Outlier Ventures: The essence of crypto is social technology; community monetization is the future of customer acquisition
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Outlier Ventures: The essence of crypto is social technology; community monetization is the future of customer acquisition
Cryptocurrency is a technology that is inherently social. To refine it further, cryptocurrency is hyper-social—it is tribalism.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Thomas Issa
Compiled by: TechFlow
Acquiring users in the cryptocurrency space today is akin to early humans hunting deep in the throes of an ice age spanning thousands of years: their tools are primitive, and their prey lies dormant. Early humans wandered across tundras with little understanding of their quarry—only two outcomes awaited them: successful capture or death by starvation and frostbite.
For consumer-facing crypto products, the story of customer acquisition is much the same: acquire users or perish.
The years 2021 and 2022 marked a period when startups could combine fundraising announcements with subsequent NFT or token airdrops to attract and retain early users. This strategy was successfully executed by numerous marketplaces, analytics tools, games, and Web3 infrastructure projects, allowing them to gain initial momentum based purely on the performance of their token offerings in the market. Whether it was Americana’s NFT pass for its digital and physical marketplace surging to 0.25 ETH after launch, or the once-promising NFT marketplace LooksRare allocating 12% of its total token supply to lure customers from OpenSea—both captured consumer attention briefly, but in the long term, their user bases remained volatile.
These missteps were far from the largest failures in crypto, but at the core of these dynamics lies the overreliance on tokens and NFTs as long-term mechanisms for customer acquisition and retention, especially under unfavorable macroeconomic conditions that further suppress the value-extractive nature of such designs.
To address many shortcomings in user acquisition, crypto companies and funds have rushed to invest in products deemed best for “loyalty.” Projects flocked to “earn-by-engaging” platforms, where market leaders like Galxe, Layer3, and Zealy became methods for acquiring, retaining, and instilling customer “loyalty.”
While these platforms show interesting top-of-funnel growth metrics, they remain temporary solutions and marketing crutches, having minimal impact on the long-term growth and sustainable user acquisition of protocols or projects. Most of these platforms focus on social vanity metrics, encouraging users to follow on social media or join communities. Reward mechanisms are trivial—offering only minor economic benefits, with almost no social or reputational upside. The growing disconnect between pursuit and consumers exacerbates the inability to track future on-chain transactions, meaning businesses cannot calculate the lifetime value of their potential customers.
Now, without a doubt, we are rapidly moving toward a future where everything becomes tokenized. Network participants are inherently greedy and obsessed with financialization—a dynamic enabled by blockchain technology.
Just as we tokenize, we will also “communify.” This means that for every human commonality, we have the opportunity to share that experience within digitally native communities through programmable assets.
Whether it's the music we listen to, the items we purchase, or the schools we attend, we can make these experiences immutable on-chain and share them in the spirit of online communities. We’re already seeing this trend flourish in the luxury market, where NFTs act as companions to physical goods, binding buyers more closely together. Louis Vuitton recently solidified this future with their soulbound NFT issuance, which delivers physical products—but more importantly, grants like-minded consumers unparalleled access to community. Shifting focus from tradability to consumption fundamentally redefines community, creating unique groups that are “inseparable” from their consumers.
As Shayon Sengupta put it, cryptocurrency is an inherently social technology—and I’d go further: crypto is hyper-social. It is tribalism. As participants in crypto, we are all tribes, each born from shared affinities among members. As communities, we heed warnings and advice from peers. More often than not, we do not act without the group’s consent or recommendation.
To ignore the tribe is to ignore the spirit of crypto consumer behavior.
Crypto-native use cases like Mirror’s Subscribe-to-Mint, POAP’s Attend-to-Mint, and IYK’s Interact-to-Mint bring us closer to forming NFT communities based on actions, preferences, aversions, and desires. Digital fashion startups and established luxury fashion houses alike have already established redemption-based minting as the future of their industries. Thanks to platforms like Medallion, we’ll be able to join our favorite artists’ communities or collect experiences with rising stars on Mercury. All of this lays crucial groundwork for the widespread integration of digitally native communities into our lives.
With advances in Web3 attribution, it will become possible to extract information about the products and brands users purchase and endorse, the places they’ve visited, the blogs they’ve read, even the sports teams they support. Web3 enables value capture that is impossible under today’s distribution monopolies. In this new media model, user value is measured by the absolute value they bring and rewarded via mechanisms like revenue-sharing rebates.
These elements align with a future led by a new paradigm known as “Community-as-a-Service” (CaaS). Simply put, CaaS can be understood as access to a specific group being so valuable that it becomes a marketable product. By delving deeper into the philosophy of communities, their trends, and their unique roles in crypto, we can realize a future where boosting organic visibility, providing low-cost feedback and insights, enhancing brand credibility, and enabling targeted ad campaigns become significantly cheaper.
The future of customer acquisition revolves around monetizing communities through crypto, empowering consumers by simplifying and strengthening value creation. In Web2 social consumption, community onboarding is simple and often disconnected from the brand itself. With Web3, the consumer experience shifts from a simple “buy now” to a more inclusive “gain access,” representing the most basic form of CaaS principles. The most powerful distribution platforms will emerge from these NFT-backed groups. Crypto enables a value capture mechanism that allows communities to own, control, and track their influence. These dynamics will ultimately exert strong effects on brands, projects, and protocols, establishing CaaS as the future of customer acquisition across every direct-to-consumer vertical.
The CaaS Transformation
The compelling argument here is that Web3.0 and blockchain technology will usher in an era of enhanced advertiser control, fairness, and decentralization. However, without systems to facilitate value creation and ensure fair distribution among all contributors, we cannot maximize this foundational premise. The CaaS monetization model represents the first step in building community-backed NFT infrastructure—an area already expanding across the ecosystem.
Once consensus emerges, this trend will be driven by platforms capable of aggregating communities, inferring data from on-chain activity, and identifying areas where communities create value and thus deserve rewards. Builders will be inspired by community aggregation tools like De.ID, contribution-tracking platforms like OrangeDAO’s Grove, or efficient advertising networks connecting brands with Discord communities like Wildfire.
While this concept is novel and has yet to be directly applied to product or protocol design, builders will eventually productize these trends that already underpin customer acquisition dynamics. We will see communities monetizing their social and technical influence—ultimately strengthening customer acquisition and validating the CaaS business case.
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Outlier Ventures
