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If you scroll through Crypto Twitter for more than 10 minutes, you’ll notice the same names on spaces and repeating the same stories about “community.” You will also see how important their perspective is on this topic. What often remains stubbornly unclear in these conversations is the product.
summary
- Web3’s hype and obsession with “community” has buried product clarity. Users cannot adopt what they do not understand.
- True growth comes from transparency. Actual audits, verifiable user data, and measurable outcomes always trump vanity metrics.
- The next phase of Web3 will be on the teaching team, not the cheerleaders. Evidence, not personality, drives long-term trust and adoption.
If a crypto newbie can’t explain your project after hearing about it for a week, it’s not on the market. It’s just socialized. For too long, Web3 has traded product clarity for the influence of personality as budgets flow toward flashy tours, atmospheric collaborations, and parallel social engagements. The things that actually matter, like documentation, onboarding, educational materials, and use cases, lag slightly behind the noise.
Many projects chase low-hanging fruit because they can be quickly accomplished, posted, and celebrated. While this seems like a good statistic to present to investors, the metrics needed to achieve actual adoption require far more important factors, such as data transparency and product maturity. Sure, it’s easy to take screenshots of likes, but for true engagement and long-term growth, it’s better to publish retention data.
In low-cost, high-volume marketing, this misalignment of priorities has a huge impact on impressions. It’s not just the meaningful numbers of consumers/customers.
Our July review clearly illustrated this pattern, with spikes in activity often masking weak retention behavior unless marketing managers measure what users actually do after the first touch. At the corporate level, too, CFOs’ mindsets tend to be more pragmatic than chatty, with almost one in four finance leaders expecting to transition to using digital currencies within the next two years.
Popularity no longer carries weight. To make real, long-term progress with Web3 today, we need evidence.
Prepare twice, cut once
Start by making your products readable again. Publish plain overview material where appropriate, and remove overly complex jargon as much as possible. The main goal is to clarify the purpose of the product being marketed and explain why users need it.
It educates consumers (whether retail, institutional, or otherwise) about the product, why it matters, how it works, the risks and tradeoffs involved, the job it performs, and concludes with a demonstration. The simpler and more reproducible the demo, the better. Never underestimate word of mouth marketing.
Once this part is done, it’s time to prove it.
Add supporting views by naming the three most common activation blockers with product-provided fixes, with vivid real-world user stories that link to audits, on-chain usage patterns, and measured results.
Projects often gain a lot of credibility when they publish their code audits and user numbers. Sharing usage statistics through verifiable audits provides evidence, and therefore trust, without all the hype.
Good marketing always delivers documentation over a bid for attention and popularity, but fades out by the next cycle of product rollout. This creates an onboarding path that isn’t easily forgotten, misunderstood, or abandoned due to complexity.
Please tell me not to be a cheerleader.
Creators can do their best work by teaching their craft. The product brief you promote should include the what, why, how, and call to action. It’s not empty hype. After all, if your product offers a solution focused on helping users first and foremost, you don’t need hype to get users on board. Help convert and gain hype through respect and excitement.
On-chain attribution is a tricky playing field, but it can work if you stick to narrowly defined, verified actions that are the focus of the narrative being driven (don’t forget marketing dollars, too).
If your team can’t explain the value of an action in your marketing strategy and can’t measure or support it, don’t scale. The only lasting marketing in a permissionless market is understanding the use case and teaching it to users in a satisfying way. If a message is overlooked, misunderstood, or consists of unsupported, well-spoken copywriting, it will fail.
Please tell me instead of being a cheerleader. What users need is understanding, not another collaborator or collaborator trying to convince them to make another wrong decision.
Take a stand above product hype and set a clear (and realistic) budget. If what is being sold cannot be taught, then don’t sell it. If you can’t teach it easily, track it honestly and make sure you reproduce it. Evidence trumps social drama, and adoption speaks louder than marketing based on hype can ever accomplish.
So when it comes to determining what real success looks like as an industry moves from opaque to transparent products, investors will ultimately care about one thing: the verifiable.
Transparency builds a stronger ecosystem, validates traction, and ensures clarity for users. So make the right choices when creating the next phase of Web3. Choose evidence over popularity.
