How This Blockchain Community Grew From 0 — 41,000 People in Under 70 Days
What happens when two guys, a slack channel and a disruptive blockchain idea bring 41,000 people from around the world together.
A couple months ago, I met Rory O'Reilly and Kieran O'Reilly, founders of Gifs.com at a friend’s son’s birthday party. Amidst some bantering over watches and the latest tech news, Rory mentioned how they were about to take on MTurk through a new blockchain platform.
For those unfamiliar with MTurk, it’s short for Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform that bridges businesses and individuals to coordinate over tasks that require human intelligence. Such tasks can involve finding a cat amongst pictures, typing out text from pictures and translating small sentence fragments.
Rory and Kieran, seeing the flaws with the current MTurk-ing platform, took on the challenge of building an alternative solution using the blockchain. Their aim was to build a more efficient system that eliminated unnecessary fees, lowered the barrier of entry for microtasking and had a better user experience.
They called it the Gems Protocol.
When Gems launched on November 2nd, 2017, there were roughly 40 members in the community.
On December 2nd, there were 769 members. The community switched over to Telegram.
Today, there are over 41,000 members (update: between the time spent writing and posting this, the group reached 41K from 40K and is the second-largest Telegram group in the world after Ripple — although they may surpass Ripple by end of day).
Over the course of 2 months, the Gems community grew exponentially — in what you would call the classic hockey stick pattern.
What happened?
Moreover, why did that happen?
The news spread softly at first, either through word-of-mouth or through internet searches. Gems was also publishing articles of MTurk and their vision through their Medium blog.
At some point, the interest exploded. I wasn’t able to record that moment unfortunately, but here are a few of my guesses on what might have happened:
Advisor Power
The addition of Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter and Medium, as an advisor may have contributed to the increase of 1000 members over the course of 7 days between December 19th and December 27th, as well as the growth thereafter.
Cryptocraze
Part of it could be attributed to the sudden crypto-craze, where everyone and their mother wants to invest in cryptocurrencies that could make them stupid rich overnight. Perhaps everyone sees the huge number of people joining the community and can imagine how much Gems could rise in value; therefore, they want to get in on the token while it’s price is low so that they can HODL it (misspelled meme for “hold”; also stands for “Hold On for Dear Life”) and then sell it off when it’s high. This makes sense because cryptocurrency is literally willed into existence, from nothing to something, through sheer demand.
The crypto-craze factor is also evident in the level of participation since Gems opened up their Community Program Application, inviting members to share their contributions to the community. The purpose of this application was to determine who would be accepted into the pre-sale. The result was a whole lot of FOMO and frantic messages of community support to prove evidence of contribution. On the last day of the application period, the Telegram chat was raking in an average of 1000–2000 messages per hour. Two days after the applications closed, there were about 300–400 messages an hour. While that’s still a substantial amount, perhaps the spike in numbers can be attributed to the FOMO frenzy associated with the buy-low sell-high get-rich scheme.
Best Example A of This Trend: Bitcoin going from $0.08 in July 2010 to hitting $20,000 on December 18, 2017 (Bitcoins) because of increased interest in the cryptocurrency, and people HODLing it.
Somewhat of an Example B: UPCoin’s telegram has over 32,000 members; with that being said, they’re not offering any tokens but are offering 500$ in trading fees to the first 100,000 beta-testers who register. The majority might be drawn to this. However, members aren’t allowed to post in the chat group so it’s difficult to gauge the level of engagement.
The Vision
But most likely, people believe in the vision and the people behind it. Even the ones willing to invest with the hopes of winning the crypto-lottery have to believe in this, because they wouldn’t put in their money if they didn’t see the potential of what it could be.
There’s more to this conversation than two brothers challenging the current MTurk status quo. What gets people excited is the possibility that people in emerging economies can make money without owning bank accounts; that people doing micro-tasks don’t have to deal with middle men taking away a portion of their earnings; and that all of a sudden, there is a platform where nation-states, borders, governance and socio-economic status don’t dictate how you can participate in the world economy.
If anything, what really brings in 40,000 people together in this virtual room is the belief that the Gems Protocol can create a paradigm shift in the economics of wealth distribution.
But There Are Others!
Indeed, Gems isn’t the only blockchain protocol trying to create that paradigm shift. In fact, probably every and any blockchain protocol is attempting to do the same and at this point in the blockchain era, any company successfully executing their product probably will disrupt whatever field they’re in.
There are blockchain companies changing how people vote, pushing for open organizations and building a world computer.
Yet, it’s making its way up as the most populated telegram group, coming close to surpassing Ripple having already surpassed Electroneum. Ripple makes it easy to make global payments and Electroneum provides super secure wallets for cryptocurrency —and both of them are already launched services.
And while it’s hard to measure what the level of engagement has been with the actual product (because it doesn’t exist yet), the Gems Alpha was just released two days ago on Testnet and already, it has gotten over 100,000 tasks completed.
There’s a sense of belonging and ownership to the project that keeps people coming back for more. Is it because people feel like they are part of building something together? What differentiates it from other pre-toke sale groups in terms of how people are supporting and interacting with it?
After looking at these other early stage companies listed as the ones to look out for in 2018, I noticed a significantly lower number of community members in their Telegram groups.
While many factors could be affecting these numbers, it still raises the question of why Gems is so popping all of the time.
Engaged Founders + Moderaters
To start, the founders are really participatory, engaging and receptive towards the community. It promotes a positive and respective culture that gets passed on even after thousands of more people have joined.
Normally, the more people there are in a virtual group, the less people are likely to participate (Blair, Thompson & Wuensch, 2010). Yet in the Gems group, hundreds of thousands of messages later, there’s relatively very little spam, consistent levels of Q&A and a sh*t ton of excitement; albeit really difficult to have deeper discussions because everyone is sending a message every second.
Perhaps the rapid message cycles make it easier for people to post comments fearlessly because they will receive just enough attention without being in the spotlight. Yet, people are keeping up with most messages being written, establishing actual dialogues amidst flurries of texts. It’s a fascinating online dynamic of 40,000 people.
There’s also research that the presence of a known figure makes a difference in how people participate in virtual environments. As this study shows, “in the absence of social controls, such as a monitor, negative intergroup attitudes can surface” (Tynes, Reynolds, Greenfield, 2004).
“Rory is the true definition of CE0.000.000”
— Chat Participant
Whether it’s responding to 1478 members or to 39910 people, Rory is constantly present and positive in the community. Besides him, there are several other moderators and frequent participants with the same attitude. It almost feels like there is a familiarity and underlying respect for each other because of these presences, henceforth fueling a stable community where people can be open and active.
Fun Community
As a result, people enjoy being a part of the community and contributing to the group. There’s a sense of unity and camaraderie in the group, to the point where every 1K milestone has launched GIF parties where everyone posts a celebratory GIF (although this has now been ceased due to how overwhelming 40,000 people’s GIF posts would be).
Either way, people are hyped up because they’re part of something bigger and tied to thousands of other people through it.
Different Application of Blockchain
What could add to the X-Factor is that Gems is addressing a different set of problems from the majority of blockchain companies out there.
In the current market, the majority of the top 100 blockchain companies of 2017 focus on finance, exchanges and development.
MTurk-ing is a relatively obscure concept that didn’t seem as exciting before Gems came along. In how the problem and the purpose is conveyed, through beautiful visuals in an easy-to-understand way (watch video here), the perception of how blockchain could be used to give access to unbanked people and benefits to businesses has shifted.
The conversation no longer focuses on only the price of tokens or the exchange; but rather, about the potential to disrupt how people work, in a really simple, tangible way. There’s nothing about building a new world or creating a new economy. There are no new practices or behaviors being adopted. Rather, it’s a flawed system being transformed into a more equitable infrastructure via blockchain.
The idea is so easy to adopt and feel empathy for, and putting aside the crypto thirsty folks, there is genuine reverence for a platform that will execute on this.
The Questions
However, there will always be questions that challenge this growth and the validity of Gems amidst the hype. Some question whether it’s overhyped; while some are curious about the technology it will be built on and who will be working on the development.
The first question can be especially relevant with the increase of newcomers in the community who know less about Gems. Many enter the chatroom asking what Gems is, whether they’ve made it into the Whitelist and where the tokens are available. There is a redundancy of answers, an inevitable symptom of a chat room that is growing and updating faster than it can informing people. To balance this though, the moderators and admin have been solid in redirecting people to the subReddit group and the Announcement channel. As a result, non-moderators have taken up to redirecting people to these channels and answering questions where they can as well.
Part of managing the hype is keeping people informed and educated on what’s happening. When people are smart about something, they buy into it with intention, not because 10,000 other people are doing the same. The group has been consistent in keeping information accessible, as well as actually teaching each other tidbits that could make a difference in how people engage with Gems. This applies for questions around the tech as well and how Gems will be built. Questions have been asked, and questions have been answered.
It’s hard to speculate what the next week or even day will look like for the Gems community, but with the current trajectory and culture surrounding the protocol, it’s clear that there will be something to be excited for.
After all, as one member writes:
And 40K of lovers will go a bit of ways away.
This is my perspective on the Gems growth and is not affiliated to official research or content produced by Gems. Visit Gems to learn more.
Much thanks to Rory O'Reilly and Kieran O'Reilly for supporting this article, and Matthew Lock for edits.
This article is part of Building Blockchain, where we make it easier to understand blockchain from the ground up.
