Guilds: How to Create an Army of Users for a Web3 Project

Introduction

More than 2 years ago, during the transition stage of one of our GameFi clients, we were thinking about how to create touchpoints or additional value points for being in the project's community. Obviously, the market was flooded with thousands of projects, and traditional activities were no longer enough to retain attention and activeness in the community. And not just the community members, but those that have real value.

Fight Me by Nekki: Choose Your Gang

So, after another brainstorming session, we were the first in the market to implement a "gang battle" right in the project's Discord server. The essence was to create a competitive mechanic that would motivate users to spend a lot of time in the community while helping the project.

As you can see in the screenshot, we created an additional verification through a bot and led users through onboarding to immediately choose, as in the Matrix, the red or blue pill. After clicking on an emoji, the user was given the role of a gang member and access to a closed channel where they could communicate with users from their gang.

At that time, we announced different kinds of tasks for the community every week. Gangs competed by posting/guerrilla marketing/creating graphics/making video reviews/inviting referrals and much more. Community managers counted and awarded points, and at the end of the week announced which gang won and what the overall score was.

At that moment, along with Discord collaborations with NFT/GameFi projects and a series of quests on different platforms, we attracted around 20k verified community members to the gangs. As a result, within 2 months, we achieved a quick sold-out Free Mint collection of 10,000 NFTs.

XYRO: Guild Competition on the Path to Airdrop

After a year and a half, we decided to transform the best practices of our previous case for another client - XYRO. And right on the server, we organized guild competitions.

After a month of running our Discord and gathering the first OG core (those who joined the XYRO clan before a specific date or met certain community activity criteria), we opened up the opportunity for "clan members" to create their own guilds.

Those who met the criteria for creating guilds received the role of Guild Godfather and a separate closed channel for communication with users from the guild. In addition, we created a separate recruitment channel where newcomers came to find out what it was and why, and Guild Godfathers lured them to join their guild for further competitions.

After a couple of weeks, we already had 5-6 permanent guilds competing with each other by completing weekly tasks and earning points. Guild Godfathers had broad powers. They could add new members to the guild or remove old ones who were less active. In addition, they distributed the prizes to their team at their discretion. Finally, they received the most airdrop points for the future airdrop.

Regarding rewards, we chose the following:

• Weekly rewards (a bit of USDT for the top 3 guilds and several XYRO Clan roles)
• Long-term (based on the guild leaderboard, airdrop points were also distributed)

Final Results

During the three months of guild competitions (we led them to Testnet, where they could already receive airdrop points in their personal accounts) - about 3000 USDT was spent on prizes, as well as several dozen OG roles and airdrop points.

During this time, we gained 100+ extremely active daily users for the project, who through our competitive mechanics:

• invited over 2000 users to Testnet
• made over 1000 posts/threads/mentions about the project
• raided 50+ communities
• actively played platform game modes and helped demonstrate real traction for future fundraising
• and even created their separate guilds on X and much more.

And most importantly - we got excellent engagement in the main channels of the project. Users spent a lot of time in the community and, as a result, on the project's main platform. The full case study of XYRO project development from scratch can be read here.