Explore the "operation approach" of the head public chain: Developer, Ecosystem, Community

How to "Run Well" a public chain? An Inventory of the Operational Differentiation behind the head public Chain

Original article by Zolo, Deep Tide TechFlow; Linda Zheng Zheng, Co-Founder of SuiWorld

Several charts have been circulating recently, showing the number of developers, daily active data, etc., for each chain, giving us a visual view of the data differences between each chain/project.

There are a number of reasons for this difference, but in addition to the attractiveness of the agreement itself, a closer look reveals a number of differences from an operational perspective. The success and failure of a common chain have internal and external causes.    

Solana was affected by external factors such as FTX's thunder; Binance's traffic feeds back into BNB Chain's growth; Aptos got a lot of attention early on because of its highly visible team and backers. However, it is not the purpose of this paper to struggle with external causes. This paper will explore more internal causes from the perspective of the official website modules, Social Media and community operation of different public chains, so as to know what operation construction should be done as a public chain project and what differentiated cases are worthy of reference.

There are three dimensions of public chain operation: Developer, Ecosystem and Community

We give priority to combing the official website operation modules of several popular public chains, which are summarized as follows:

We have grayed out the same parts, and we can see that although the names are different, basically each public link has to cover Developer, Ecosystem, and Community, all of which play a large part. Ecosystem is a key word for project ecosystem, which is to show your ecosystem dapps and help promote Dapps/services. Community focuses on the user community, not the developer community.

From the logic of construction, developers are usually attracted by unique technical evangelism. After developers, a thriving ecosystem can eventually attract a large number of users.

Developer: Developer wins the world

No matter Layer1 or privacy public chain, they will emphasize their technological lead or difference. At this point, each of the public chains has its own expertise. For example, Solana's PoH at that time tells you Super Fast; Avalanche has been spreading new consensus protocols and subnets that can "customize hair chains with one click."

In addition to the core technical narrative, the essence of running Developer is to better complete onboarding for technicians, so construction needs to be carried out in at least the following parts:

1. Perfect 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 events, such as Hackthon, Roadshow and other display platforms.

In addition, BNB Chain/Polygon/Solana provides a very clear and categorised view of the types of tools available to developers developing on their own network.

Ecosystem: The application layer keeps the public chain alive

This part is mainly about showing and flexing your muscles. A common practice is to list the projects clearly and provide an entry point to guide the construction of the DApp.

In contrast, BNB Chain has the most complete and different ecological section. They are building their own ecological section with the idea of "app store". You can think of it as DappRadar with the Info + Comments feature. It not only presents projects, but also dimensions such as data, user feedback, and even alerts based on projects at risk. The ecological operation of BNB Chain has opened a bigger gap with other public chains.

Community: Let users be your evangelists

Community construction is the top priority of Web3 project. Community is not only a simple social group, but also a weekly Town hall. From the perspective of the operation of several public chains, large modules should at least include:

1. Community News - News

2. Community communication - Social Media

3. Community Suggestions - Forum

4. Community Events - Events

In order to better activate the vitality of the community, let more users become public chain evangelists. They also tend to have ambassador programs for individuals to engage more loyal users. BNB Chain and Solana have formulated The Martians Program and The Collective, respectively, and configured spiritual incentive and material incentive.

In addition to preaching, community building is about creating a "family" for project teams and investors, with the potential benefits of:

1. Help early projects quickly find high-quality early users, which is the booster of project construction;

2. Serve the developers of Web3.0 and cultivate the pioneers of innovative DApps;

3. Incubate Web3.0 entrepreneurs, discuss the system of token economy together, improve Web3.0 products, build crypto community, etc., and help Web3.0 entrepreneurs become an excellent team;

4. It is easier for investors to find innovative project teams.

Therefore, from the perspective of the project, an excellent public chain community is also building a "resource pool" for incubation and acceleration, gathering members who share the same idea and help each other improve. With this Vibe, community cohesion, ecological vitality and attraction are stronger, which in turn naturally increases developer and team loyalty to the community.

The above are the common modules and better cases in the construction of the public chain. In addition, every public chain actually has one thing in common: it operates its own Foundation (foundation) to promote ecological development from capital and resources. In the following section, we will talk about cases related to foundations.

Ecological development tools: foundation, Grant, Treasury, from the capital and resources to promote ecological development

Almost every public chain has a Grant program for developers and early-stage projects. The selected projects are usually open source projects. In addition to receiving a small amount of funding, they will also receive technical support for the project construction main network, marketing, media PR, and regional community incubation to accompany the development of the project. The majority of public chains have the right to speak on funding, which is decided by foundations. The exception is EOS, which established a secondary crowdfunding platform called Pomelo, which encourages fans in the community to vote on projects and increase governance rights by using the DAO model.

But there are several common problems with granting grants:

1. Grant is despised by projects that do not need money;

2. Serious homogeneity of Grant applications;

3. Some projects have low loyalty and just pull a little Grant wool from each chain and go away.

In response to this problem, the public chain can launch developer development programs to cultivate supportive developers in the community and increase long-term loyalty.

In addition to foundation grants, Polkadot uses an innovative Treasury mechanism that Staking staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, staking. Pooled into a pool of funds to form a Treasury for the development of the Polkadot ecology. This is more sustainable than the way most previous projects raise money through financing and then use the money for ecological development. Polkadot's Treasury mechanism may be an innovative model that can be borrowed and referenced by various public chains.

Of course, there are some external reasons for the unprecedented popularity of Poca, and this is mainly about the innovation of the Treasury.

Under the competition of mature public chains such as ETH, new public chains usually increase financial support for developers by throwing money into ecological development. However, ecological construction is a long-term process, and it is not sustainable to only rely on funds raised by initial private equity Token sales. The Treasury mechanism provides a new idea for the public chain. It allocates part of the capital flow and governance of the normal operation of the blockchain to the Treasury, and then decides the use of the money through the governance of the council for those proposals that are helpful to the ecological development of the public chain. With these funds, the public chain can be better built and more people can use it. The pool keeps accumulating money, creating a virtuous circle. It can not only solve the fund problem of ecological development, but also regulate the inflation of its own chain by means of governance, even in the form of DAO, so as to reduce the centralization of the team at the governance level. This may be a reference mechanism for killing many birds with one arrow.

Of course, specific to the subdivided module operation and development stage, each public chain will have its own unique considerations, the following will be listed for some good differentiation.

Operation differentiation of different public chains

Below, marked in blue, are the main differences we see in the operation of each company chain.

There are a lot of things that BNB Chain does well, but when you dig deeper into its content strategy, you'll see. BNB Chain rarely talks about its technological breakthroughs, but Polygon\Solana\Avalanche highlights its technological innovations. Solana also built Blockchain and Solana 101 to make onbording developers better because of the differences in development languages. Aptos is the youngest of these public chains, so Grant is deliberately placed in a very important position and given clear rules.

Although BNB Chain does not talk much about technological innovation, many friends should be familiar with BNB Chain's MVB and incubation plan. In fact, this is part of the support for developers in the Developer Program. The 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 new module has been specially added on the official website to conduct guidance on Migrate.

The setting of the module Migrate is one of the most interesting things in my opinion, there are not many developers or users in Web3 to start with, and developers/users are disloyal. You'll often see an early project going to Hackthon on every chain, and you'll also see it. Web3 users follow the app or revenue, not the public chain.

So while the industry's "builders" talk about growing the pie, they also need to steal the existing users.

Migrate is not aimed at new projects, but at existing ones that are attracting them to migrate. After entering the module, he will attract you by telling you that there is more support for developers, users, TVL and other data is very high, and at the same time add success Case, so that you start to expect the same success after you migrate. Finally, Build on BNB Chain for clue transformation.

For the Marketing of To B, BNB Chain has well understood the project side's customer journey and has done a better job in operation. Perhaps more public chains can also consider setting the content of "Migrate".

Polygon does a lot of technology integration, so it sets up a separate Solution module to present different technology solutions. Of course, what most people remember most is Polygon's appeal to traditional brands. NIKE, Starbucks and others have cooperated with Polygon. There was a simple reason why:

So if more Web2 brands choose to build on Polygon, or want to move into 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 a high-qualified version of Avalanche Subnet Casestudy.

Traditional brands have a large audience, and the more collaborations like these, the more Polygon's user base will grow. See Reddit. From the perspective of detailed operation content, considering that Aptos/Sui is relatively new, it is easy to review. Therefore, in the following part, we will take Aptos as an example to look at the operation content and focus of Aptos from the official announcement in February to now.

Aptos and Sui were taken as examples for further discussion

Aptos's Tweet /medium/Discord shows that twitter contains almost all content from other channels, so we first mapped the content of Twitter's operations and sorted out the key parts.

For Developer, the official focus will be on beta network progress, weekly MoveMonday, and irregular Aptos/Move sermons;

In addition to the official announcements of various partners on Ecosystem, we also planned the theme "Aptos Ecosystem Highlight" to share the ecological projects built on Aptos from time to time.

Not much has been done for the Community.

However, it is worth noting that the early Aptos founders would attend various events and preach around. After the mainnet went live, the current official dynamic to Developer has been reduced, and the content of community and events has been added.

On the number of it, as referred to above, although the Developer Ecosystem/Community are operating focus, but from the point of order, should be the Developer & gt; Ecosystem > Community, so you'll see that most of Aptos' operations are related to the first two. In addition, as mentioned above, the new public chain paid more attention to the operation of Grant in the early stage. Although Aptos raised the priority of Grant on its official website, it did not show enough on social media.

Unlike Aptos, Sui hosted an AMA in Discord once a week to update its technology and preach its Move language; In addition to online, Happy Hour meetings are held in the United States, Portugal, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and other places. In terms of promoting the eco project, Sui emphasized the support and progress of GameFi's track. One of the reasons is that Koh Kim, the eco director, has a lot of experience in games, as well as many other types of projects.

Although Sui's social media started several months earlier than Aptos, its popularity has been significantly lower. Through the above review of the operation history of Aptos and Sui's official promotion, it can be clearly found that Aptos focused on publicizing the progress of various ecological projects. Sui mostly shared its technical documents and Sui Move's sermon. As we know, developers accounted for a much lower proportion of Crypto users than retail investors, which may explain the relatively lukewarm social media for Sui.

To sum up, after going through BNB Chain\Polygon\Solana\Avalanche\Aptos, we find that the operation focus of public chain needs to build three big foundations: Developer, Ecosystem and Community, among which the foundation is well built, will be a good catalyst. After that, we will strengthen our operations in Grant and community growth, depending on the characteristics and stages of differentiation.

At the same time, in view of the phenomenon of large number of users of BNB Chain, apart from the traffic of Binance itself which we often think of, we can also see that BNB Chain is the best built in terms of developers, ecology and community. Avalanche has been talking about the innovation of consensus /Subnet, but the user base/ecosystem has not been up. Maybe there are some shortcomings from an operational perspective.

Of course, the scope of the public chain is not just Layer1 above, but also includes more Aleo, Mina and other specific attributes of the public chain, or ina broad sense, the need for developers, self-built ecosystem projects. The construction cycle of public chain projects is long. This paper attempts to explore some practical methodologies by sorting out operation modules relative to the head project, and share highlights of good cases, hoping to be helpful to long-term project construction. Welcome to DM Twitter @zolo_hands @linda_guagua.

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