#10 Community Is The New Moat

This post is titled “#10” because I got the thought that “Community Is The New Moat” via First Round’s “State of The Startup 2019”, in which the 10th insight noted:

Nearly 80% of founders reported building a community of users as important to their business, with 28% describing it as their moat and critical to their success. You can read more about building your own thriving community here.

I’ve long held that community is the defining characteristic of crypto. As my crypto framework evolved, I published 5 More Thoughts On Crypto After Another Five Months Down The Rabbit Hole. The first new thought was “Community Is A Major Differentiating Factor In Crypto”. I had come to realize that when communities work, everyone gets more out of them then they put in. Our own decentralized community, CryptoMondays, was growing rapidly, because everyone gets more out of it than they put in. We started more Meetups in the areas we wanted to drive crypto thought leadership, including Token Economics, Governance & Consensus, and Social Good.

We’ve also started operating the NYC chapters of other communites, most notably DAOfest NYC, with Chainlink NYC next to follow.

I had no idea that community was so important outside of crypto. But within crypto, I believe it is the core factor driving success of projects. In fact, if you were to look at the top performing of the 10 largest tokens by market cap, Tezos had, by far, the biggest gain on the year, up more than 200%

Binance was #2, at just half the gain of Tezos. Of all cryptocurrency, outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, I believe that Tezos has the strongest community. This is based on my own personal experience, which includes attending Tezos’ TQuorom global summits in Paris and NYC this year and seeing the community in action. It’s incredibly impressive.

So this post is just a friendly reminder to the crypto ecosystem that community is a thing, THE thing, and not just in crypto, but especially in crypto.