Ran Neu-ner - Your Attention Please – Why Some Tokens Succeed and Others Fail - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

I want to speak a little bit about why tokens succeed and why other tokens fail. Um I think I've got a pretty unique view as to why that happens. So I think the first thing we need to understand is let's just understand the landscape under which we operate. Um, we have today 42 or 43 million tokens that are actually live and we have 600 million users in the world. So, if you think about a a world where you have a global market with 45 million tokens and 600 million users, effectively you're looking at for every user, for every 14 users, there's one token on the market, which is absolutely crazy.

And to make it worse, it's a global market, right? So, how do you become the one red dot in the sea of 42 million tokens? How do you make sure that your token is a token that performs out where the price outperforms the fundamentals and not the other way around where you have an amazing project with with great fundamentals, but the problem is that you struggle to be the red dot amongst the 42 million tokens. And this problem is a problem that is very very very unique to crypto. Why?

Because there are not many markets in the world that are truly global. I mean, if you think about Nike or you think about Microsoft, yes, of course, their product is global, but they have a marketing office in the US, they have a marketing office in South Africa, they have a marketing office in Philippines, they have a marketing office in India. Crypto can't do that because it's a decentralized uh world. And so how do you make sure that your token is a token that outperforms the price where the price outperforms the fundamentals? And I think the answer is very simple.

The answer is that you have to get attention to your token. And the reason why you have to get attention to your token is because crypto is actually about networks. And networks are the most powerful things in the world because they're governed by two laws. One of them is Metco's law. And Metaf's law basically says that in a network like a token network, every time you add a user to your network, the value of your network actually increases exponentially, right?

That means that your job is just to add your job is to create the network and then to add users because every time you add a user, the the network will grow exponentially. The other law is Barabasi's law and Barabasi's law says that if you have a network in the absence of any government regulation the bigger networks will always win and we see that every day when we deal with things like WhatsApp or Uber or or Amazon because they are so big and because they are networks when you land in a country and you want to you hell a ride you're going to use Uber and when you want to use a chat service you'll land using WhatsApp and so on and so forth. And so our job is to effectively build networks. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to build networks.

And the reason why I like networks so much is because networks force users to be in a relationship, right? Whether you like WhatsApp or not, you're pretty much forced to be in a relationship with WhatsApp. And surprise surprise, this relationship, this relationship that you have, which is a forced relationship, this knows more about you than your wife knows about you. I mean, I'm sure if one of you wants to hand me your phone and we could read some of the messages, I'm sure some of those messages even your wife doesn't know about, right? And so, I always say that networks are pretty much forced relationships.

It's a relationship that you get into and you can't really get out of whether you like it or not. And all we're trying to do in crypto is we're trying to build networks. So just a quick introduction for those of you who don't know who I am. My name is Raner. In crypto I'm known as Cryptoman Run.

We've built I think the largest active community in crypto. We built it in a very short time. It's we built it in three years. Our channels are very big. I mean, we have, I think, one of the biggest media channels.

We have over 1.5 million subscribers. And we've done this quicker than anybody else. And I think the reason why we've achieved that is because we understand how to build networks. Before this, I was in marketing.

Surprise, surprise. I spent 17 years building the biggest marketing company in Africa. And there was a turning point in our company. The turning point was when we managed to turn our marketing company from doing that to doing that. And the reason that that turning point came was because we took the time to study the human brain.

So instead of just doing marketing, we actually took the time to understand the human brain. And believe it or not, this human brain is actually not as complicated as it looks. It has one job. You know what the job is? To keep you alive.

That's it. Your brain scans every single day and it say and it puts things into two categories. One is safe and one is dangerous. And safe it doesn't worry about. and but dangerous.

It makes sure that you don't die. And so we took the time to understand the brain and specifically the brain as I said needs to trust that you will stay alive. So things that it trusts it lets in and things that it doesn't trust it keeps out because it needs to keep you alive. That's all the brain is actually for. Inside the brain there are a few a few glands and they secrete essentially four hormones which drive every decision that you ever make.

Every decision that you ever make is a function of the pituitary gland which actually secretes four hormones. You may have heard about these hormones dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. Actually, if you think about these hormones, let's quickly talk about them. You got endorphins. Anyone know what endorphins are?

It's what your brain secretes when you go to gym and you feel like you're on a high and you don't have any more pain and you don't have any more stress. You want to go, you have a lot of stress, go to gym. Your body will release this thing called an endorphin. You will be more relaxed. It's pretty simple.

Then you get serotonin. Serotonin is the happy hormone. It makes you laugh. It makes you hungry. It makes you happy.

People who don't have serotonin or have serotonin deficiency effectively sometimes get depressed. I think you all know this. Then you've got dopamine. And I think we're all in this industry because we love dopamine. Dopamine is the reward drug.

Dopamine is the achievement drug. Dopamine is the pleasure drug. When you have a good trade and you're a guide and you've done this, it's self-recognition. It's reinforcement. It's your body releasing dopamine.

This is a great drug. This you can easily get addicted to. The next drug which is actually the most important drug or the most important hormone is oxytocin. What is oxytocin? Oxytocin is the chemical that the body releases when the baby goes through the mother's birth canal.

And that creates a relationship between the mom and the baby. It's the hormone of attachment. It's the hormone that makes us feel connected to something. It's the hormone that makes us trust something. This when you're building a relationship is the most important hormone.

Actually, what they're doing now to couples who are not really getting along anymore is they're injecting them with oxytocin and they're putting them in the same room together and they're getting them to trust and to love and to connect again. So, this is the most important hormone. So, if you want to break these down, you can break them down into the what and the where. What? Sorry, the where serotonin and endorphins.

Get someone in gym and their serotonin and endorphins will probably be good. The what is happening with dopamine and oxytocin. So, where I catch you, I got to catch you in a good frame of mind. Where do I do that? I do that when I your serotonin is high and your endorphins are high.

After a workout. I don't catch you during a day during work because your serotonin is low and your endorphins are low. So, you're more receptive to things when your serotonin is high and your endorphins are high. And then your job as a marketer is to make sure that you get oxytocin and dopamine. Oxytocin makes you trust and dopamine makes you feel amazing.

So, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. Anyway, I came into this industry in 2016 and unlike everybody else, I was a marketer and I came into this world. It was a world full of geeks where no one even thought about human connection and marketing. And here I am, this marketer, walking into a technological world and trying to explain to them what we're doing. As I mentioned, we managed to build a community of 1.

5 million people, even bigger. And we did it in a very very very short period of time. And the reason is because I understood marketing. And if you think about marketing, marketing is actually very very very very simple. You have a product.

Usually your product isn't that good. Then you identify a target market. Who do you want to sell the product to? Then you come up with some crazy message like this yogurt is actually good for you because it has cultures. Then you communicate the message.

If you're good, you'll get verality. And all of those things you actually do just to build trust. Because if you build trust, you get oxytocin and then you can build a relationship and then people will take action. So now the question is how do you do this in this industry? How do you evoke oxytocin?

How do you get people to trust you? If you can crack that, you'll have a relationship with millions and millions and millions and millions of people. And if you have a relationship with millions and millions of people, then you get network effect and your protocol will succeed. So let's quickly break down the five options that you have to get into relationships and to evoke oxytocin. The first one, there's five.

The first one is paid marketing. The second one is PR. The third one is to create something with viral features. The fourth one is influence. And the fifth one is just make people rich.

If you can make people rich, funny. They trust you. Don't know why. So, let's break this down. First one, make people rich.

If you make people rich, surprise, surprise, they trust you. Great. People trust Bitcoin. People trust, well, not Ethereum so much anymore because they made us rich, but then they took away our money. But people trust Salana.

Why? Because Salana, Bitcoin, and E made us rich. And that's why we all love them and we all have a relationship with them, right? I have a better relationship than Bitcoin than sometimes I have with my wife or with some of my friends, right? Why?

Because Bitcoin made me rich. It's not only in crypto. If you think about the best stocks in the world, Amazon, Meta, Facebook, Google, they all have one thing in mind. The chart started low and made people rich. And if you held on, you built a relationship.

And when the market dips and you have some extra money, you put it to the person or the the token that you have a relationship with. So option number one is just make people rich. And if you make people rich, you'll build amazing relationships. Only problem is that the market structure doesn't allow for that anymore. Because unless you're launching your token at a10 billion dollar market cap, you're not expected by accepted by the market.

And so unlike the old days where we launch at zero and make a millions of people rich, here we launch high and we make millions of people poor. And then there's no oxytocin and there's no dopamine and there's no trust and there's no relationship and nobody cares about your token ever again. So the first way to do it is just to make people rich. If you make people rich, you will give them oxytocin because they will trust you. And you will give them dopamine because they feel like gods because they bought your token.

The token went up. The body said you're a genius. That's called self-reinforcement. And then you score very high high on the marketing scorecard. So option number one, just make people rich.

Let's go to option number two. You can't so you can try and do airdrops but airdrops are like a one night stand because people don't work to make the money and so they just dump your airdrop token and so I always call air drops a one night stand the people will feel rich it doesn't score anything on oxytocin no trust no reinforcement and it's done the second way to get into a relationship is to do paid marketing how many of you have done paid marketing put your hands up Okay. The problem with paid marketing is you're trusting you're starting from a point of zero trust. And 90% of the time that you spend and the money that you spend is actually just to get trust. And 10% is just to get the action that you want.

So you're spending 100, 90 is going to build trust and you're only getting 10% worth of value. Doesn't work. But if you're going to do it, you got to do it properly. Get a real agency, spend a lot of money, do bold things because remember that the brain's function is to keep you alive. And so unless you're doing something bold like getting a zipline over here, you ain't going to win.

And so paid marketing really doesn't work. You can do PR. How many of you have done PR? Put your hands up. Okay.

You spend a lot of money to churn out news articles of which there are a billion there are more news articles than tokens every single day. How do you get noticed? You don't. Bad PR. You can do good PR which is doing interviews and connecting emotionally with an audience but it's very hard to maintain that.

Trump did a very good job. R Paul does a very good job. The reason why Trump won the election is because he went on a lot of podcasts. We all got to know him. Even those that didn't like him started to love him.

The oxytocin released and when the oxytocin released, Trump won the elections. And that is the importance of doing PR. I'll be three minutes. The next thing you can do is you can launch a viral feature. This for me is probably the best viral feature in the world.

Every time you make money, you share this viral feature which I think BBET created on Twitter and on Instagram. What does it do? Makes you feel like you're part of a community. Oxytocin trust community. Makes you feel like you're a god.

Ah, I got 5,000% in a trade. Dopamine reinforcement. Amazing. Okay. The thinking when you see everybody else posting and you're also posting is everybody else is part of the winning community and now so am I.

Okay, great. You score very high. High dopamine, high oxytocin, good relationship. Great, right? Let's talk about one more and one that's really really really close to my heart and one that I think is really the most effective because if there are 50 million tokens and there are 600 million users and there's about 12 tokens per user one way is to be able to get influence attention.

Now what do we mean by influence? It's the ability to take attention and move it from one place to another. Let's talk a little bit about influence because influence is actually a formula. How much attention do you have and how much credibility do you have? So if I have high attention, lots of people looking at me and I have high credibility, a lot of people will do what I say.

If I have high attention but I have no credibility, people won't do what I say, right? It's pretty simple pretty simple math. So influencers are always juggling trying to get more attention by doing things that are just stupid enough to still keep you credible. It's pretty simple, right? That's what influencers are doing.

They're trying to get more attention and more and and still keep their credibility. I learned this when I started being an influencer, which I I never actually planned. Credibility equals trust. And if you followed our talk and you know some maths, trust equals oxytocin. So if an influencer who you trust tells you to do something, oxytocin is a tick.

And if you do it and you land up making money, dopamine is a tick. I learned this. I came from the marketing world where I hated influencers because I didn't think they added value. And then I became an influencer by surprise. and I realized just how powerful this attention actually is.

An influencer is your gateway to trust. It's the cheapest and easiest way to direct attention. So, let's use an example. if you have a bad influence. And I I use Bit Boy because I think he's pretty much gone down.

But he has no attention and no credibility, so he can't help you on your journey. But if you have a good influencer or you have a fund, these funds are actually influencers. When Multicoin Capital says that they're investing in a project, these guys are actually influencers because we all trust what Multicoin Capital does and they have a lot of attention. And so if you start understanding how the human brain works and you start understanding that the key thing that you're trying to achieve to build relationships is actually trust, you'll find that the cheapest way to buy trust is through influence. Now, I'm not saying that you should engage with YouTube influencers, but I think you should surround yourself with people that have high attention and high credibility.

And those are the people that need to be involved in your project. And if you do, you shortcut the route to getting trust. You shortcut the route to relationships, and you shortcut your way to network effects, which are the most powerful effects in the world. So that's the formula and if you look at how this formula has been applied I wanted to show you an example because I know you guys are all crypto investors you remember Aptos and Sooie Aptos and Suie always moved together went up Suie went up went down Sui went down right until one day Sooie went much higher than Aptos what happened that's what happened. Ral Paul and many others who had high attention and high credibility started to endorse this protocol and the community started to trust and they started to buy and they started to invest and they built network effects and the rest is history.

So listen, I'm very much over my time, but I think you guys have now got the road map and I think you understand the way to build trust, credibility, and ultimately build network effects. Thank you very much.