Gaming the System: Mastering Engagement in Web3

One of the biggest problems facing projects in Web3 isn’t technical hurdles; it’s engagement. There are hundreds of shortcuts and thousands of pieces of advice about how to get traction, but it’s still a considerable challenge, so what’s going wrong?

Undoubtedly, the best way to gain exposure in crypto is still X. It’s an unforgiving and crowded channel with hundreds of projects vying for attention. Standing out isn’t as easy as many believe.

Web3 is still a relatively new industry, and the present market conditions mean fewer people are around to discover new projects. Everyone is chasing the viral breakthrough that memecoins like Pepe seemed to get.

However, a critical factor in Pepe’s success was that it was heavily promoted by well connected people in the space. Their success was less viral and more predetermined because of the people pushing it to the top of the attention ladder.

Without understanding this point, many projects waste time and money trying to recreate their success. Going viral takes a tremendous amount of time and effort or some excellent connections; there’s no shortcut.

If you don’t have the connections, there’s no better way than rolling your sleeves up and getting on with the grind of steadily building your project’s reputation. One of the most popular ways of doing this is through giveaways.

Scrolling through X, it’s easy to find people promising airdrops and tokens in exchange for liking, following, and reposting their content. As a strategy, this is one of the foundations for gaining more traction.

However, like all good things, it can be overused, and since Elon added monetization to X, it has been. The problem with copying a simple strategy that’s been overused is that people easily switch their attention off.

They may have seen too many similar offers, or they may not believe that anyone will win the prize. These are significant issues for early stage projects because they lack visibility and trust. So, how do they make their giveaway campaigns stand out?

That’s precisely the problem that Zesh Portal is being built to address. We’re solving this with two main factors – gamification and traceable rewards.

Gamification increases user engagement with campaigns. It takes the basic framework of the reward strategy and adds depth and color to it because we understand that rewards need to be more than financial.

A basic reward giveaway is like working at a job just for the money. It satisfies an essential need but doesn’t do much more than that, which is why low-skilled jobs have staff retention problems.

It’s no different with reward campaigns. If people are engaging just for the financial incentive, projects are caught in a recurring loop of trying to draw more people in to balance the ones that are leaving. Growth turns into survival.

Gamification adds that extra layer of engagement; it gives users a dopamine hit even if they don’t get a financial reward, which keeps them engaged. It’s the difference between doing a job for the money or a job you love.

Traceability of rewards is also crucial so that people know it’s not just hype. They can see who was rewarded on the blockchain and know that although they didn’t receive anything, someone else did.

Understanding fundamental human factors and building them into our reward campaign app is just one of the reasons that Zesh Portal will stand out from other Web3 approaches to engagement. Our CEO, Marius, has a wealth of experience building online communities and knows firsthand how to get and keep people engaged.

As the market heats up, more projects will be vying for attention and need powerful tools to help grow their communities. The timing is perfect for Zesh, and we can’t wait to start helping the Web3 ecosystem flourish.