Demographics, audience targeting, ICPs, avatars. Whatever you want to call it. That stuff is downstream. Before you can segment an audience, you need to understand the system architecture sitting underneath your entire project. You need to know who your ecosystem agents are, what they actually want, and when they need to show up.
The questions that matter are simple. Who do we actually need? When do we need them by? Does this fit into our strategy? What do these people even want? And what do we give them?
If you can’t answer all five for every agent in your ecosystem, you’re running blind.
At the highest level, every crypto ecosystem has the same core agents. The infrastructure sits at the centre and supports everything. Around it you’ll find validators securing the network, builders developing on top of it, traders speculating on the token, holders sitting on positions, users interacting with apps, governance participants steering direction, and infrastructure partners providing the tooling that makes the whole thing functional.
Each of these groups has completely different motivations, completely different timelines, and completely different definitions of success. Treating them as one “community” is the single fastest way to serve none of them.
Validators are the first ecosystem agent worth thinking about, specifically because most teams think about them last.
They are entirely mercenary. They don’t care about your vision, your roadmap, or your Twitter spaces. They’re validating multiple protocols simultaneously. Your chain is one line item in their operation. If the economics stop making sense, they leave. No goodbye post, no feedback. They just turn off the node.
That said, they matter enormously.
If you have ten validators and they’re all in Dallas, Texas, that’s not decentralization. That’s a single point of failure wearing a decentralization costume. Three validators spread across the UK, Texas, and China might be a tiny set, but the geographic distribution already tells a better story than most “decentralized” networks with 10,000 testnet validators who sybiled their way in for an airdrop.
Most projects run testnet validator programs to inflate their stats. They’ll get thousands of validators to spin up nodes, then wave those numbers around for their Series B deck. After the incentives dry up? Those 10,000 validators become five. This is predictable. It happens every single time.
The lesson is straightforward: design your validator incentives around what mercenaries actually respond to. Predictable yields, clear economics, minimal friction. Don’t expect loyalty. Expect rational self-interest, and build for it.
When people in crypto say “community,” they almost always mean token holders yelling in Discord. That’s not your community. Your builders are your community.
But “builders” isn’t one group. It’s several, and each sub-segment wants something completely different.
Integration partners are established projects, sometimes with billion-dollar market caps and a hundred people on payroll. They already have product-market fit. What they want from you is distribution and fees. They want their existing product to reach more users through your ecosystem. The pitch to them is volume, not vision.
New app developers are trying to build the next breakout product. They want grants, documentation, dev tooling, and a shot at real users. They’re betting their time (and sometimes their savings) on your platform being the right place to build. Your job is to reduce their risk and increase their odds of success.
Core protocol developers are building the infrastructure itself. They care about technical architecture, governance influence, and long-term sustainability of the project.
Most teams target all of these people with the same messaging, the same campaigns, the same Discord channels. That’s lazy. Break your builders into segments. Know exactly who you’re targeting and when. “We need devs” is not a strategy. “We need three DeFi lending teams with existing audit histories to deploy on our chain within 90 days of mainnet” is a strategy.
Unless you’re Pump.fun or Hyperliquid, traders should be a secondary consideration after builders and core ecosystem agents. If all of your activity revolves around your token, you’re not a protocol. You’re a casino chip.
That said, traders serve a function most teams underestimate: they’re free marketing.
Speculation is one of the primary distribution mechanisms on Crypto Twitter. Some random degen with 80,000 followers takes a position in your token and suddenly they’re bull-posting about you every day. Not because you paid them. Because they have skin in the game and they want the number to go up.
Market makers, retail traders, swing traders, bots, mercenary farmers. They all serve slightly different roles in your token ecosystem. Market makers provide liquidity. Retail provides volume and social proof. Bots provide price efficiency. Farmers provide temporary TVL that looks good on dashboards.
The key distinction: traders are useful as a side effect of having a real ecosystem. They are not the ecosystem itself. If your entire marketing strategy is designed to attract traders, you’ve already lost.
Holders are the most vocal part of any ecosystem. They’re also the most extractive.
Here’s the uncomfortable breakdown of who’s actually holding your token. The majority are waiting to dump at breakeven. They bought the top, they’re underwater, and they will sell the second they see green. They’re not your advocates. They’re hostages waiting for the ransom to arrive.
Below them you have the ones who forgot they even own your token. It’s sitting in a wallet they haven’t checked in months. You’re one portfolio line item among dozens.
Then you have active speculators who are actually engaged with price action, governance participants who care about protocol direction, and true believers. The evangelists. The 1% who were there early and who will defend you online no matter what.
The problem is that most teams bend the knee to holders as a group. Founders spend hours in Discord replying to angry bag-holders instead of building product. Teams make roadmap decisions based on what token holders want instead of what builders need.
Token holders are rent seekers. They claim they add value through liquidity and market cap. Maybe. But the actual value comes from whales and market structure, not from retail yelling “wen moon” in your Telegram.
Stop optimizing for holders. They are not your customer.
Governance is a small slice of most ecosystems, but it’s a real ecosystem agent that has to be accounted for. Aave, MakerDAO, Uniswap. They all have contentious governance issues running at any given time.
As you scale post-launch, governance becomes the ecosystem agent you want to actively cultivate. Mark Zeller from Aave Chan is the model. He built an entity from scratch that works for the protocol and provides net economic value. His operation brings more capital and coordination into Aave than it extracts. That’s the standard.
Companies like Alpha Growth operate on the same principle: pay them a million dollars, they bring hundreds of millions in capital, liquidity, and downstream fees. This isn’t charity. It’s ROI-positive ecosystem development.
The opposite is governance theatre. People posting on forums, debating proposals, signalling virtue, accomplishing nothing. Zero value. If your governance layer is just a forum where delegates argue about font choices, you don’t have governance. You have a mailing list.
Block scanners, CEX integrations, oracles, wallet providers, bridges, dev tooling. This is the facilitating infrastructure that makes your ecosystem functional, and it’s almost always treated as an afterthought.
If you’re launching a chain and you don’t have a block explorer on day one, what’s the point? If developers can’t connect to an oracle, they can’t build lending protocols. If there’s no bridge, users can’t move assets in. If wallets don’t support native RPC connections, people can’t even hold your token.
BD teams need a clear, prioritized checklist. Block explorer. Liquidity on main indices. Bridge. Wallet provider integration. Oracle connections. CEX listings. Dev tooling. Each one of these is a prerequisite for the next stage of growth. Miss one and the entire developer experience degrades.
This is not marketing. This is plumbing. And plumbing has to come before the paint job.
This is the part most teams get backwards.
Your infrastructure protocol does not target end users. Ethereum doesn’t run consumer marketing campaigns. Ethereum targets Uniswap, Polymarket, Compound, and Aave. Those applications target users. The infrastructure’s job is to attract and retain builders who then attract and retain users.
If your entire marketing plan is consumer-facing, trying to get people to take actions, run quests, farm points, you’ve skipped six layers of ecosystem agents that provide 99% of the value during the first 18 months of an infrastructure project.
Users come last. And honestly, acquiring users isn’t even your job. It’s the job of the people building apps on top of you. Your job is to make those builders so successful that the users follow naturally.
Motivations shift with market conditions. Understanding this is the difference between a strategy that works in one season and a strategy that survives all of them.
In a bull market: Validators want high fees. Developers want grants, users, and revenue. Traders want volatility. Holders want price appreciation. Users want the lowest fees possible. Governance wants power. Infrastructure partners want integration fees.
In a bear market: Validators want stable yields. Developers want stability and long-term commitment. Traders want exit liquidity. Holders want hopium and use cases. Users want reliability. Governance wants survival. Infrastructure partners want reduced costs.
The alignment play is straightforward. Give validators predictability. Give developers multi-year commitments, not weeks, not months. Give traders deep markets. Give holders real mechanisms like revenue sharing or buybacks. Give users a consistent experience. Give governance real responsibility. Give infrastructure partners a genuine partnership where one plus one equals three.
If you want a masterclass in ecosystem failure, do the following:
Expect loyalty from mercenaries. Your 10,000 testnet validators will become five the moment incentives dry up. This is not betrayal. This is exactly what you should expect from rational actors.
Neglect developer experience. Bad docs, no dev rel team, poor customer success. Result: nothing gets built. Doesn’t matter how much you spend on marketing if there’s nothing to market.
Prioritize TVL over builders. Stand up two billion dollars in TVL with no real applications underneath it. Watch it evaporate the moment incentives end. You had hype, you had momentum, you had a number on DefiLlama. You didn’t have an ecosystem.
Run governance theatre. People talking on forums, accomplishing nothing, adding zero value. Meanwhile, real decisions get made in group chats.
Skip infrastructure. No wallets, no block explorers, no oracles. The protocol becomes unusable. Developers can’t build. Validators don’t want to participate. Users can’t interact. Network effects never materialize.
Every single one of these mistakes is avoidable. Every single one of them happens constantly.
1. Right agents at the right time. Pick your ecosystem agents. Map them to your GTM timeline. If you’re pre-launch, you’re targeting validators, infrastructure partners, and early builders. If you’re post-launch, you’re running campaigns tailored to each segment. Learn the sub-segments within each group. Within security, you might target validators with a minimum stake threshold. Within builders, you might target teams that have already shipped on competing chains. Specificity wins.
2. Assume everyone will game you. If people can extract value from your system, they will. Mercenaries will dominate if you let them. Prepare to get sybiled. Prepare to get exploited. Make sure every incentive makes economic sense even when participants are playing game-theory optimal.
3. Builders over holders, every time. Your client is developers. Your product is for developers. If you’re making product features, marketing campaigns, or strategic decisions based on what token holders want, you’re doing it wrong.
4. Infrastructure before marketing. If you don’t have a block explorer, spending money on awareness campaigns is setting cash on fire. Build the plumbing first. Make the ecosystem functional. Then tell people about it.
5. Survive the 90% drawdown. The bear market test applies here too. Will your builders keep building? Will your validators keep validating? Will your governance keep governing? If the answer to any of these is “only if the token price holds up,” your ecosystem is fragile and your agents aren’t truly aligned.
1. Ecosystem Mapping. Pick any protocol, or your own. Use FigJam, a whiteboard, or a piece of paper. Map every ecosystem agent. Validators, builders (broken into sub-segments), traders, holders, users, governance, infrastructure. Draw the relationships. See where value flows.
2. Identify Misalignments. Look at your map and ask: what doesn’t make sense right now? Which agents are underserved? Which ones are being prioritized when they shouldn’t be? Where are incentives misaligned with desired behaviour?
3. Design Fixes. For every misalignment you found, propose a solution. This is product-meets-growth-marketing. The fix might be a new incentive structure, a new onboarding flow, a partnership, or a complete strategic pivot. Write it down. Be specific.
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