Learn: Is Community-building Essential for Web3 Startups?

Community building is an essential part of the sector being successful and with Web3 space being relatively new, community building becomes all the more important for the space

This article was originally published on Entrepreneur India, written by Saptak Bardhan, dated 19 November 2022.

"Time waits for no one" is a famous proverb that has been going around for years. Technology has been moving at a rapid pace and with the advent of Web 3.0, the world is set to adopt the decentralised version of Web. Little do people know that Web 3.0 is a web of a lot of components like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, et al that forms the decentralised web.

Community building is an essential part of the sector being successful and with Web3 space being relatively new, community building becomes all the more important for the space. Consisting of aspects like metaverse, blockchain, NFTs and crypto, the space unknowingly helps us enter the new phase of technology.

All the aspects of Web3 have various different use cases with some coming up as the space is explored further.

"One of the biggest use cases here is fintech.

The inception of Bitcoin was the point where peer-to-peer transactions came to the fore and despite the new use cases coming in, fintech is still being considered as one of the biggest use cases for blockchain. The applications are immense and we are just scratching the surface as of now," said Kaavya Prasad, founder, Lumos Labs.

Blockchain is a distributed database that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. The data is stored in a digital format electronically on the blockchain.

"With the growth of blockchain, crypto tokens would grow as well. Ultimately what will drive value for the tokens or for the user that buys the tokens would be utility that is associated with the token.

How is the token helping further adoption or resolving a pain point for the user. One is essentially making a token whenever something is put on the blockchain and hence, crypto token is here to stay," said Tarusha Mittal, COO and co-founder, Unifarm.

NFTs have been a huge market that people have taken to.

NFTs or non-fungible tokens that are essentially digital assets being stored on a blockchain. A digital asset means it can be anything ranging from an image to a video or an animation or a single-pixel or even a tweet for that matter. There have been various launches of NFTs in the country ranging from NFTs of Bollywood superstars to NFTs of a brand.

"We launched NFTs of Big B to create a market. We did that successfully. NFT is going to grow because of its utility. There are collectibles but not for the long run. I strongly believe that utility is going to make a huge impact on the NFT market," said Kameshwaran Elangovan, co-founder, GuardianLink.

The buzz became a trend in the B-town as Amitabh Bachchan's NFT launch was followed by a lot of NFTs related to other B-Town celebrities notably Kamal Hassan and Salman Khan.

"There is immense excitement amongst everyone of them like with every evolving industry, I don't think they know a lot about Web3. Everybody is very willing to be involved but there is this factor of what is the minimum guarantee to be expected. There is a need to find the right celebrities for the NFT market," said Jogesh Lulla, COO, Cornerstone.

Engage2Earn has been a relatively new segment which has not received much light yet. Engage2Earn allows users to engage with their favourite content creators, create their own content, mint their own user coins, etc.

"When we started, we wanted to get two mixes of communities together. Sports fans who are in essence in Web2.0 and Web3.0 fans that are also sports enthusiasts. We cultivate the community from the teams we have partnered with. We have built it for India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia," said Vinayak Yannam, CBO, Sportzchain.

India being a cricket-worshipping country, some companies have decided to capitalize on the sport itself by introducing NFTs that help the fans to engage better with the sport and the superstars of the sport.

"People are trying to democratise stock investment. Cricket is something else in terms of followership and the sheer love for the sport. The person buying the NFT is not evaluating the cost to value ratio because of their passion. Web3 has given us a new business model which was not available to us," said Ankit Wadhwa, CEO and co-founder, Rario.

The Web3 space is only starting out and has immense potential to grow.

However, community would be central to the growth and the expansion of the Web3 technology.