For those who are deep into the DeFI ecosystem, we all witnessed the hype that got $GMX these past month. The token went from 37$ this 3rd October to nearly 60$ following the announcement of its listing on Binance, then FTX,Crypto. com etc.
For me the hype was obvious and the platform is very far from reaching its peak yet since they created a very strong community and the team announced some next features (X4 and Synthetics) that are expected to be huge.
But most important, the team proved how they can be innovative and hard workers even during tough times.
While we saw the collapse of one of the two biggest CEX (Centralised Exchange), FTX, traders and investors lost a lot of money and realized how the quote 
“Not your keys not your coins” can be true.

Since where there is chaos, there is opportunity, DEX platforms can be presented as better alternatives for retail traders and investors that do not want to give their funds to an entity. For me GMX is the most suited protocol to benefit from this traction since the infrastructures and the community are not only more and more solid but the platform is a leader in a growing blockchain and one of the most profitable during this bear.

For the ignorants, GMX is a decentralized perpetual exchange that supports low swap fees and zero price impact trades. The dynamic pricing is supported by Chainlink Oracle in order to provide the best prices on the market. The platform has a multi-asset pool that earns liquidity providers fees from market making, swap fees and leverage trading. And liquidity providers receive also multiplier points which is a ratio calculated with the amount of $GMX and the duration they are stacked on the platform.
This incentivizes the liquidity providers to keep their funds stacked on the platform and they receive also escrowed GMX that are vested following a certain process.
The platform has been built on Arbitrum and implemented later on Avalanche.

From a very useful, innovative and underrated DEX (Decentralized Exchange) they decided to launch a NFT collection.
We were in the 4th quarter of 2021, 1 $ETH were worth over $4000, Arbitrum was a new blockchain with few big protocols and NFT industry was on fire !

So we could legitimately guess that launching a NFT collection was a nice strategy to grow their audience and generate more revenues for the protocol.

But it was way more than that.     

From the announcement, specific terms such as community; exclusive; ownership have been used by the team to communicate on their purpose and vision but it did not seem obvious at that time since they were all marketing terms used by several web3 projects.However, contrary to many others web3 projects, not only the community still exists today but these terms are still up to date. Through a powerful vision and a genius marketing, the Blueberry Club became one of the top NFT collections on Arbitrum and you will know why in this study.

Most of us got into crypto to get a fair share of ownership and to take part in something that brings us together, we’re here to coordinate this ship with you all. It’s important that you raise your voice as this helps us to improve and make sure we adhere to these principles. Source

The 4th December 2021, the GMX Blueberry Club is out on tofu.nft marketplace.
For this launch, GMX liquidity providers received an airdrop of 1 NFT and the unit price at the public sale was 0.03 $ETH (roughly 130$ at that time).
So, there will be only 10,000 NFTS on the market for ever and the goal of the club is to create a strong community of GMX users and enthusiasts sharing the same values and growing together. At that period, the GMX protocol registered only 5,211 users so approximately half of the GBC supply.
It was clear that the team was very optimistic about the future of the Arbitrum blockchain and GMX because it was also a way to strengthen the active community and easily onboard future users over time.

The collection spent 1 month before sold out, it was still a nice outcome since everything was organic and they did not look for massive adoption from the start but the main focus was to put together the GMX and Arbitrum enthusiasts.
From sold out to the announcement of the 2022 roadmap In February 2022, here are the GMX Blueberry Club statistics:

 👾 Over 2900 members  
850,000$ in the GBC treasury 
10,000 GBC’s minted out of 10,000  
Floor Price: 0.4 ETH  
390 ETH Volume on secondary sales  

The benefits for the holders are :

• An access to a 100% transparent treasury that measures the performance of the collection and show the investments of the community in real time

  Since the first day, the only tokens in which the GBC treasury have invested are $GMX and $GLP. And it has been very profitable till now. As I speak, the treasury is above $1,100,000 and this fund is exclusively for the community.
  Over 4000esGMX were distributed every month to the holders from the start and more to the treasury in order to incentivize the ETH distribution to the holders.

• An exclusive access to physical GBC events and parties

  Only one physical event has been organized by the team for now.
  It was a meeting in Bordeaux, France, where members digested wines and cheese while chilling. But holders living in the same cities also meet themselves and create networks while traveling.

• An exclusive access to the discord channels of the club and private group chats

• A premium access to new products built by the club

• The right to build a brand or a product around the club and to benefit from the support of the community

• An access to the Blueberry Lab
  A marketplace built by the team to give the opportunity to the community members to customize their NFTS and trade outfits between holders.

  In short the goal has always been a massive adoption, but by being loyal to the values of the community and by growing together.

  As the GBC co-founder Appodial once said :

  The blueberry club is more like a millionnaire club in Santa Monica than a NFT collection.

  And I can tell you as a blueberry member since Day 1 that this quote has always been the main vibe and vision within the community.
  I consider other blueberry members like brothers and even during though times the community groups have always been for me and others, places where we can share everything openly with friends sharing the same vision.

  You might ask yourself why the club is named the Blueberry club ?

  To be honest with you I do not have the main idea and I don’t think anyone knows except the founders lol.
  But I know some ideas since I follow the project from very long.

  First, just think about blueberries.

  Aren’t they delicious ?

  Not only they are, but they are so important for the human body.

  They are antioxidants and are believed to have one of the highest antioxidant levels of all common fruits and vegetables. It protect cholesterol in your blood from becoming damaged, it lowers blood pressure and may help increase heart disease. So by eating blueberries, you are developing good habits for your health, you can find more informations about blueberries here.

  Secondly, the blueberry is not only a vibe, a state of mind, it goes further. One of the goals is to own blueberry farms and develop a community driven, decentralized organization that generates passive incomes for the members.
  Cherry on the cake … the blueberry industry is flourishing !

“The demand for this fruit has expanded beyond what is fresh or frozen, conventional or organic, and is required from different areas, such as the pharmaceutical industry, cosmetics” etc.

As stated in this article, blueberries production grew from 429,000 metrics in 2010 to over 1 million in 2022. So I don’t know for you but personally I won’t refuse a passive income from this industry in the next years.

As you can see, nothing is random in the blueberry club and everything has been designed through a clear and unique vision that is shared by over 3,000 members nowadays.

While I am writing this article, it has been over 11 months since the club went out and as every investors know, these past months have been painful for the ecosystem.So how did the club handled this period of uncertainty and disillusion and how did they manage to become through this bear, one of the main NFT collection of the most used Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain.

Due to many bad news as :

• The Luna collapse

• 3AC bankruptcy

• The recent FTX bankruptcy

To list a few …

Every project got impacted by these bad events so it creates a lack of trust and there is less and less investors and liquidity in the industry. During times like that, many projects are undervalued and their capitalization is only the outcome of the situation of the market. However, those who stay consistent get more credible since by staying active, they can easily differentiate from competition and remained investors get more confident in the team.
Although the collection did not reach its previous all time high yet in weekly volume which was $517,709 the 31st January 2022, the community kept growing and we saw the brand gain more value.

There is an average held of 2 blueberries NFT per owners and this number has been consistent for a while now. While trading volume were getting lower and lower, we saw credible personalities from the industry give credit to the collection and project. Another proof of the strength of the collection is its correlation with the GMX trading platform. Even if trading tools for NFT owners and GMX users have not been out yet, the team always incentivize the holders to interact with GMX. As a result, the price action of the GBC collection benefits from the adoption the GMX protocol and its growth.Till today, the Blueberry Club paid 49,917 esGMX to the holders by rewarding them at the end of each month for keeping their NFT. The treasury have not been that much impacted by the events except the FTX platform where and is still a million dollars, $1,181,614 to be precise.

Despite of all these accomplishments, I think the most valuable thing the collection got this past month is recognition. The collection not only succeeded to be one of the vitrine of the Arbitrum blockchain but by its originality and its innovation, they got the attention of investors from other blockchains and larger platforms as Opensea.

Even if today the market is still unstable and the collection is still undervalued in my opinion, from a business point of view i find the project more reliable and viable in the future since the foundations have been considered and built in details.

Now I got a question.

In order to gain more legitimacy and become credible, what should do a project that identify itself as innovative ?

Develop innovative stuffs right ?

Well it did not last to the team to show their creativity by launching the Blueberry Lab.

The blueberry Lab is an exclusive tool for GBC holders that gives the opportunity to the community members to customize their blueberries with different new items over time.
It is an innovation that is a big success for the club since it open doors for funny and innovative collaborations with other brands or communities.The first products of the lab were free for the GBC holders and free items are still released overtime for the holders.

These items can also represent whitelist for other NFT projects as the collaboration GBC x Mythical for example. They can also be exclusive entry tickets to events like the next NFT Paris in February or just be free items during special days or not.

The holders can trade the lab items in the Stratos marketplace. We can see that even free minted items get valuable and are traded at higher prices.

This innovation in the NFT space creates wealth during the community, strengthen the relationship inside the community and permit to the Club to easily develop new partnerships and surprises over time.

Less than 6 months after being released, the Blueberry Lab marketplace generated over 10 ETH of volume and released more than 10 items for the community.

During the bear market, investors tend to spend less time within the crypto space and become less aware of the innovations. This is because there is less liquidity in the market and specially in these past months, the news have been too intriguing to be only preoccupied by NFT projects. But it is the best time to build and launch new products in order to take advantage of less competition to test and discover new areas.

Few months later, the team created Blueberry Pulse. A weekly Newsletter to keep the community informed about the latest news on @GMX_IO and the @GBlueberryClub.
This product came on time and was a really nice initiative because it was the est way to keep all the weekly news into one space and give the opportunity to the community members to stay updated without doing daily researches.

Personally when this project has been announced, I was very enthusiast about it and even shared some ideas of templates for the newsletter on my Twitter page since I have a good background in this area. I discussed with the Marketing Director about the directives and process and I started working on the project in order to provide a nice product. I was not a team member and I did not discuss about salary with the team, but the idea of providing for the community was so well represented in this project that it felt mandatory to me to share my experiences and expertise with the community.

Finally I did not receive any updates after our discussion and I ended with a work not submitted lol.

But the team did not start working apparently and they recruited a new member in order to create the newsletter.

The Blueberry Pulse has been out on substack and it has been since then a really nice and effective product for the community for free.

Later on, Blueberry music has been created.

A blueberry product giving exclusive leaks and advantages from the music industry. The advantages can be invites to listen parties from artists, collars and more. Few infos have been given but it has a huge potential and it will be a way for the community to meet physically and develop a physical presence.

Although a lot of discussion groups exist for the community on discord, twitter or even telegram.
The isolation and depression that a bear market can produce needed more tools to engage people and put them together. A tool that has been effective these past year and represents nowadays a huge potential is podcast. And it came more than once in the discussions within community members so the team decided logically to launch the Blueberry podcast.

Hosted by @tanoeth and @cryp_growth, it is a bi-weekly podcast that features topics chosen bu the community. The episodes are posted on Spotify and 7 episodes have already been recorded. The topic discussed can be about the club, future partnerships or special events.

With all these different features, the club is not only a NFT collection but:

• a brand,

• a foundation,

• a media

• An investment fund and more …

When the financial space will become more stable and the Bull will be back, we can easily imagine that the GBC will be one of the NFT collections that have been the best established to onboard easily more and more members.

With over 1,400 ETH volume traded, the GMX Blueberry club still has a huge margin growth and in my opinion the most innovative and fun products have not been released yet.

The team announced for a while now the GBC Trading. A redistribution system that allows GBC Members to open leveraged positions on GMX with the Treasury Yield.

This product won’t only be a way for the members to create liquidity but a more fun community tool with trading tournaments, cash prizes and new ways to create entertainment with the Blueberry Lab.

With the same objective, the team is also working on Puppet Mirror Trading.

A social trading platform for investors that will enable Mirror trading from your favorite traders on the GBC Leaderboard. There will be 2 types of participants: Traders and Puppet.

• Traders get additional profit and clout based on their leveraged trading performance

• Puppets use the leaderboard to search for traders that are likely to generate profit by mirroring their trading strategy.

Doesn’t that sound incredible ?

The platform will provide different scoring metrics to better help Puppets make their investment decisions.

Such innovative products can only increase the value of being a blueberry member.

But it is not the best weapon the community have.

It is Creativity and Emancipation.

The club gives the opportunity to the members to create their own products around the brand.To link their personal goals and dreams with the strength of the community or to bring more value by solving new problems for the members.

In this vein, various projects are being built.

It goes from NFT collections to Fitness platform (s/o Olympian) or Framing labs etc.
The club gives the space, tools and network to express their creativity and bring values to others.

This is beautiful and every thing is correlated.

Even the external projects built by the co founder Appodial are expected to bring more value to the club and the members have early access.

The blueberry community is no more just a crypto project but a real life enhancement and every one who shares the values and want to become the best version of themselves can join it.

One of the actual strategy for the community is to start being present on all social media as Tiktok and Instagram.Hundreds of Blueberry pop have been created on Instagram and today the best marketers of the collection are the members.

Physical events and parties are expected in big cities, and to give the opportunity to the member to experience incredible physical events will be the next huge big step for the Club in my opinion. But it has already been successfully tested through the first event in Bordeaux and the strength of the members over time can only be a good thing for the future.

As a marketer, I detect some frameworks that can be highlighted from the GMX Blueberry Club community building strategy and so here is a brief analysis of their community building following the interesting framework of @barnabashq.

When a brand want to build a community, we know the famous 5 phases that the customer has to go through.

These are Awareness, Consideration / Engagement, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

When it comes to web3, we can add 2 more steps in this process since the “customer” here is also an investor and a key player of the brand.

So the 7 steps of community building in web3 by Barnabas Atam are :

• Awareness

• Onboarding

• Activation

• Engagement

• Contribution

• Retention

• Referral

The awareness step of the blueberry club comes first from word of mouth.

When joining the club, members become subconsciously ambassadors and a clear mission and vision is stated for the community.
It is also a profile - picture project so collectors are naturally invited to use their NFTs as profile pictures on twitter and other social platforms.
Members then start following and supporting each others back, alphas and values are shared in private group chats and it creates a sense of family and belonging to the members.

Once this step is reached, potential members start being curious about the community and what it really looks from the inside because it is no longer the brand that does the marketing but the alchemy between the community members.
To realize it, clear community boundaries and minimum viable expectation have to be set at the start. One sentence I like from Barnabas’s article is :

Your community should be accessible to anybody but not be for everyone.

You also need to spread your own symbols, signs, memes so your members can be part of something special. I think if you are still reading this article you already know what is the blueberry symbol . (Hint 🫐)

Furthermore for onboarding new members, the community need to have some regular contributors and the GBC did not miss this step. Several contributors have been added to the team over time, facilitating 1:1 connections and education resources for the community at any levels. Blueberry members can be DeFI experts and managers or new investors so one big task is to create educational contents for everyone.
Different platforms have been used to complete this task, you can find youtube videos and Instagram posts from co founder explaining in detail for newbies how to buy some ETH, bridge them into the Arbitrum blockchain and buy a blueberry NFT for example.
But you can also find advanced articles and contents about discovering new projects or new advices for traders on the GMX platform on Twitter and Discord.

The activation phase is crucial because if not done correctly, a good number of community members can be lost and become lurkers.

The Blueberry community uses a lot low-effort community activities in order to interact with members and make them active. Fun competitions are organized, members just need to hold their NFT in order to receive royalties monthly, content is created for the community (podcasts and newsletters). Members have all the tools to be active and have a closer look at the community, being part of the project remain the only task and no effort is required.

After that, people start to engage naturally and share their experiences within the community.

If the past phases have been well executed, members truly relate with the community values and they want to enhance their experiences by being more committed.
The team does not need to put more effort no more.
It comes naturally, it can take time but it has to come from members.People don’t want to feel forced to do something and subconsciously the human being needs to give back when receiving too much for free.

So keep sharing values with your community till they feel grateful.

Then they will give you back.

The contribution stage is when the brand wants to sort between its more loyal fellows. For me, it is the introduction of the final step of the community building journey and the blueberry club illustrates it perfectly.

At this stage, we need to show more rewards to the members. We can step the minimum viable expectations but the community rewards also need to be stepped up. The brand starts to build while thinking about members remunerations, it goes through partnership with new NFT projects or clothing brands for example.Then we introduce the affiliation but affiliation is a big topic.Here we are not talking about on-boarding new members but developing personal brands affiliated to the community.

“Man is a political animal.”

Aristote

When being part of something big and strong, we get more confidence and credibility in the eyes of others.

It may be sad but you got more prestige if you work for Apple than Huawei.

So the community members need to feel important to link their image with the community brand and it is something that GBC did perfectly.Then members don’t only think about growing their personal image but they think about how to scale their image with the community.

The members need to feel free to create sub - groups and develop their products.

This way they can benefit from the community strength and growth while bringing value at their scale.

Once the brand successfully incorporate it within the community, members become the best marketers and content creators of the brand.

This leads to the retention phase which as the activation phase needs to come naturally. The team needs to stay present and friendly with members while monitoring them.There must have independency but also tutoring inside the community so members don’t get lost.

Retention is the reason the contributors and engaged members stay for as long as possible. In the Blueberry Club, features as GBC Lifestyle have been created for the members to share their personal experiences, GBC events are planned worldwide so members can meet and the team keep getting creative about developing the best experiences for members.

Finally the Referral phase is traduced in the club my new derivative projects from members. Since one of the missions the community is to develop an ecosystem, the main goal is not just to buy a GBC NFT but to create an economy.Members can create their own projects in order to solve internal issues or develop new ways to enhance web3 experiences for GBC users or overall web3 users.

This goes from blueberry handmade necklaces to web3 fitness platforms, clothing brands, a media (s/o Hoodlife) and more.

To conclude, it is not the GBC community that went to larger platforms but larger platforms that welcomed the GBC community.GBC always shared with their community members content by emphasized the proximity between the members instead of always be looking to attract new members. The blueberry Club grew organically by launching regularly new products and the hype made by the community attract new members from the Web 3 industry.

To be a blueberry is not about a gender or race or whatever, it is sharing the same vision and be committed to reach the best version of yourself.

Through this use case, I send my support to the GBC team members and contributors and specially the co founders @xm92boi, @appodial & @itburnz.

All Love !

You can read more from me here.

This Article is not a Financial Advice (NFA).