随着社区塑造其演变，加密项目拥抱新范式

加密货币最初被认为是一种中央银行或政府无法控制的去中心化货币形式，但自 2009 年比特币诞生以来，它的发展已经远远超出了这一愿景。

如今，加密货币代表了一场全球运动，该运动是由围绕其最具创新性的项目涌现的数千个专门社区推动的。

我们在行业中随处可见它，从本来只是玩笑的模因币，到正在打造去中心化金融未来的去中心化自治组织或 DAO 的形成。

加密货币的社区精神也许最好地体现在狗狗币及其衍生品柴犬币等模因币的忠实支持者身上。

虽然这些代币在首次崭露头角时被视为笑话，但由于周围社区的大力支持，它们拒绝消亡，并已跻身行业顶级数字资产之列。

Meme 币拥有一些加密领域最热情的粉丝，它们促进了社区的发展，这些社区庆祝他们最喜欢的代币的幽默起源。

社区成员的一个共同点是他们对加密货币潜力的共同信念，这有助于推动狗狗币和柴犬的大量采用。

DAO 推动决策

随着 DAO 的出现，许多加密项目背后的社区变得更加组织化，DAO 提供了一个结构化框架，支持者可以通过该框架集体做出决策。

DAO 通常是为社区创建的，以决定如何使用加密项目的资金，但他们的决定不仅限于财务问题 - 如今，它们通常还指导项目的未来方向，成员对新规则进行投票，倡议等等。

Polkadot 社区最近通过 Polkadot 的第一个模因币 $DED 的工作例证了这一想法。

“$DED 代币确实证明了社区成员掌舵可以取得的成就。

专门的 Polkadot 社区以完全无需许可、去中心化和透明的方式从头开始构建了这个项目，同时带回了许多 Meme 币本身成功的乐趣和奇思妙想。”DOT 活动家和 $DED 的 Giotto De Filippi 说道硬币爱好者。

DAO 通过动员每个项目背后的支持者和贡献者社区来获得力量。

通过这样做，他们能够创建一个系统，任何人都可以通过该系统提交提案供整个社区投票。

投票主题包括支持哪些慈善机构、下一步要启用哪些功能以及哪些分支项目应该从财政部获得资金等，这些主题通常由加密货币社区进行。

Innovation, Transparency & Adaptability

The democratic decision-making processes in community-driven governance ensure greater inclusivity and the consideration of more diverse perspectives that can aid significantly in a project’s evolution, boosting innovation.

Andrea Lerdo, Managing Director at Palm Foundation, said that when the community feels genuinely involved in decision-making, it fosters a deeper sense of ownership and commitment to its success. Palm Foundation is a DAO that drives the development of Palm Network, and its primary goal is to empower traditionally overlooked creative communities in the blockchain industry. Powered by the $PALM token, the Palm Network is all about enabling creators and artists to mint more energy-efficient NFTs with lower gas fees and rapid transaction finality. The project has been quite successful, with more than 3 million NFTs minted by creatives on the Palm network thus far. It has grown into a sizable community, with more than 1 million wallet addresses and growing.

“The transparency inherent in decentralized systems, especially with blockchain technology and smart contracts, further augments the community’s impact,” Lerdo said. “Every stakeholder can see and verify the decision-making process, enhancing trust and accountability. This openness not only attracts more participation but also instills confidence in the project’s direction among both current and potential members.”

Besides innovation and transparency, community-led projects are also more adaptable, Lerdo believes. She said decentralized governance models are inherently flexible, which allows projects to quickly evolve in response to any challenges or new opportunities. “This agility is crucial in the fast-paced, ever-changing world of digital technologies, where being able to pivot or adapt rapidly can be a significant advantage,” she said.

Community-Led Products

Within crypto ecosystems, the voice of the community has never been more relevant, and that holds true for almost every project, even those without an official DAO. Take Nexo, which started out back in 2018 as a pioneering lending platform, introducing the concept of crypto credit lines to the industry. The platform experienced rapid growth and quickly spawned an entire ecosystem of crypto finance products, with a wallet and exchange platform that allows users to buy, sell, trade and borrow against their digital assets. At the last count, Nexo said it has grown its user base to more than four million worldwide.

Nexo understands the concept of catering to its community, and its users have proven to be instrumental in its decision to rethink the four timeless ways people use money – which Nexo defines as investing, earning, spending and borrowing. Elitsa Taskova, Chief Product Officer at Nexo, said that while the customer was always king in Web2, with Web3 it’s the community that reigns instead.

“In the case of projects structured as a DAO, this entails community participation in every stage of the process, voting on key proposals, grants, treasury management, and protocol upgrades,” Taskova explained. “But crypto projects that are traditionally incorporated can also successfully use this playbook to engender more engaged, motivated, and cohesive communities.”

This is exactly what Nexo did over the last year, remodeling its products around the four essential ways people use money, Taskova explained. “[People use money] to invest, earn, spend and borrow,” she said.

All told, it transformed an incredible 24,500 user requests from 22,357 individuals into new features and functionality across each of its main products. “This created a community-driven offering that directly reflects users’ needs,” Taskova continued. “We refined every little bit so that it fits into people’s everyday lives and solves a specific problem they’ve previously experienced.”

On the investing side, Nexo launched a lighter version of the Nexo Exchange to enable users to trade on the go, while introducing futures trading, dollar-cost averaging and high-performance crypto bundles, following user requests.

Nexo also gave its users a more reliable way to earn a passive income, with an industry-leading 16% APY on stablecoins, while adding support for more crypto assets on its popular Nexo Card, which allows users to spend crypto directly. Other community-inspired innovations include new tax reporting tools, and the introduction of low-interest borrowing.

DeFi’s Future Dictated By Users

Communities are also playing a pivotal role in the evolution of DeFi, with DAO-based voting mechanisms influencing the strategies of popular protocols such as Uniswap, MakerDAO and Synthetix. In the case of Uniswap, a controversial vote earlier this year went against the wishes of its developers. The team behind Uniswap proposed introducing a protocol fee for liquidity providers, but the community voted to reject the idea, and the developers had no choice but to accept the wishes of the majority.

Meanwhile, MakerDAO’s growth strategy has seen it diversify into traditional assets as well as crypto at the direction of its community. In a recent development, MakerDAO added a new real-world asset vault called BlockTower Andromeda, which will invest over $1.2 billion into short-term U.S. Treasury bonds. The move followed a community vote, where the majority deemed fit to diversify the assets backing MakerDAO’s $5 billion market cap stablecoin, DAI.

As for Synthetix, its community voted this year to transfer customer funds from the original version of its protocol to its latest iteration, Synthetix v2. The decision highlights how communities are even shaping future platform updates, which was something that was traditionally decided by developers alone.

“The primary motivation is to enforce sunsetting of outstanding positions in PerpsV1 in the least intrusive manner, leaving enough time for accounts with existing positions to close their positions,” the proposal read.

What About The Downsides?

Although Palm Foundation’s Lerdo speaks for one of the crypto industry’s more successful DAOs, she admits that there are some tradeoffs versus the centralized governance model. In particular, one of the main challenges projects must overcome is voter apathy. Some projects struggle to engage a wide enough array of participants in the decision-making process, she said.

“Factors such as the complexity of issues, lack of incentives and information overload can lead to low participation rates, leaving important decisions to a small and possibly unrepresentative portion of the community,” Lerdo said.

Another well publicized risk of DAO-based governance is that key votes can be manipulated by a minority that has more significant resources. According to Lerdo, this is especially true with communities that utilize a fairly basic token-based voting system where voting power correlates directly with the number of tokens people hold. “This can sometimes lead to decisions that favor the interests of a few rather than the broader community,” she warned.

Finally, Lerdo conceded that decentralized governance is sometimes less efficient than centralized models. The problem is that ideas and proposals can be debated for a long time until a consensus is reached. This is especially true for larger and more diverse communities, Lerdo pointed out, adding that “it can be time consuming and may lead to delays in decision-making, causing challenges in situations requiring swift action.”

Community Empowerment Is A Growing Force

Such challenges cannot be ignored, but it has become clear that the crypto industry is largely in favor of decentralized governance models. As we enter 2024, community empowerment is a rising trend that’s likely to shape the crypto industry going forward.

More than ever before, the future of crypto projects is being dictated primarily by their users, and most will agree this is a positive development for an industry that prizes decentralization. After all, communities serve as the lifeblood of every single blockchain, protocol and dApp. Without an enthusiastic user base, no crypto project would stand the test of time, and so it’s only right that these communities have their say.

“Crypto’s strength lies in its ability to remove barriers between platforms and their users and grant everyone the right to transact and interact freely,” Nexo’s Taskova said. “In 2024, the crypto companies and projects that embody this ethos – placing community at their core – are the ones that will thrive.”

标签：加密 社区 项目