The many facets of launching and managing a web3 community can spiral out of control and overwhelm founders in the crypto industry. But Common—a web3 governance platform and crypto-native community that helps projects discuss, vote on and fund initiatives—aims to make everything easier through its community management tools.

Instead of wrangling discussions across Discord, Telegram and Twitter/X, Common can be utilized as a one-stop-shop for all of a startup’s decentralized governance needs—including polling, token gating, webhooks, notification settings, wallet connections and snapshots.

For Dillon Chen, Common’s founder and chief executive officer, the idea behind the company has always been about facilitating something positive and communal within society.

“It’s always been about the tech for me and wanting to bring something positive into the world,” Chen said to me during a recent interview. “We started as a forum product helping [decentralized autonomous organizations]—forums with built-in governance and rewards—but really we want to help any on-chain community with engagement, launching their own coin and distributing rewards and governance.”

Chen believed crypto and blockchain had the opportunity to transform how we feel about public goods—so much so that while studying at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he began mining Ethereum (ETH) using dorm room electricity. 

“In 2013, crypto was the most interesting thing for me during my gap year before Penn, which is when I first got Bitcoin and watched what was happening with Ethereum,” he said. “It was cool to see people not just talking online, but actually building projects together and realizing the value from it. That was the thing that really pulled me into the space.”

Read more: Wyoming's New Law to Recognize DAOs as Legal Entities is Just the Start, Lummis Says

While at college, Chen also worked at venture funds like Rough Draft Ventures, where he invested in several crypto companies and gained additional exposure to the blockchain industry. He then started Commonwealth Labs, a product studio that launched Edgeware and incubated projects that collectively raised over $50 million in venture funding.

With Common, Chen follows the mantra “make it real” as a reminder to do his part to bring the intangible into existence. But community platforms—while providing a sense of belonging—are not always the easiest to maintain.

“The challenge lies in maintaining community engagement,” David Kroger, senior vice president of financial services firm StoneX, said to me over email. “Currently, there is a trend of enriching early followers, providing them with economic incentives to promote the project and highlight its strengths. This approach has proven to be somewhat effective in the early stages of memecoin markets and for capturing mindshare.”

Kroger referenced Jupiter as an example of a project that—while not a memecoin—has achieved some success with DAO voting and user retention, including 69 percent of voters supporting the extension of active staking rewards and active quorum adjustments to accommodate its growing community.

It's the type of community engagement Chen is relying upon to grow Common.

“The benefit of crypto is that you can go from idea to coin instantly and can then reward people around that,” Chen said. “That’s not just for DeFi protocols or layer1s—we’ve seen other interests launch around memecoins and community coins. These used to be ‘powers’ only people in Silicon Valley or people ‘in the know’ could leverage.”

Instead of people having to possess a vast network of connections and pitch their heart out, they can now go to market to build a project and work together with people aligned around similar interests.

“All communities take a certain amount of activation energy,” Chen said. “The technology is pretty straightforward at this place in time—indexing, wallet solutions—which means we can build a really great product experience. Memecoins get a bad rep, but buying a billboard on the Vegas Sphere is pretty cool.”

Despite the memecoin boom, it remains to be seen if tokens with little to no utility will have longevity, or if the community around a token—that Common can help manage—can help guide a project to long-term success.

According to Kroger, user retention is a crucial but often challenging metric to measure, since it focuses on users who aren't just extracting value but are genuinely engaged with an ecosystem.

“Governance participation is sometimes highlighted as a measure, though it’s frequently criticized due to flaws in voting mechanisms—simple token-based voting, quadratic voting and time-weighted voting,” Kroger said. “Vitalik Buterin and others have voiced concerns about these methods, and no single model has become the gold standard for communities.”

Even without a standardized model, Kroger said there is increasing interest in social metrics derived from blockchain analytics and that metrics such as quality of holders, growth of holders and wallets with low trading activity can actually provide insights into a project’s effectiveness and reach.

“Tying it back to real value—real things people can actually do—is what we’re trying to figure out,” Chen said. “There are DAOs, there are on-chain communities and there are tokens. For Common, people can bring their own token, help with existing communities, and drop rewards to those communities to help with meme contests and grant programs.”

Chen said people can also create their own communities around social issues, like cleaning up the streets of Manhattan, and that he’s most interested in projects around political action and more nonprofit use-cases—specifically for DAO projects and ecosystem projects.

“Use cases already on the platform are related to research and bio,” Chen said. “One flavor of a nonprofit is research—like VitaDAO—so that stuff is happening and I’d love to see more of it. If you’re building on a layer1 or a layer2 and want to find people who want to build something similar, creating a token directly is one way to raise your flag in that way.”

But it might be some time before we see true community platform competitors emerge to challenge the likes of giants such as Twitter/X, Discord and Telegram.

Kroger cites advancements in Telegram’s applications this year and their innovative features as an example of how big tech communities are able to stave off competition. However, he believes we might see the emergence of more blockchain-based social media like SocialFi—free from state control—grow in the coming years.

Though for their advancement to take hold, a lot will depend on the rules and regulations surrounding crypto and how those rules and regulations are enacted.

“Regulatory clarity gives builders a lot of confidence in what we can do legally and compliantly,” Chen said. “It feels like interest in community building and interest in politics can be drivers of further crypto adoption, so over the next year, that’s something we’ll be paying attention to.”

lead image: Dillon Chen