CTRL/SHIFT - 14 06 2026 PARTHENOPE STAGE - GINEVRA MAGGI - COMMUNITY AFTER THE HYPE ERA

Okay. Hi everyone. Super happy to be here. Let's get into community after the hype era. So, I thought to start this with a mantra that I think anyone would need to repeat every morning.

So, community is not a Telegram group. And the reason why I put this is that in Web3, that's usually how the most of us think. Uh but yeah, so let's get into that. First of all, I want to just give you a short introduction. I'm Geneva.

I've been doing crypto marketing for the past 5 years across projects from the Solana ecosystem as well as the Ethereum ecosystem. And yeah, the I run marketing at Parachute, which is the GK engine to power perpetuals on Solana. As well as I'm the fine co-founder of Sol Sister, the community for girls on Solana. And so, yes, let's go. Oh, sorry.

Uh so, we said that community is not a Telegram group. So, the the question becomes what is community? And the definition that I I put here is not even from crypto. It's from Seth Godin. Seth Godin says, "People like us do things like this."

And this means on the one end that community is people bonded by a shared identity. So, people like us. How do we think about ourselves? As well as do things like this in terms of shared behaviors because of the way that we think. Um community is not something that belongs only to web 3.

It's a part of every brand and the DNA is made of two pillars. A shared interest as we said, this is not about a product, it's rather about a brand and people loving a brand. And it's also about the connection to each other. Not the top-down connection so from the brand to to their users, but rather the member-to-member connection. We want to find our people.

And we see that real brands started started as producing product but then turned into tribes. We see this in many different ways. Think about Pokémon. Pokémon is a 25-year-old brand and it's not even a brand, it's not a game, it's not cartoons. It's a generational culture where parents basically hands on their their their cards to their kids.

Or Taylor Swift where there is a fandom that basically regulates themself with shared rituals inside languages and things like this. So this is what makes brand tribes and not just products. So to come back to the Telegram group thing, channels are where this is possible but they're not the reason why we create communities. And let's get into crypto because something was already there. As I said, in web 2 there are a lot of communities, incentives have already been there.

Like think about referral programs, loyalty program, airline miles and all of these. But the thing is that all of these gives you perks and as a customer you're still like a guest into someone else's house. On the other hand, crypto flipped this script of web two, let's say, turning their customers into the product, you know, with all the data, personal data, and and so on, and introduced ownership. Ownership means to have a stake and to have a say on the direction of something, and this goes well beyond all the perks that we we saw before. And crypto basically made this possible, and this is the most powerful ideas that we brought to the space.

So, when it's done right, how does it look like? Here I put some examples of Chef Kiss community initiatives that we've seen over the over the past few years. They both share this identity, this belonging at their core, but they different project made it in different ways. There are projects like Dogecoin that has no have no roadmap, no utility, nothing if not identity for its own sake. After more than 10 years, we're still here.

The market cap of Dogecoin is still very large, and yeah, so basically identity sometimes is all it takes to create a a thriving community. Pudgy Penguins, most of you I think would know this brand, but it's true for the most part of NFTs. So, whenever belonging, you can hold the belonging, so it's about membership. And it's not really about the art, it's about the having the key to the room behind this this community. Loyalty earned, here I put the example of Hyperliquid.

I think Hyperliquid completely revisited the playbook of airdrops of creating a community with no VCs, no insiders, and just made the loyalty profitable. Um governance, this is widely spread in our space when it comes to those, but it means just to have a say and you know influence the direction of a protocol or of a product by owning your your own shares. And finally, of course, Bitcoin because if you think about it, we don't even know who's the founder of Bitcoin. There is no company, there are no KOLs, there are just an army of people that just won't stop talking about it because it believes in financial freedom. And this is all organic.

So, this is community what the community is done right. But at some point, we kind of forget forget why we were doing this and kind of took these owners that we made and turned them back into product. So, let's see how this process unfolded over the past 2 years, let's say. It goes down to four phases. Usually it starts with a one token, meaning that at the point where airdrops and points program becomes not a reward, like not a thank you to your community, but rather the way on how to attract some user base that you are attracting in an inorganic way, so by paying.

This becomes the whole purpose of becoming part of the community itself. So, what happens next is phase two. All the metrics go up from vanity metrics on social media to TVL, to volume. Everything is amazing, so the project actually it not have any incentive on how to stop and he kept saying, "Okay, let's delay the TGE and basically soon that's why the name of this second phase." And when that was not enough, we also introduced the infofi meta where basically we paid people to um have a belief that they would not have organically.

Think about all the mind share and attention meter that we saw over the past year um on X. And at the end um everyone go goes away with their bags and start to farm the next project. So basically the only believers that you had end up diamond handing dust. Uh these are a few examples. Like it's not about calling out any project to be honest because it's what happens to basically 99% of crypto project.

I just put the an example of an example from Eclipse because their social media manager truly deserved a raise because it was like you know having fun after the token just nuked as well as all the other 99% of other tokens and uh this is the tweet from Nikita where basically um X uh didn't get access API access anymore after infofi basically flooded the timeline with bots and agents just to farm points. So yeah. The question becomes how do brand can actually build real communities while we are in a very speculative space because crypto is intrinsically um speculative. So, it's all about, uh, a shift that unfolds into, uh, four pillars. First of all, vision over hype.

Why? Because, uh, vision is, uh, owned while hype is, um, is borrowed. This means that, uh, we need, uh, we as brands, we need to have a long-term vision, and this vision must be consistent over time. Um, because if you're talking about belonging, you cannot expect people to belong into a narrative that keeps changing. You cannot, um, pivot again and again, just to chase where the hype is.

Um, show over tell, because, uh, one thing is attention, and the other is to earn trust. The only way you have as a project or a brand to earn trust is actually to deliver, to ship, and to act according to the promise that you made, uh, to your community. Contribution over extraction. Um, this, I want to stress out that, okay, there are airdrops, there are points program, that's not the problem at all. Like, it's not about, should we have incentives, but rather on the design part.

So, what type of incentives should we design in order to reward the behaviors that we actually want uh, our community to to perform. So, the the the rule here is that if you are rewarding, uh, farming mechanics, you're going to attract the farmers, and probably it's not what you want. You rather want to attract, someone that brings value. Rooms over channels, because, uh, channels apply a top-down approach, while, uh, in rooms, that's where real bonds and connection happens. Whether this is, uh, in real life, or, uh, remotely, this doesn't matter, but, having, uh, a space, a safe space, um it's the only way where actually people can say, "Okay, this is people like us.

I found my people, and we do things like this together." And this is uh the proof of pillars, meaning that uh um when we talk about real example that put in place these four pillars that I just mentioned, I think Solana uh is the key example because not not because I'm biased, even if I am, but because uh I have receipts. So, let's see um what do I mean here. Vision over hype. So, we saw Solana evolving a lot over time.

It went basically to zero after the FTX collapse, but it's also one of the very few cases where the community survived after the token was basically uh going to going to zero. And the the narrative itself uh changed when it comes to the claim, because we saw Solana evolving from the fastest blockchain in the world to the on-chain casino, only possible on Solana, and now internet capital markets, the everything chain. But what didn't actually change was the bet. Uh the first bet that they they had. So, one single monolithic layer one um that is fast enough and cheap enough to hold everything together in contrast with the modular approach and the roll-ups and the layer twos.

So, this was uh um a clear example of evolving while staying consistent. And we we just mentioned the FTX collapse. So, how do you do that like how did Solana manage to have this greatest comeback ever. Well, um no rebrands and no pivots. This is huge because we see rebranding like everyday in in our space.

Solana didn't do that. What Solana did was just building and shipping. And the result of it is that as of now, Solana is number one on basically all the metrics that matter from developer activities to user activities to revenues generated by protocol. And even the on-chain casino thesis that was let's say not seen in such a good way from other ecosystem, it became like the proof that such things like meme coins were actually only possible on Solana because no other chain was fast enough or cheap enough to handle it. Contribution over extraction.

Here I refer mainly to builders because as an ecosystem, it's okay. It's very hard to, you know, find someone that can back you up in a way that Solana does. This means bring bringing capital, users, mentorship, and everything that builders need to thrive. We have programs made for perps. We have We have Colosseum hackathons and all of this.

And finally, all the community happening in real life at events like Breakpoint, hackathons such as Colosseum that I just mentioned. Solana is the only chain having super teams which are the local communities. They're present in 19 countries including Italy now. And communities such as Sol Sisters. These are real places where belonging can happen.

So, to wrap it up, we said that community is not about launching a Telegram group. It's about a cultural infrastructure. This means that community has to be the foundation as well as the end goal. And that's it. Thank you so much and if you have any question, I'm here.