Recently, I've seen many discussions on how to achieve growth towards consumers (To C); in fact, Web3 and Web2 are fundamentally the same.
Since the e-commerce era, there has been talk of B2B and B2C; in today's Web3, for a project to survive long-term, it still needs to figure out how to attract users, retain them, and gradually turn them into loyal fans.
The essence of growth towards consumers (To C) has never changed – subsidizing with money, first attracting people over, then slowly cultivating user habits. Uber initially relied on a subsidy war to start, and now JD.com has begun to compete in food delivery, still relying on the most traditional 'cheap first shot.'
Web3 is the same; the initial airdrop attracts popularity – but the problem arises: most projects don’t even reach the stage of habit cultivation before they cash out and run away during TGE. For example, $xxx (not naming specifics), after launching, they pull a wave, and the result is a chaotic ecosystem, with the boss having already made money and run away.
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But there are exceptions, such as Initia @initia
At first, I just came in with the mindset of grabbing airdrops, but as I kept grabbing, I began to understand what this project wants to do, and even got a bit hooked. The 5% initial airdrop is just an appetizer; the real main course is the subsequent VIP mechanism, where 25% of the VIP rewards and 25% for staking combine to a total of 50% of the tokens used for long-term ecological incentives.
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VIP is a long-term incentive method devised by Initia.
The logic is not complex but very clever: it’s not a one-time airdrop, but rather rewards $esINIT distributed every two weeks, which is locked $INIT that cannot be sold immediately. You need to continue participating, engage actively, and maintain your score to slowly unlock it. The more seriously you participate and the more active you are, the more rewards you get; conversely, if you are less active, you will either progress slowly or receive nothing.
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And this 'scoring mechanism' is not rigid.
Each Rollup project can define its own rules – are you trading? Points awarded; providing liquidity? More points; coming to check in every day? Points for that too. The gameplay can be quite flexible, with one goal: don’t just grab and run, but rather continue to use and participate.
If you're too lazy to interact every day, you can lock $esINIT in the LP pool to earn some transaction fees, which also helps improve liquidity for the project, benefiting both users and the project, making the design quite reasonable.
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Rollup developers can also share incentives.
If you improve the ecosystem and keep user activity high, you will earn more, which in turn compels them to continue operating and optimizing the product, rather than just taking the funding and not doing anything.
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The underlying logic of the entire VIP can be summed up in one sentence: in the past it was 'You come, I give you money'; now it is 'You participate seriously, I reward you seriously.'
Web3's growth towards consumers (To C) cannot rely on a single wave of popularity; it must also depend on mechanisms for stability in the long term. If you are not genuinely building the ecosystem, how can users genuinely stay?
