david phelps on X: "I've worked with ~100 chains; I see the exact same issues."

By now, I've personally worked with ~100 chains, and I see nearly all facing the exact same issues. This is a reckoning point: juicing TVL with airdrop-farmers for exchange listings is backfiring badly. So I wanted to write a quick guide to building a chain with real users: 1. Your users are the apps that build on you. Chains are B2B2Cs, but this has been way too easy for everyone to forget, as chains have figured out that the fastest way to bootstrap traction is act as B2Cs instead—focusing on Discord and Quest strategies to directly tap into end users who will provide liquidity. But this is dangerously short-sighted. Ultimately, the only way to get actual end users who will be loyal to your chain is to get apps that will draw them. That means focusing on great *builders*, connecting them to support one another, and running campaigns *through* these apps. 2. Bots and farmers are not your end user. I can’t describe how many chains have done calls with me in the past month regretting that they pushed bots and farmers instead of real users. Some of it is by necessity: they need to get sufficient users to properly decentralize a token, and they need as many users as possible to get listings on centralized exchanges. But these are fickle users who will drain your eventual treasury, dump your token, and switch to your competitors. They are the definition of a parasite. And as long as you design for them, you’re disincentivizing real users who don’t stand a chance of competing with them for yield. See: Blast. 3. Whales are not your end user—because liquidity is overrated. Years of awful UX, exclusive focus on DeFi, obsession with liquidity, and lack of mass interest in crypto has taught everyone the same lesson: the real users are the crypto-native whales. But there are two issues with this theory. First, the whales are *mercenaries*, so they will follow the yield—you can acquire them for a few months, but they’re difficult to retain. And second, everyone has already built better for them than you will (good luck competing with @berachain’s liquidity incentives, @solana’s global composability, etc). But that’s fine. Liquidity is only a meaningful metric in DeFi and means very little in measuring mass adoption or interest. Which leads to: 4. Support mass adoption—by supporting women. The degens in the space hate when I say this because crypto has, famously, built predominantly for male financiers and tech bros (I’m probably in that latter category myself). But that market is saturated, and the real market for adoption is wide open. And this comes down to basic numbers: women drive 85% of consumer behavior today. If you want mass adoption, you need to think femme. Your immediate first step should be to partner with @shefiorg and @boysclubworld to support your apps. 5. Build a differentiated culture. With a few exceptions, nearly every chain follows near-identical architecture to one another. The way to differentiate is culture. Build memes, characters, lore, and media. Better yet, *let your users* build memes, characters, lore, and media, and reward them for doing so. This is one of the most powerful use cases for onchain contests we enable at @jokerace_io, and my dms are open. 6. Have a charismatic founder who is not afraid to be polarizing—or to work in the trenches. This is probably the biggest differentiator for chains that have succeeded over the past ten years—including the ones you hate. The founders are often beloved by their community, hated by outsiders, and work in the trenches by talking to builders, promoting their projects, and engaging in every thread and repo they can. There’s lots of ways top founders can delegate. But working with builders is not one of them. 7. Incentivize and reward *valuable* contributions. Instead of giving out points to anyone who performs a rote action on your chain, give it to people proportionate to the value they’ve contributed. Run a hackathon for devs where each vote they get is a point, so they can build an onchain resume and earn credentials even if they lose the prize money. Run a meme contest, art contest, or tweet contest where the best content earns tokens proportionate to the votes they got as well. And remember: there is no community of the best devs, the best designers, the best researchers, the best artists, or the best marketers in crypto *because no chain has ever tried to create one.* This is a major opportunity, and we enable all of the above @jokerace_io *on your own chain*. My dms are open.