Elk Weekly Recap — #11

Elk Season, our popular community event, kicked off this week. Read below for details on how to earn $ELK and NFTs, along with other happenings…

• Olive Cash launched two ELK pools, this time on Avalanche: an ELK-AVAX pool that earns OLIVE, and a single-sided OLIVE pool that earns ELK
• Elk ranked #4 on Avalanche and #3 on Fantom for TVL growth over the last 7 days
• Elk Season 2: The Network Effect, a five-week community event with weekly airdrops, exclusive NFTs, and more, is underway. Register here to join the fun!
• All About Crypto, the Elk.Finance Podcast, released a new episode covering Impermanent Loss
• Trader Joe (Avalanche) and Elk launched a trade & farm competition with $5,000 in prizes over the next two weeks

When people ask what sets Elk apart from other projects, there are usually a wide range of answers: an truly reliable cross-chain bridge, impermanent loss protection covering every farm, 42-day farming cycles, value-added NFTs, an ambitious roadmap based on our inevitable multi-chain future. Ask any of us on the team, however, and you’re likely to get a different answer: the community.

Crypto projects live and die by the strength of their communities. The most cutting-edge technology in the space is destined to wither on the vine (or, what’s more likely, get cloned) if it doesn’t have a solid community to lift it up and spread the good word. A strong and supportive community is especially critical as the DeFi landscape becomes denser and harder to navigate by the day. Community is the key metric for project longevity, since it can carry a project through moments of market instability, when so many projects fall by the wayside.

Elk will be around for the long haul, and more than anything that’s a function of our community. Like the Dude, the #ElkHerd abides. One of the amazing effects of this strong community is that many of our recent and forthcoming partnerships now come from word-of-mouth. When we were just starting out, we would spend hours looking for potential partnerships. Now, more often than not, partners come directly to us. Typically, it’s a dev or a project lead who mentions that folks in their Telegram or Discord were touting this project called Elk. That’s a special kind of marketing that can’t be bought. As in life, a few good friends is generally worth more than dozens of casual acquaintances.

To show our love for the community, this week we launched the second version of Elk Season, a fun and popular community-building campaign that rewards people for getting involved in all sorts of ways. We learned firsthand the importance of quality over quantity in the first hours. Our Elk Season announcement included the atomic hashtag #airdrop, and like clockwork thousands of users flooded our Discord. We’ve seen other projects use similar strategies to inflate their social metrics, but this is an approach we decided very early in our development that we would avoid, despite whatever numbers we‘d be able to boast.

We remain steadfast in our approach and our conviction that people =/= numbers. Our numbers continue to swell, but they represent a real community that’s earned rather than bought (or bot’d, as the case may be). We approach our community the same way we approach our technical products: creating something that’s built to last. That’s how Elk win.

• Single staking pools are set to launch tomorrow (Tuesday) at 2pm UTC across all networks
• The final strong holder airdrops will be distributed around the same time
• AMA with HashEx, the security firm that audited our contracts, tomorrow at 5pm UTC on Elk Discord.
• More Elk Season challenges and events to be announced!