In a recent case issued by the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission, Huang was sentenced for sharing securities investment information and advice in a TG group without a license. In this regard, lawyer Mankiw also issued a quick comment, believing that the encryption community also needs to be vigilant about this compliance issue. .
Previously, the latest data from TGStat showed that 6 of the top ten Telegram channels in the world are Web3 communities, including Hamster Kombat Announcement, tapswap, Notcoin, etc.
In China, theoretically users cannot participate in overseas encryption communities, but there are many types of Web3 communities, including WeChat, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Weibo and other social media platforms. You can often see Web3-related content sharing and discuss.
However, for community managers, operations are both easy and difficult to do. The good thing is that it is easy to gather a wave of users just by spreading money or sharing money-making information; what is difficult is that whether it is the operating model or community standards, you often need to pay attention to compliance matters and avoid legal disputes.
Therefore, Lawyer Mankiw hopes to use this article to discuss the key points of compliant operation of Web3 communities and help community operators create a more compliant community operation model.
Web3 community operation
When operating a Web3 community, operators often need to consider operating methods based on multiple complex links, and ultimately build a private domain and achieve profitability. There are several core links, which often involve compliance precautions. for example:
1. Social Platform
Web3 communities are usually built on Telegram or Discord. The former has a low threshold, many tools, and is easy to operate. However, the community is a mixed bag, and there are often scams, advertisements and other information; the latter has a higher threshold and is more suitable for niche enthusiasts, such as chain games and NFTs. At the same time, community DApps are also being developed in the crypto community, such as DeBox and friend.tech. But in this category, the users are relatively smaller and the threshold is higher.
In the Mainland, Web3 communities are usually built and operated through common social platforms such as WeChat, QQ, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo. WeChat groups and QQ groups usually have invitation and review mechanisms. Other platforms are based on the attributes of social media, paying attention to similar topics and participating in them, and automatically forming communities under the topics.
It is worth noting that general investment advice or single-category Web3 communities often choose platforms with group membership restrictions or audit mechanisms, and charge a certain fee to gain access. In some communities, membership fees are paid in RMB, but there are also cases where membership fees are paid in cryptocurrencies such as $USDT.
(2) Profit model
The long-term operation of the community is inseparable from costs or profits. After all, generating electricity with love is limited to a small number of pioneers. Therefore, the sustainability of the Web3 community is inseparable from the choice of profit model. The more common ones are:
1. Cooperate with project parties
As a natural private domain traffic, some Web3 communities will choose to cooperate with encryption project parties and help the project parties with science popularization, publicity, or joint activities to charge a certain fee or other exchange resources.
2. Provide paid courses
Some Web3 communities also provide users with paid encryption-related guidance and courses, which often include courses such as paid porting, encryption investment advice, currency, and project analysis.
(3) Community interaction
As users continue to join the community, Web3 community operators need to consider how to manage interactions within the community. On the one hand, in the process of daily interaction, operators need to consider what content should be used to attract user participation, increase community activity, and guide the direction of the community.
On the other hand, operators need to pay attention to fraud and advertising information appearing in the community. For example, in many communities where coins have not yet been issued, it is easy for phishing links to appear, inducing users to click through the gimmick of project airdrops. Once this link appears and is not managed in a timely manner, it will cause the user to lose funds, and ultimately the community management will be responsible for the responsibility and compensation.
How to operate a Web3 community in compliance with regulations?
Based on the multiple links in Web3 community operations, Lawyer Mankiw believes that operators and managers need to pay special attention to the following compliance points:
1. Platform construction
When building a Web3 community, you must first consider the choice of platform. Policies and regulations in some countries have strict restrictions on the encryption industry. Operators need to comprehensively consider regulatory policies, user profiles, platform rules and other aspects, pay attention to compliance issues such as user access and geographical screening, and then determine which audiences to target. , the question of what platform to build on.
Secondly, community operators may have to consider the payment model. Should they charge RMB or cryptocurrency? As far as relevant regulations in China are concerned, it is generally believed that the paid community model forms a service contract between the operator and the user: the user pays, and the operator provides valuable information and guidance. If a dispute occurs, the court will often hear the dispute between the two parties based on the relevant provisions of the service contract and the basic circumstances. However, if settlement is made in cryptocurrency, certain difficulties may arise in judicial practice. The main reason is that according to mainland regulations, cryptocurrency does not have the same legal status as legal currency and does not have legal compensation.
In addition, operators must do KYC when collecting fees. At present, the anti-money laundering supervision in the mainland is becoming more and more strict. Whether it is RMB or cryptocurrency, if the operator receives black money or black $USDT, his bank account or exchange account may be frozen, and he may even face suspicion of concealment and fraud. criminal risk.
(2) Profit model
In terms of the profit model, if the community achieves revenue by cooperating with the project, it needs to consider the review and promotion methods of the project.
Especially in terms of promotion methods, the project recruitment model of some communities is a multi-layered system. In other words, the community operator publishes project promotion information and obtains certain rewards from user A's participation in the project; when user A recruits new users, the community operator can also obtain rewards from A's invitation, and so on. promotion.
According to the provisions of mainland criminal law, if the level of the recommended project rebate model reaches level three or above, it may involve the crime of organizing and leading pyramid schemes. There are also relevant cases in judicial practice. For example, in the (2023) Shaanxi 01 Xingzhong No. 368 case, the parties promoted cryptocurrency projects through WeChat groups and other methods, induced others to purchase cryptocurrency, and formed 14 levels in a certain order, using the number of developers as the basis for rebates. Luring participants to continue to develop other people's participation was found to constitute the crime of organizing and leading pyramid schemes.
Therefore, in the process of cooperating with project parties, community operators should pay attention to the setting of project recommendation rebate levels. A cooperation model with more than three rebate levels may be deemed a pyramid scheme, bringing criminal risks to community operators.
(3) Community content
Community operators need to clarify certain review obligations for comments posted within the community. However, there are many users in the community with diverse identities and backgrounds. It is obviously difficult to verify the real information of community users one by one. Therefore, in daily community management, community operators should do the following:
Review in a timely manner, set up shifts, review the text content in the group, and delete abnormal content immediately;
Set thresholds. Overseas social platforms usually have tools to set up mechanisms for reviewing and deleting abnormal keywords or links;
Multiple rounds of reminders: multiple rounds of continuous reminders about possible content risks through group announcements, etc.
For example, there are often currency dealers in the Web3 community. If review obligations are not fulfilled or topics such as currency dealers and virtual currency buying and selling are not avoided, community operators may also be implicated once disputes arise between community users and currency dealers over the purchase and sale of cryptocurrency, or they are suspected of criminal offenses. .
Conclusion
Whether internationally or in mainland China, Web3 communities have blossomed everywhere, but not every Web3 community can do a good job in compliance control. As the regulatory policies for Web3 in various countries and regions gradually become clearer, who knows when the Web3 community will become the next target? At least, the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong has begun to sharpen its knives on the unlicensed securities investment opinion community.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reproduced with permission from: "Deep Wave TechFlow"
Original author: Liu Honglin