Written by Tyler Web3
From Monad to Berachain to Morph, the irreplaceable role of the unique cultural symbol of the "founder" project has gradually emerged.
What role should the founder play for a Web3 project?
Is he a pure technical expert, a market promoter who is proficient in marketing, or a community expert who is good at building an atmosphere? Apart from the old industry leaders in the crypto world, over the years, there are actually very few founders of crypto projects who have been able to successfully step forward and bring practical extra points to the development of the project.
However, with the continuous penetration of the attention economy and consumer wave into the Web3 world, new projects such as Monad and Berachain have begun to gradually reflect the irreplaceable and important role of the unique cultural symbol of the "founder" project:
Founders with great personal charm or personality traits can actually serve as concrete project representatives and directly reach the widest range of (potential) community users. Even before the main network is launched, they can gather a group of loyal community users and establish a religious community atmosphere. This has almost become the core element for the success of Web3 projects in the new era.
The "role evolution" history of Web3 founders
In the Web3 world, a community is not just a collection of users, it is a culture, a belief, and a force. All community members come together because of common values and goals.
For the community, the cultural core that can effectively bring them together, in addition to the project vision, is actually the "personal charm of the founder."
We can take Gavin Wood as an example, who is also the best old example for us to observe the charismatic project founder in the early days of the Web3 industry.
Although Polkadot's project development and community governance are now under criticism, Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Polkadot, was initially most praised for his ability or charm, not just his profound technical attainments, but his excellent market insight and communication skills:
It is also for this reason that when Gavin Wood created and promoted Polkadot and concepts such as "one-click chain launch" to the market in the early days, he was able to successfully transform complex technical concepts into easy-to-understand user experience, and through effective marketing, quickly attracted the attention and participation of a large number of users and investors.
I believe that there are still many old crypto players who clearly remember the scene when Gavin Wood showed the world how to develop a blockchain in 15 minutes at the Web3 Summit in 2018. Regardless of the fact that this narrative seems commonplace now, at that time, it really made many people who didn’t understand technology feel shocked intuitively, as if a new era had begun.
This also shows that being able to enable ordinary users to understand and accept new narratives and new concepts is crucial to the promotion and development of a project. Project founders not only need to have solid technical capabilities, but also need to have keen market insight and excellent communication skills, so that they can stand out in the highly competitive market and attract more users and investors.
Now, many years have passed, and the focus of competition in the Web3 field has further shifted from technical narratives to large-scale commercial implementation. To some extent, this also means that the new generation of Web3 founders need to accurately grasp market trends and user needs in addition to technical capabilities, and communicate effectively with investors, community users, partners and other parties.
To put it bluntly, in the new wave of Web3 such as consumer DApps, the speed and breadth of information dissemination determines the influence of the project, which requires founders to be good at communicating with all parties, be able to clearly convey the value and vision of the project, attract the attention of investors, win the trust of users, and establish a solid relationship with partners.
Going further, the founders of Web3 projects need to find a delicate balance between technology, marketing and community governance to attract many believers-like community members and create an almost religious community atmosphere. This atmosphere is not blind worship, but is based on common expectations and beliefs about the future of the project, allowing everyone to unite closely and contribute to the development of the project together.
Founding talents are the “critical few” who build communities
In the Web3 field, Consumer narrative is becoming an important force driving industry change. Compared with traditional technical narrative, Consumer narrative pays more attention to user needs and experience, and requires that users be placed at the core driving force of the project. This requires a link to reach as many (potential) community users as possible and bring them together.
Berachain: From NFT Community to Blockchain Network
For the currently popular Berachain, NFT can be regarded as the origin of the project and a unique cultural symbol, because Berachain co-founder Smokey himself is a master at building a sense of community atmosphere:
In 2021, he initially jokingly expressed his desire to create 100 NFTs of bears smoking marijuana, and allow these first-generation NFTs to be continuously rebased to produce second/third-generation NFTs. This idea received a lot of attention and support, and since then it has officially started as an interesting NFT project and has been successfully distributed in the DeFi community.
This unique approach has attracted a group of people with strong technical capabilities and good communication skills. As the community continues to grow, they actively add various new gameplay mechanisms to NFT to maintain community participation.
It was during this process of community co-building that Smokey discovered a gap in the market and chose to gradually evolve from an NFT community to building a blockchain. So from this perspective, this transformation is not accidental.
Monad: The standard-bearer of “religious” community building
Objectively speaking, many Web3 projects today claim to create a unique culture and community, but only a handful of them have truly taken culture and community to the extreme, and Monad is one of the rare success stories.
In addition to the technical narrative of "EVM-compatible high-performance L1", Monad founder Keone Hon, as a typical technology-oriented founder, highly advocates true decentralization, for example, emphasizing Monad's low hardware requirements, allowing anyone to run a full node, thereby achieving true decentralization.
It is precisely because of this insistence on decentralization that Monad is able to introduce completely free Meme culture and closely integrate it with the development of the community, thus opening up a new community building paradigm for Web3 projects:
Whether it is creativity, technology, or cultural expression, as long as it is in the Monad community, it can find its place. For example, by holding various Meme creation competitions and theme activities, the creativity and participation of community members are stimulated, allowing everyone to use their imagination to contribute wonderful Meme works to the community.
These works are not only widely circulated within the community, but also attract attention from the outside world, further expanding Monad's influence. In this process, Monad has gradually formed a unique community atmosphere - giving users a sense of participation and recognition, allowing every member to feel their own value and importance.
Everyone is no longer just a user of the project, but also a creator and promoter of the project. This strong community cohesion has also helped Monad to have a greater market voice than most heavyweight players even before the mainnet is launched.
AI-generated Morph joint creation?
Interestingly, someone on Twitter previously posted a questioning post against Morph founder and CEO Cecilia Hsueh, and the questioning angle now seems almost "outrageous" - he believes that Cecilia is perfect in every aspect, almost like a "hexagonal warrior", so he suspects that she is an "AI-generated CEO."
Of course, with Cecilia Hsueh's subsequent appearance at offline events such as "Consumer Day" in Singapore, the doubts naturally disappeared, but it also reflected a new era of Web3 founder paradox: people's expectations and standards for founders are getting higher and higher, so that when a founder demonstrates abilities and charm that surpass ordinary people or even "perfect", it will instead cause doubts.
On the one hand, this outrageous doubt actually stems from Cecilia's overly active performance on Twitter and her posts of various styles. She is more like a "Morph Chief Community Officer". Not only does she give people the illusion of maintaining close communication with developers and users 24/7, but she also frequently publishes the latest developments, industry insights and personal opinions on Morph and consumer applications.
Although the Web3 industry has seen the emergence of many outstanding female practitioners, as one of the few female CEOs, especially the only female CEO in the L2 track, Cecilia Hsueh will naturally receive more attention and scrutiny. After all, in traditional concepts, women's breakthroughs and achievements in the field of science and technology are more likely to be questioned.
So serial entrepreneurs like Cecilia, who just entered the Web3 industry, participated in the establishment of an exchange with trading volume ranking among the top five in the world. Her second entrepreneurial project, Morph, directly touched the top industry resources and the largest user groups such as Dragonfly, Pantera, Bitget, Spartan Ventures, Foresight Ventures, etc., which are innate advantages that many L2 projects do not have. It is no wonder that some people may think that her success is too "perfect" to be real.
On the other hand, this is also a requirement that all Web3 projects that want to deploy consumer applications will inevitably face.
For projects like Morph that take "consumer applications" as their core narrative, whether it is to meet the user's demand for the application of Web3 in daily life, or to help developers more conveniently develop consumer applications based on Web3, the founders need to start from the perspective of the market and users, build trust through interaction with the public, and formulate and synchronize strategies that are more in line with actual needs.
Only in this way can a friendly and approachable community culture be formed, attracting users to participate in and test consumer products and enhancing user stickiness. So in fact, Cecilia frequently shares her insights through social media, offline events and public speeches, explaining how Morph brings value to users and developers. This should be due to this consideration.
Notes
High-performance L1, L1 based on Cosmos SDK, consumer-grade public chain. If we only look at these three labels, Monad, Berachain, and Morph seem to be just ordinary members of a group of uninspiring crypto projects.
It’s just that when it comes to Web3, people tend to focus too much on the technical narrative and forget that a strong ecosystem and community can actually act as a catalyst. In this process, the founder, as the soul of the project, plays an irreplaceable role.
Not long ago, with the upcoming Morph mainnet, Cecilia publicly stated, "I asked the team at which stage of the project the mainnet should be launched, in the initial stage of the project or after the project has progressed to a certain extent? Because many infrastructure projects in Crypto will choose to continuously postpone the mainnet (or even the testnet) and the release of tokens, because they don't know what else can be built for the long term after the release. As long as it is not launched, it will not be falsified, and you can continue to raise funds and attract users to interact. Finally, I asked a question, do you believe that you can serve Consumer Users in the long run? The answers I got were surprisingly unified, so we decided to choose another path and launch the mainnet once the technology is ready."
Ultimately, Cecilia believes that technology must be "useful" - letting users know that it is "useful" first, and then being willing to take the initiative to try it and truly agree that it is "useful" is the key to breaking through the Web3 narrative, and the founder is the core element in promoting the implementation of this culture.
Let us look forward to the Web3 revolution led by the new generation of Founders.
