or albums) and now to digital access (streaming platforms) has been described as a move toward a “post-ownership economy.” Theoretically, it’s easier than ever for users to leave an app for a competitor, given low switching costs. However, the study found that once users invest time learning an app and personalizing their experience—such as creating public profiles, editing playlists, or customizing recommendations—they are reluctant to switch—even when better (including cheaper) alternatives exist.
Notably, an important implication is that users are developing stronger psychological ownership toward specific platforms or apps, while their emotional connection to individual artists or albums is weakening due to reduced investment and intent to build direct relationships.
How Is Psychological Ownership Formed?
Product developers can actively foster psychological ownership in users. Consumer research reveals several drivers that make users feel ownership, with significant implications for product design:
Self-Investment
The more time, effort, energy, or money people invest in a product, the greater their sense of psychological ownership. “The more effort people put into something, the more they value it,” notes research on the so-called “IKEA effect,” named after the Swedish retailer famous for selling DIY furniture kits.
In the digital realm, people invest effort in various ways: customizing avatars or profile pictures, creating content on social platforms, giving feedback to companies. For example, on TikTok, users deliberately interact with videos to shape their recommendation feed (e.g., “comment to stay on this TikTok”). When users spend years building content on an app—tweets, blog posts—their sense of personal ownership grows. A prime example was the backlash following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter accounts.
Therefore, in Web3 and crypto projects, to foster psychological ownership, developers should enable users to invest more of themselves—through personalization and customization within the product. This helps gradually build user loyalty, retention, and long-term sustainable ecosystems.
Control
Providing a sense of agency over a product or service can also create emotional attachment. This often means offering features that let users shape their experience through creation, customization, and expression of preferences. Interestingly, these strong feelings of ownership can sometimes backfire on companies. In 2014, Apple sparked backlash when it automatically added U2’s album to every user’s iTunes library, undermining users’ sense of control. Slate magazine called it “deeply unsettling, possibly portending a terrifying new future in which taste and culture are even more explicitly chosen for us by our corporate overlords.”
Familiarity
Familiarity often triggers ownership feelings. A local restaurant might feel like “my breakfast spot” because I know the menu and have a favorite table. Software products can exhibit similar traits: users become familiar with all the advanced, complex features of a particular app. For instance, mastering all the keyboard shortcuts and UI of an email client can increase ownership and loyalty—even though (in theory) switching costs are low due to email’s open protocols. This closely ties to self-investment: by investing time, people also gain familiarity.
User–Product Identity Alignment
Finally, alignment between product attributes and a user’s self-concept builds psychological ownership. Users tend to choose brands that best match their self-image, whether aspirational or actual; people are more likely to use apps that align with their self-concept. When older generations adopted Facebook, millennials turned to Instagram and Snapchat. As Gen Z came of age, they carved out space on TikTok. How can crypto projects make users feel like owners?
Crypto Ownership: A Digital-Native Form of Ownership
Crypto ownership can be seen as an internet-native property rights system, analogous to how legal ownership is enforced through legal contracts. In the context of crypto, ownership is enforced cryptographically on blockchains. Governed by decentralized protocols, crypto ownership is digital-native: inherently global and independent of any legal jurisdiction or central authority.
Cryptocurrencies and blockchains offer the potential to build an internet owned by users, where networks and products turn users into owners via native tokens. But simply giving users tokens isn’t enough. Users need to *feel* like owners—to align with the network’s success, contribute to its growth, and stay engaged long-term.
Blockchain introduces new dynamics to the question of psychological ownership. First, blockchains make it easier to leave any given interface or platform (e.g., an NFT marketplace or wallet), since you can take your assets with you. While Web2 platforms could foster strong psychological ownership by locking in time and effort spent creating content or customizing experiences, Web3 may shift users’ sense of ownership closer to the underlying crypto assets and creators, rather than the platform itself.
Second, in the crypto context, psychological ownership may manifest differently. High psychological ownership correlates with active participation, contributing to communities, long-term holding, and evangelism. Low psychological ownership, by contrast, may show up as short-termism: flipping assets, using products only to farm airdrops, and low governance participation.
For crypto developers, the challenge and opportunity lie in designing products that support richer ownership experiences and a stronger sense of “ownership.”
Crypto and Psychological Ownership: Drivers and Barriers
In traditional gaming, skins—decorative items used to customize a player’s appearance in and out of games—are estimated to be a $50 billion market. By comparison, NFT fashion—an emerging category that has seen major players like Dolce & Gabbana and Karl Lagerfeld launch collections—is a market worth less than $245 million, or less than 1% of the size of the video game skin market. Why this disparity, when crypto’s ownership of NFTs is clearly a “stronger” form of ownership, independent of a single game company’s database?
Psychological ownership is part of the explanation. Strong feelings of ownership over in-game characters and experiences lead users to pay at scale for skins. In contrast, current fashion NFTs offer little opportunity for self-investment beyond financial cost, limited user control, and few chances for others to see the NFT and associate its traits with the owner. (Projects like Fashion NFT markets and digital wardrobes such as DRAUP are notable exceptions.)
Let’s examine some drivers of psychological ownership and analyze how various crypto projects perform (or fall short) in enhancing users’ sense of ownership:
Personal Investment
Crypto projects are often good at capturing users’ time, effort, and capital, but this doesn’t always translate into ownership feelings. Consider rewarding users with tokens for performing specific actions—so-called liquidity mining—used across games, NFT markets, and DeFi protocols. While often successful in driving initial usage, these rarely lead to long-term success. For example, Nansen’s analysis of liquidity staking activity among DeFi users showed that “42% entered and exited staking within 24 hours of launch, and by day three, 70% of these users had withdrawn from the contract.”
Why do these programs—essentially about incentivizing purchases—often fail at promoting long-term user retention?
One explanation is that most token distribution mechanisms attract speculative users making simple profit calculations, rather than those genuinely interested in using the product. This means high churn when other opportunities offering better returns on capital and time emerge.
If so, reframing the problem may present an opportunity. Historically, most tokens have been used to fuel growth with little regard for long-term sustainability: they attract users to a new network/product by promising future airdrops or ongoing token rewards, which in turn promise financial returns. This is a weak strategy for creating attachment. But what if attachment came first, and token ownership second? By identifying key drivers of psychological ownership and tying token rewards to user actions aligned with those drivers, tokens can reward psychological ownership, strengthen attachment, and build engagement habits. This mirrors successful incentive programs in Web2—Uber or DoorDash offering guaranteed earnings to new drivers, deepening their understanding of how the app works, fostering psychological ownership, and converting it into stronger network effects. The Blur token airdrop follows a similar model, making token receipt conditional on behaviors like using new features and providing liquidity to the NFT market.
Familiarity
If creators can generate psychological ownership among their token holders, it means transforming a community of speculative users—who see the creator as a source of profit—into a long-term, deeply engaged community that values the relationship above short-term gains. To see how this works, consider Bonfire, a platform helping Web3 creators build custom experiences including exclusive content, contests, and airdrops. By encouraging fans to invest time in the creator’s community and develop deeper knowledge of their work, Bonfire fosters a sense of ownership beyond just holding a token.
Control
Various Web3 communities link creative, engaging control experiences with token ownership. For example, Shibuya’s White Rabbit animated film lets users stake their NFT producer passes to vote on the next chapter, with over 80% of token holders participating in voting. Mad Realities, a reality dating show, allows NFT holders to control elements of the show—voting for winning couples or influencing set design. Creating richer control experiences around users’ crypto tokens can generate higher psychological ownership and loyalty.
The key is that users must care about the specific type of control and feel a sense of agency to value their asset ownership. Low governance participation in most protocols—less than 20% turnout on proposals in DeFi—stems from average users feeling their influence is negligible, reducing their sense of control.
User–Product Identity Alignment
Some crypto communities show very high linkage between token ownership and identity: users buy and display NFTs, even changing usernames or bios to publicly signal affiliation with a network, conveying their identity and beliefs (e.g., Bitcoin and laser eyes). This emotional attachment and alignment with self-identity can lead to extremely high holder retention, causing them to highly value what they own.
Crypto projects can boost user retention and loyalty by representing a clear set of values that resonate with their owners. The opportunity lies in refining positioning and storytelling, clearly stating what they stand for, attracting users aligned with their mission, and activating them as evangelists for the narrative.
Building Psychological Ownership Through Better Relationships
With all this in mind, how can builders in crypto put these ideas into practice? Implementing psychological ownership requires building different kinds of relationships with users—changing how they perceive their role in the project and relying on co-creation. Here are some approaches.
Interoperability and User Control
I hypothesize that in Web2 platforms, users feel a stronger sense of ownership toward the platform than Web3 users feel toward the underlying crypto assets, communities, and creators. This is because crypto enables interoperability and data portability: built on open, decentralized ledgers, users have greater control and “my-ness” over their assets. They can access tokens from any crypto wallet, buy/sell NFTs on any marketplace, and participate in tokenized communities across social apps. In contrast, in Web2 apps, user data, content, points, etc., are stored in centralized databases—users only have control within the context of a specific app, leading to platform-level ownership feelings.
For example, in decentralized social protocols like Lens Protocol, user profiles, follower graphs, and content are represented as NFTs. This means any client can build on top of Lens Protocol and access the data. When users download an app built on Lens Protocol, their existing social connections and content are pre-filled from day one. For users, this enhances control and ownership over their content and relationships—but may weaken loyalty to any single app.
In Web3, cultivating psychological ownership and product defensibility depends on other factors: self-investment through customization or token allocation, intimate familiarity built through user habits, strong brand identity and self-object congruence, or proprietary product elements like superior discovery algorithms and offline data. Crypto app builders can learn from email or podcast ecosystems, where certain products dominate significant market share despite being based on open data (Spotify represents 27% of podcast listening; Gmail holds 30% of the email market).
User Co-Creation: Building in Public and Governance
Research shows that involving customers in the creation process and giving them decision-making power enhances positive word-of-mouth, enjoyment of the product, willingness to defend it publicly, and willingness to pay. Granting users co-creator status builds a sense of control, deep familiarity, and allows them to invest time and effort into the product.
This aligns with the growing trend of “building in public” among startups—openly sharing progress and soliciting public feedback to grow early adopter communities. In crypto, user co-creation also takes the form of governance, where stakeholders vote on a project’s or protocol’s direction using their tokens. In crypto, user governance is usually a benefit granted to token holders, not a prerequisite. Given the power of collaboration and co-creation in generating psychological ownership, it’s worth exploring making such participation a requirement to become an owner or receive an airdrop.
Psychological and Asset Ownership: Foundations of a User-Owned Internet
Psychological ownership is a critical factor behind many successful products, especially in the internet era where countless alternatives are just a click away. We all have strong attachments to products that give us a solid sense of “my-ness”—a feeling born from our effort, control, intimate familiarity, and alignment with our values and self-identity.
In crypto, new technological innovations provide an internet-native system for tracking ownership, enabling any product to turn users into owners via tokens. This has led to rapid growth for some projects due to user ownership, but also to notable failures and rampant speculation. I believe these negative outcomes occur due to a relative lack and under-exploration of psychological ownership—resulting in tokens attracting mercenary users and ultimately undermining long-term project success.
Conversely, tokens—or the promise of them—can be strategically deployed to encourage users to invest time, effort, and energy; exercise control and agency; and express their identity and beliefs—conditions that precede the feeling of ownership. Research in traditional finance highlights the effectiveness of combining actual asset ownership with psychological ownership. A Columbia Business School study found that in a fintech app, users who chose to earn stock in certain brands or stores after shopping there increased their weekly spending at those brands by 40%. Researchers concluded that stock ownership boosted brand loyalty. Crucially, users intentionally chose their stock holdings and invested time shopping at these brands to earn rewards—a meaningful path to ownership distinct from buying ETFs or mutual funds, which require little personal investment beyond capital. From a psychological ownership perspective, the experiment cultivated a “my-ness” toward the brand by giving users a sense of control, deepening brand knowledge, and prompting investment of time and money.
This is the potential for crypto builders: when asset ownership is more broadly and programmatically distributed—and closely tied to psychological ownership—it becomes a powerful new tool to accelerate growth, drive retention, displace incumbents, and build long-lasting, sustainable networks.
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