Guild has stratified countless communities with their framework of Role, Requirements and Rewards, ranging from Uniswap, LivePeer, Seed Club, Lens Protocol and Base, Lil Nouns to new a few. Checkout their list of guilds here.

Reka, the Co-founder of Guild, has seen the evolution of crypto communities from large DAOs → PFP communities -→ crypto curious online communities.

Today, Reka observes communities balancing rewards with lasting engagement.

Guild envisions a future of interest-driven communities and contextual, anonymous interactions driven by GenAlpha focused on defining value and crafting the right vibe.

Let’s dive in ↓

NFTs hit the scene in 2021, and then consumer behavior really started to happen over the last 6 months. Could you dive deeper into how Guild was a bridge between that era in 2021 to now? How have communities transformed over that time?

Reka: The granularity of NFTs became instrumental in the formation of communities. This gave rise to the cultivation of culture, reputation, wealth, and relationships centered around on-chain assets, primarily focusing on ERC-721s initially, and later expanding to include 1155s as well.

That's what we predicted when we launched the product in its first format. We saw that the ERC-20 standard is gonna die down because of regulatory issues, but also the interesting aspect of having to provide liquidity. It's a bit more difficult playing field. There needs to be something simpler, and NFTs provide that.

It was interesting to work with these communities when at that time everyone was selling NFTs and building lore around it. It was hard to decipher if it's actually meaningful or a rug, and that's when the vibe economy also started.

It became incredibly important to stand out as an NFT project or community. They needed to focus on the brand, the message, the events, and activations they were doing. So during that time with Guild, we doubled down on satisfying these queries cause, interestingly enough, the metadata that the NFTs use are not all on chain, they're scattered everywhere. We worked closely with these communities and they had pretty simple needs.

It was interesting to see that shift more into governance, structures, and how they try to mature. I was participating in a lot of panels and conversations around fair compensation cause it was a mess. A lot of people did not pay moderators in these servers. There was so much uncharted territory that these communities were selling on. I'm glad we took some of the learnings from that.

Can you provide examples of early or power user communities on Guild and the benefits that Guild enabled for them?

Reka: So initially, the first types of communities that started using Guild were the token-focused and NFT-focused communities. Then it shifted towards more DAOs. Amongst the few first DAOs that started using Guild were Krause House, Seed Club, Forefront, DAO Masters - so smaller focused communities. Now we work mostly with L1’s, L2’s, and bigger defi projects, and it's a much different landscape.

It's much less of the small ones and genuinely the big ones that stuck around and have the power to keep an active community around and focus their time, effort, and energy on it. With the Guild model of requirements, roles and rewards, many different use cases can be satisfied with this flexible system.

A good example might be Linea; they just recently had a campaign where they used Guild to identify members who have met specific criteria that then can continue into a different platform in a different section of the campaign. So out of their hundreds of thousands of members in their community, they managed to find a very specific niche of the subgroup that they actually wanna activate and target with their next phase of the community campaign.

The next one, PoolTogether, is interesting. It's also a longstanding community. They're smaller, but they are so active. They want to become number one in the Optimism governance stack and delegation.

What they did is they narrowed down their community into finding people who have been going to the events for years, have gotten the NFT, and have been active in governance before. These were the three requirements to get this role to be able to see a Google document where they could apply. They found a couple hundred members that then became active. The PoolTogether community became a big delegate in the Optimism governance stack.

What unexpected insights have you gained from developing for the mentioned use cases, such as Optimism and Uniswap loyalty?

Reka: What has been interesting to see is the space shifted so much towards growth. There's so much tooling and practices that are strictly focused on growth. So completing a task, getting a reward fast, and then not even caring about what the community's about or their longevity or partaking in any other activities they might have, working with these communities, building out these programs, campaigns, and membership structures, was heartwarming. Also kind of sad to see how much less percentage of the community sticks around for the long haul and how much only participate in the growth.

But I do think with every bear market or growth cycle that we go through as a collective, there's always the people who are lurkers or farmers right now; I don't wanna diminish them at all because I think they are the ones that if they spend enough time in the space, they'll find something that they like and will stick around and educate themselves enough to be partaking in these communities.

What's your vision for the future of online communities over the next decade, their global impact, and the role that Guild will play?

Reka: What's gonna grow is the super niche, small contextual communities, and the generation that's coming to the internet much more actively, genalpha. They are happy not showing their face, voice, or just being avatars. That attitude is gonna be much more prevalent. We're gonna have very interest-oriented, contextual small groups where people partake anonymously. What early DAOs and investment communities in crypto started to establish, we built the infrastructure for that.

They had the need for these types of interactions where they have something that they're working towards. We built the tooling and infra for all of that to satisfy, and now comes this new wave of style of communities that are not crypto-native but have the same need in a very different way.

That's where we come in as more of a tool and infrastructure. What we collectively are building in crypto right now, like the roll-ups, the infra we're building, account extraction, etc. The ecosystems are becoming so complex, which I do think it's gonna allow much more niche consumer behavior-specific use cases to form.

In terms of these small, niched interest-based communities, that's where we can help a lot. The other end of the fork, which is this small, little anonymous niche, tiny deep connection communities. The other end is gonna be a different breed of audience-style communication.

Similar to one-to-many communication in current crypto practices, we often engage with DAOs, contributor teams, and communities, connecting with hundreds of thousands of participants across ecosystems, including our own guild.There's hundreds of thousands of people in it, and it's four of us talking most of the time.

With these, I don't see as clearly as with the small ones where the trends are going. I do feel the more value-driven back-and-forth style of communication is gonna evolve in the bigger audience type of communication. So a brand that's communicating, or a small team that's representing a company mission or project communicating to a large audience.

Right now, it's one-directional, like fully megaphone. You're standing on stage and screaming to your audience something that they might wanna hear. Hopefully, they do, and I think that's gonna transform. Especially with our tech, it's gonna transform into a much more bi-directional conversation and a much clearer value proposition from both directions. That's gonna result in healthier relationships and alignment, whatever that might be. But more interest in mission, passion, curiosity-based. Those two avenues are how things are gonna change.

With Guild we're building for both of these for sure. To enable, at least on the tech side permissionless and quick. The crypto tech and the infra needs to sit in the back. These value exchanges have to sit in the front, and people don't need to care too deeply what tech they use underneath. They need to care about these relationships and the value that they provide each other much more. We need to build more apps that facilitate that, and hopefully, that's where the consumer side of crypto is going right now. At least I've heard the need for this, and I fully support that.

I hope that's where we build on all these massive infrastructure that we have already and their collisions and interoperability. I hope we build consumer apps that facilitate and encourage these connections.

Experience the future with Guild.xyz, your gateway to limitless access management. Craft memberships that travel with you, shaping social connections around both on and off chain demands. Unleash unparalleled user journeys across diverse apps, and embark on a transformative adventure in digital connectivity!

Lore is the ownership platform. Lore helps groups spin up a shared vault, pool resources, co-purchase NFTs, and use them together in a simple, safe, one-stop-shop platform. With co-ownership, collectives can access NFTs they couldn’t before, crowdfund creative projects and even play web3 games together.

If you’d like to share community-building insights with us, reach out on Twitter to join the Shared Stakes show.