Building a Thriving Web3 Community Using Dunbar's Number

Everyone knows the value of a thriving community when it comes to launching a blockchain project but, many (if not most) face a critical challenge: maintaining meaningful connections and engagement as they grow....or more fundamentally, growing at all.

In mid-2019, research by NonFungible.com identified about 44,075 unique active addresses across all 14 projects. There were more on waiting lists or hanging out in various discord communities waiting for something meaningful to happen.

By 2022, MarketsandMarkets found that games like Alien Worlds and Splinterlands had average daily unique active wallets (UAWs) of 190,770 and 159,522, respectively. However, these numbers are exceptions rather than the average.

The reason for the slowing growth in many Web3 communities relates to something called Dunbar's number —the cognitive limit of around 150 stable social relationships that humans can maintain.

The Challenge of Scale

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research reveals that human cognitive capacity limits our ability to maintain genuine relationships beyond approximately 150 people. This presents a significant challenge for blockchain communities, where effective governance, technical collaboration, and community engagement are mission-critical for project success. Even with a couple dozen community ambassadors and moderators, driving adoption, engagement, and retention can be challenging.

Breaking Through the Barrier

Research suggests that you can implement them in your blockchain community:

1. Implement Strategic Sub-grouping

The most successful blockchain communities have adopted a structured approach to growth by creating focused sub-groups. For instance, many Discord servers in the DeFi space organize their communities into specialized channels for developers, governance participants, and general community members. This approach allows for more intimate connections while maintaining the broader community structure. To manage bandwidth, many AI projects on Discord will create multiples. For instance, in Midjourney you will see several "Newbies" channels. The marketing takeaway here is to use these sub-groups for sorting and segmentation —steering high value participants into specific groups (perhaps even token-gated ones), creators into various groups who are then assisted in dispersing their creations throughout the broader community, etc.

2. Leverage Tokenization for Engagement

Tokenization is a powerful tool for scaling community engagement. Token-based incentives are great rewards for active participation and contribution but again, they can also be used to token-gate sub-communities creating groups within groups and providing a sense of advancement for those pursuing desirable behaviors. This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where community members are motivated to participate meaningfully, even as the community grows larger. And, that momentum allows each community member to build their own mini-Dunbar within the whole.

For example, successful DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) use governance tokens to ensure that community members remain engaged in decision-making processes, effectively maintaining participation even with thousands of members.

3. Establish Clear Leadership Structures

Yes, keep the democratizing feel of DAOs but creating a multi-tiered leadership structure helps maintain community cohesion. While you definitely want to reward whales who invest heavily, also advance those who actively participate with their time. Consider implementing:

• Community moderators for different time zones and languages
• Technical advisors for development-related discussions
• Governance facilitators for decision-making processes
• Creator councils who promote model content

These roles help maintain order while also ensuring members have accessible points of contact AND accessible points of entry, regardless of the community's size.

4. Utilize Technology Effectively

I personally have doubts that AI moderators are ready for primetime but modern community management tools and blockchain technology itself can help overcome the limitations of Dunbar's number. Implement:

• Automated onboarding processes — leverage progress indicators with rewards along the way
• Clear documentation and knowledge bases
• Transparent governance mechanisms through smart contracts
• Tiered developer channels for experts all the way down to curious learners. Promote mentors and empower them to build learning enablement, online classes, and secondary income streams.
• Regular community calls, AMAs, and virtual events
• Real-World Success Stories that can be pushed out to general social media channels (or be gated for a sense of exclusivity)

Consider the case of Uniswap, which has successfully scaled its community beyond 300,000 members while maintaining active participation. They achieved this by:

• Creating specialized working groups for different aspects of the protocol
• Implementing a transparent governance process through their UNI token
• Maintaining active technical discussions through focused developer channels

5. The Road Forward

As your Web3 community grows, remember that the goal isn't to overcome Dunbar's number, but to use it as a multiplier by creating structures that support meaningful connections at scale. Each hexagon in a beehive is comparatively small but their shape is ideal for building larger structures.

Instead of looking at gross numbers, think about your community and content marketing engagement in terms of Dunbar units of 150. If your AMA only had 50 participants, think about how to complete that unit, perhaps through a referral system were teams of three attendees receive a reward.

Focus on:

• Quality of interactions over quantity of members — in fact, periodically warn lurkers that their account is about to become inactive, then give them a choice of two ways to advance. Randomly assign rewards to desirable actions.
• Add friction to lapsed accounts. This can be as small as a 2-3 day delay or filling out a short survey or create a steeper slope. Whatever rewards you gave early adopters should only be made available again under extremely rare circumstances.
• Creating clear communication channels and governance processes that an eight-year-old can explain to a seventy-year-old. Cut, cut, cut the jargon.
• Build sub-communities limited to 150-175 active members. Many ancient civilizations limited their colony size to around 30,000. When a colony became larger, they sporated off a new colony. As mentioned above, if a sub-community grows too inactive (~25%) warn, then remove the lapsed accounts then give the remaining loyalists a reward for finding and attracting new members up to the max. If they are unable to do so, move high-performers from various groups into a new, more exclusive sub-group.
• Regular community feedback and adaptation. Anytime you survey, ask for feedback, host and AMA, etc publicize your insights and resulting actions. "we heard you say X so we are going to 1,2,3." Even if you are just announcing a stat "43% of you said Y" always give a clear signal that you listened and heard.
• Create strong documentation and educational resources that are qualitatively tested. How many downloads? What are the ratings? Publish on sites like LinkedIn Learning and Udemy to see how those resources perform in the wild.

By implementing these strategies, your blockchain community can grow beyond the limitations (25-45K seem to still be sticking points) while optimizing engagement at scale.