The biggest predictor of success for a project in Crypto is the strength of the community.
“We humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
Go back in time 10,000 years, and you're in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive, you can procreate.’ - Jeff Bezos
If you took an adult born 2,000 years ago and teleported them into todays society they would be SHOCKED at how different the world looks today.
We have abundance everywhere. We have shoes so we can walk around without our feet getting torn apart by sharp rocks. We have bikes and cars and planes so we can travel away from our place of birth, even across the world, whenever we see fit. We have medicine that means a mild infection doesn’t turn into a death sentence. We have all of human knowledge available to us at the click of a button in a tiny device we carry around in our pockets.
Life is wonderful.
But deep down, our brains are still wired the same way as our ancestors were 10,000 years ago, despite technology evolving at a meteoric pace, our limbic system has not kept up.
There is an innate drive within ourselves to look for a community and ensure we fit in.
Because for the majority of the time human beings have existed on earth, being shunned from your group meant a high likelihood of a miserable death. You would probably be eaten by wolves or brutally murdered by the rival tribe you stumbled into when looking for food.
Conforming to social norms is a survival instinct.
This has been clear time and time again in Crypto.
Projects that have been able to generate die-hard communities have performed exceptionally well, even if their fundamental values make close to zero sense.
Last cycle, Cardano had a higher market cap than Solana. XRP is still the sixth most valuable coin. Dogecoin once hit $88bn, and Monkey pictures were selling for more than most reasonably sized houses.
Community matters.
Monad Community
The Monad Community was forged during the depths of the bear market.
The Discord opened a mere ten days before SBF posted his famous tweet announcing the bankruptcy of FTX. One of the darkest points in Crypto's short but turbulent history.
Over the next few months, gas on Ethereum averaged around 13 gwei, about 90% lower than at any moment during the bull market. Sentiment towards Solana was basically at zero, and most of the main characters of the prior cycle were now in jail. Users were at historic lows, and the outlook was bleak.
The general attitude towards the space was “why do we need another L1? Blockspace is so abundant, and we can barely find use cases for things to do on Ethereum.”
This meant that the core Monad community tended to be a collection of people who could envision a different future.
A community of people who, despite the insane wreckage that was crypto, could still see the light and remained hopeful.
A group of people who knew that if the market conditions changed and became positive, it would be unlikely Ethereum would have scaled, and the same issues we saw in 2021 would arise, bringing about a dire need for highly performant Blockchains.
It was certainly a contrarian position to take at the time.
It was for this reason I tweeted that the Monad Discord is like a rare oasis surrounded by a desert of misery.
It truly was.
If you went on Twitter, you’d see people proclaiming it was the end of days and wanting to fight each other.
The government was about to nuke us to zero, and Satoshi himself was about to rise from his grave, market sell all of his coins in a single transaction to teach us a lesson, making Bitcoin worthless and this entire thing a failed experiment and a period we’d have to creatively explain away on our CVs.
But in the Monad Discord, it was just a group of people laughing, joking, and having a great time.
You’d find Bill drawing tears onto a Vietnamese guy's dog to make it look like he was crying.
Or Ray J making deep fakes of anyone he could get audio & video recordings of. (pls leave me alone)
Or Danny working tirelessly to host Minecraft events and launch a podcast.
Or Berry enthusiastically commentating on the weekly poker tournament whilst hiding in his bin.
Or Skilly making custom pfps for anyone who joined and showed an ounce of commitment.
Or beNADS just doing beNADS things.
The fears and hatred and pitchforks were an entire world away.
It wasn’t a Discord filled with people grinding in the hopes of free Money. Most people were of the opinion we’d never make money again.
And apart from the occasional Loot Money YouTube video where thousands of his followers invaded and engaged in spam warfare, it was an incredibly chill and fun place to be.
I think Bill said it best recently with his comment in the image below, and I think he’s completely right.
It’s like going to the pub with your mates, but on the internet.
Nothing else in Crypto really compares to it as most teams take themselves way too seriously, ban discussion of anything not on topic or try to force a culture upon the users rather than letting the users determine where the memetics flow to.
Another compliment I can give to Bill and the team is the fact that random community-led, spur-of-the-moment memes have been mentioned far more times than the word Cobie has.
In the early days of Monad, the main draw for a lot of people to the community was Cobie being announced as an Angel investor, so it was quite common for him to be mentioned in conversation.
While Cobie, of course, is an immense thought leader within the Crypto space and someone I look up to immensely, if Monad is to succeed, it must be bigger than any one person, even if that person is Cobie.
I think this is clear evidence that Monad has transcended to a new level.
The community has helped turn Monad into the powerhouse that it is today. It’s the reason you see so many die-hard fans on Twitter and it’s the reason I think Monad will be the blockchain to beat as we head into 2024. Nothing else I’ve seen comes remotely close.
It is entirely organic, and it all stems from Monad doing an amazingly good job of making the weirdos, the misfits, the outcasts, and the perpetually online feel welcome and valued.
Huge credit must be given to Bill in his stewardship of this, and he certainly deserves the 6/10 score Keone will give him during his end-of-year review.
I was planning on covering the other reasons I think Monad will be successful and discussing their exceptional hires, the fact ETH is struggling with its scaling strategy and highlight that Monad aims to grow the pie, not fight over the pieces.
But this post is already quite long, and if you’re anything like me your attention span has been massacred these past few weeks with all the craziness that is crypto, so I’ll keep it brief(ish) and end it here.
I’ll release part two in the new year!
For now, thanks for reading, and if you too are a fellow internet weirdo who wishes for their sense of humour to regress back to how it used to be in their teenage years before a decade of corporate culture slowly rotted your brain and drained all the happiness from your life then please come along and join the Monad Discord.
You will be welcomed with open arms.
This was such a fun read, Happy. Looking back, I realize one of the reasons I've stayed in crypto (aside from the financial gains of course) is the communities we've forged from the ground up. It's become more rare these days tho. Really kicking myself for not being active on Monad, even though I've been on their Discord for 6 months now. Imagine all the fun I've missed~
But I guess it's never too late right?
—a fellow internet weirdo who wishes for my sense of humor to regress back to how it used to be in my teenage years before a decade (almost) of corporate culture slowly rotted my brain and drained all the happiness from my life