I am an on-chain user and a community builder. I have participated in many projects' testnets and mainnets, especially those so-called new public chains.
However, for ordinary users, many so-called high TPS public chains offer a poor experience. They mostly focus on two aspects:
1.High redundancy in the ecosystem:Many new public chain teams claim that they have dozens or even hundreds of Dapps for you to experience, but most of them are useless and repetitive projects. They may have a dozen DEXs, a dozen lending projects, and a dozen NFT markets. For users, this is actually a kind of noise. Do users really need so many projects that seem to compete with each other but are actually just reskins?
2.Promises of high TPS and new technologies:Every project claims that they have high TPS or different technologies that can complete transactions in just a few tenths of a second. But when you actually participate in network interaction, it is a different story, with high latency and constant failures. If the team launches some activities at this time, it will be a disaster.
So what factors make users stay?
Early stage: There is a money-making effect, winning the reputation of early users. Whether it is an airdrop from a project or other incentives, it is indeed one of the means to attract users. Even if your project is a pile of shit and the tps on the chain is 1, there will be users who will come to participate despite the stench and publicize your generosity. As a developer, you may think: These are all sybils for rewards. Yes, why not? The situation is caused by you. If you can make your network as smooth as cream, then everyone is willing to experience it.
Mid-term: No project can permanently reward users, but a good ecological project is an important factor in retaining users. There are many negative examples in the market, such as Aptos, zksync, Starknet, etc., especially Starknet. Although its network experience is really bad, they give users a lot of rewards and have a good reputation among users, but after the airdrop, almost no users use them. It’s not because their technology is not strong, there may be many other reasons, but as a user, they don’t have an ecological project that makes me worth staying. I don’t want to just keep using DEX and lending protocols on the Starknet network. I think this can be done on every chain.
Long-term: I think only projects that can survive the early and mid-term are worthy of talking about technical issues. This does not mean that technology is not important. On the contrary, technology determines long-term success. But many projects over-promote how strong the technology is, and do not pay attention to other aspects, and then die early. They don't even survive to the mid-term, and then complain that the industry is just a group of villains who only care about money. Come on, man, your project collapsed just because you got the focus of each period wrong. The industry doesn't owe you anything. Does anyone question the money-making effect or ecological maturity of ETH now? Everyone is discussing its technical development
As a normal carbon-based organism, we all like to make money, and make quick money. But we all want to be Buffett, and we also hope to grow with the project, and then make more money to achieve a win-win situation, but where are such projects?
initia
We mentioned above a lot of new public chain experience problems, such as high ecological duplication and high chain delay failure rate, but after the initia test network experience, I am really very satisfied. The official launched an incentive test network activity. With such a huge traffic, the test network experience is still smooth, L1-L2, AI image generation, Monopoly game. Between chains and between projects, no matter when you transfer funds, it is very smooth and fast, and you don’t even realize that you have completed a cross-chain operation. Here I have to pay tribute to the initia team~!
Then there is the ecosystem. Initia currently has more than a dozen interwoven rollups, which is not a small number for a testnet, but it is not far ahead either. The problem is that these interwoven rollups have almost no overlap, and each interwoven rollup is an independent and non-conflicting category. And it is very important that some projects have already received very good financing, and some projects have been selected for Binance's MVB program! Is this a testnet? I believe that many public chain mainnets do not have such achievements? But this is not all the credit of the Initia team, it is due to the fact that these interwoven rollups are excellent in themselves, but why did they all choose Initia? Think about it.
Secondly, we talked about how to retain users. From the early stage to the late stage, I saw the layout of the initia team. In the test network, the team launched an incentive plan, and the reputation is very good (pleasant and smooth experience + less complicated tasks). After the main network, there will also be a VIP plan for continuous incentives (a flywheel plan). In order to avoid serious technical problems after the main network, the team hired the top auditing agency in the industry to conduct an audit (see which projects they have audited). We saw the sincerity of the team, right? In the initia community, there is no chat level plan, but many people talk nonsense here every day. There is a good community culture here, which is very friendly to newcomers. If you have any questions, just ask them and someone will help you. (As long as you join me in teasing the team members, we're friends, haha.)