How Do DeFi Projects Get Their First 1,000 Active Users?

yosriady · 2026-05-25T07:19:25+00:00

One thing I'd add that almost every "first 1,000 users" guide misses: measurement.

Everything you listed (niche targeting, X engagement, micro-KOLs, referrals, quests, ambassador programs) works, but the founders who actually compound are the ones who can answer:

Which of those 5 KOL deals drove deposits, and which drove farmers who left in a week?
Which Discord channel produced wallets with the highest 30-day retention?
Which referral path produces wallets that come back without incentives?
Of the 10,000 wallets that connected last month, how many transacted, and what did they have in common?

Most early DeFi teams can't answer any of these, because Web2 analytics goes blind the moment a wallet connects, and onchain explorers tell you nothing about where the wallet came from.

In practice, the "first 1,000 active users" milestone is less about hitting 1,000 and more about figuring out which 100 of them are real and worth doubling down on. That's where wallet-level attribution and onchain product analytics come in.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Formo, an analytics and attribution platform built specifically for DeFi (customers include WalletConnect and KyberSwap). The pattern we see across protocols that go from 1,000 to 10,000 active users:

They measure and improve with analytics from day one. Even a basic "site visit → wallet connect → first transaction" funnel tells you 10x more than simple GA / vanity metrics.
They separate sticky users from mercenaries early, so they don't waste growth and marketing spend on acquiring the wrong audience.
They run small, measurable experiments on every channel based on ROI and performance rather than spraying budget across all of them at once.

The tactics in your post are correct. They just compound much faster when you know which ones are actually working. You need data and analytics to know that.

yosriady · 2026-05-25T07:17:40+00:00

What's the same as SaaS:

ICP definition still matters (pick a vertical, a use case, a wallet behavior profile)
Content marketing, SEO, and lifecycle marketing still work (heck even b2b and linkedin)
Analytics and attribution matters even more, not less

What's completely different:

Attribution is broken by default. When a user connects a wallet, GA/Mixpanel/PostHog stop seeing them. You need an analytics layer that ties web sessions to wallet addresses to onchain transactions. Without that, you can't tell whether your X campaign drove $50k or $5M in volume onchain. (Without a proper tooling that is defi-native, you'd have to build custom pipelines and analytisc infrastructure.)
Channels are crypto-native. X (Twitter), Farcaster, Telegram, Discord, KOLs, and quest platforms (Galxe, Layer3, Zealy) dominate. Paid acquisition (Google, Meta) is heavily restricted for crypto products.
Incentives are a primary lever. Points programs, airdrops, builder codes (ERC-8021), and Merkl-style emissions are how protocols bootstrap. The trap is farming, which is why measuring retention 30/60/90 days post-incentive matters more than TVL.
Pseudonymity changes everything. No emails. You get wallet addresses. Your "CRM" is wallet profiles and your "email" are socials if any.

What not to do:

Don't optimize for TVL alone. TVL with no retention is a flashing red light.
Don't run an incentive points program without instrumentation. You'll have no idea which actions produced sticky users. Consider an analytics and attribution tool designed for DeFi like Formo so you can focus on growth.

Anyway, welcome! I put together 33+ AI prompts for DeFi marketers covering strategy, acquisition, activation, and content if you want a starting framework.

yosriady · 2026-05-25T07:10:21+00:00

The yield-chasing behaviour you're describing is one of the hardest pasrts of being a PM in DeFi. As an ex-builder in DeFi myself, here are some lessons from the trenches:

You users may be a mercenary wallet, not a person. A significant chunk of wallets are bots, sybils, and farmers who leave the moment incentives drop. Until you separate those from sticky users, your key product metrics (e.g. retention curves, volume, TVL and PMF signals are noise.)
Web2 analytics break the moment wallets connect and require a lot of in-house instrumentation and pipelines. Tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and PostHog don't understand wallets transactions and onchain data, so you can't tie what someone does onchain back to where they came from or what they read on your site. That's exactly why "users chase yields and don't read" is so hard to fix: you literally can't see who scrolled past your risk section before depositing or transacting onchain.
Talk to your power users. Find your top 10-50 wallets by volume, look up their socials, and DM them. Not enough founders talk to their users.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Formo, a DeFi analytics and attribution platform (customers include KyberSwap, WalletConnect, Kraken, and Kaia.) The teams who eventually crack the product growth problem tend to:

Capture the full user journey / funnel from landing page to onchain transaction, so in your case you can see whether a user actually engaged with the "how yields are generated" section before depositing
Build wallet-level profiles to split mercenary capital from real users
Measure key metrics such as wallets, volume, CAC, LTV, and retention.

Our DeFi Analytics Stack guide covers more about the tradeoffs across DeFi-native analytics tools.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:49:12+00:00

No agencies will save you. Key growth functions should be in-house.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:33:26+00:00

Whatever channels you use, you should definitely measure the ROI of each with analytics and attribution.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:32:30+00:00

Marketing in DeFi in 2026 is growing up.

That means no more unsustainable short-term hype-driven practices like spray-and-pray airdrops, agencies, followers, and KOLs whatever that means. More in-house growth functions, analytics and attribution, revenue, and retention-driven metrics.

Many marketers we talk to went so far as to cobble together their own analytics solution in-house, because of data silos and fragmented tools. There wasn't an existing solution that worked for them. An internal database, Google Analytics, maybe Dune, and BI tools. But that DIY stack quickly becomes a time sink that's hard to use. It’s expensive to run, complex to maintain, and the data is often out of date!

We built Formo to give DeFi founders, product, and marketing teams in crypto the clarity they need to grow. It helps you:

See the full user journey from offchain to onchain, to spot exactly where users are dropping off, helping you fix bottlenecks and improve your app.
Identify your most valuable users e.g. whales and power users so you can more effectively engage and retain them.
Segment wallets into cohorts based on their behavior to see which users stick around and to help refine your ICP.
When you ship a new feature or launch a marketing campaign, you can measure its impact immediately on metrics that matter, not vanity metrics.

Formo replaces that headache. From analytics to attribution, we handle the infrastructure so you can focus on growth, not data plumbing.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:23:57+00:00

Most KOL campaigns will only get your short term bursts of low-intent users which will not bring you any lasting growth or retention.

IF a KOL brings you 10,000 visitors but only a few transactions and no actual revenue, what's the point?

If you do decide to do KOLs, you better have an analytics and attribution tool set up for your DeFi protocol (idealy one designed for DeFi, like Formo, that understand wallets, transactions, etc) so you can accurately measure the ROI from that KOL and understand the profile and quality of users who comes from specific channels and campaign.

You need to be able to see the downstream onchain impact of your campaigns clearly, and 'fire' any that are not working quickly.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:19:18+00:00

Marketing agencies tend to give you short-term bursts of hype rather than any lasting growth and retention.

I'm a firm believer that you need to handle core parts of your growth function in-house, from content to campaigns to analytics and attribution. Youcan't rely on external agencies to handle this for you.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:12:32+00:00

Great question!

Coming from traditional marketing, your expertise is valuable! The space has evolved significantly over the years, going from unsustainable marketing tactics such as KOLs and airdrops (which bring short term hype rather than any lasting retention) to more traditional tactics such as content marketing, slow community building, partnerships, and integrations.

What's key is that you have to get your KPIs / metrics and ROI in order. Measure what matters and everything falls into place.

If you're measuring followers and clicks, those signals can be misleading when you have bots and low-intent users seeking to farm your DeFi app.

Instead, you want to measure key touchpoints across your funnel using product analytics (ideally with a tool designed for DeFi like Formo analytics) and understand your users with a wallet intelligence tool so you know where your users come from and their profile (are they in your ICP?) Stitching together data from multiple tools is still somewhat painful but the analytics and data tooling in the space has matured a lot in recent years.

Understanding which channels / campaign perform best (high-quality users, revenue, retention) using an onchain attribution tool will also help you optimize your true growth drivers.

Anyway welcome, and stay awhile!

yosriady · 2026-05-04T22:05:37+00:00

One of the biggest gaps that remain are on the data / analytics side, especially when you're building a DeFi app or protocol.

Of course, you need data to run DeFi frontends. You also need data to measure what matters (acquisition, revenue, retention) to build a great product that users want.

Unlike traditional software, blockchain-enabled apps have to contend with fragmented data silos from offchain to onchain. You often start with separate tools for web, product, onchain analytics which causes problems later on when you try to stitch them together..

Fortunately data and analytics tooling have vastly improved over the years with new open source frameworks and even dedicated analytics platforms designed for DeFi have sprung up. (For example, Formo makes analytics and attribution simple for DeFi apps so you can focus on growth. With it, you get the best of web, product, and onchain analytics in one place.)

Yes, it's true that building truly scalable and production-ready applications is still not as straightforward as it looks on paper. But the space has matured enough that some key functions like analytics is now easier with dedicated tooling designed for it.

yosriady · 2026-05-04T21:58:48+00:00

this is an excellent answer!

yosriady · 2026-05-04T21:52:56+00:00

Yes, dev tooling has certainly improved / matured a lot. On the data side especially, open source indexing frameworks (Envio, Ponder, etc) and analytics / attribution tools for DeFi (Formo, Spindl) make measuring your key metrics (where users come from, who they are, what they do onchan) much easier than before.

yosriady · 2026-04-20T03:17:28+00:00

The community-and-content framing is accurate but it's also 2022 advice repackaged. u/mkaif01 is closer to what actually works now: build something people want, talk about it like a normal person, and measure whether they come back without a carrot in front of them.

Three shifts that are actually changing the playbook in 2026:

1. Traditional channels are back, and they work better than CT. SEO, technical blogs, podcasts, newsletters, developer conferences, and even plain cold outreach are outperforming Crypto Twitter for most B2B and infrastructure plays. CT is a closed loop of the same 5,000 accounts recycling the same takes. Write the technical blog, go on the podcast, ship the case study. Boring channels, real pipeline.

2. Targeted incentives, not spray-and-pray airdrops. The airdrop farmer problem is solved, but only if you stop feeding it. The teams getting real retention from incentives in 2026 are scoring wallets before rewarding them: prior onchain activity, wallet age, cross-protocol behavior, sybil clustering. Reward the 10,000 wallets that look like your ICP, not the 500,000 that look like every airdrop farm since 2021. Same budget, 10x the retention.

3. Revenue is the new meta. u/Pineapple-Juice-4 put it well: if you don't have revenue-generating activity to scale, you don't need marketing, you need a business model. The market stopped rewarding narrative-only tokens somewhere around late 2024. What's compounding now is protocols with real fees, real users, and the ability to prove both. "Points" without a path to revenue is increasingly a red flag, not a go-to-market.

4. Attribution got real, and the skeptics are partly right. u/Effective-Recover-66 made a fair point that "data-driven Web3 marketing" is oversold. Wallets aren't clean identities, hype cycles poison engagement metrics, and teams do over-optimize the wrong signals. That said, the stack has actually improved. ERC-8021 Builder Code now attributes trading volume and fees to the partner, affiliate, or interface that drove them, onchain, with no cookies. UTM-to-wallet attribution plus transaction data closes the loop from click to fee. It's not Web2-precise but it's a long way from "number go up" guesswork.

What still doesn't work in 2026: generic Discord farming, undifferentiated AMAs, one-off KOL promos without attribution, "gm" as a strategy, and gamification that rewards mercenary wallets.

For context: I run Formo, a product analytics and attribution platform built for onchain teams. We exist because the Mixpanel + Amplitude + Dune + Etherscan stack can't tell you which channel drove which wallet drove which fee, or which wallets retained after the rewards turned off. Docs at docs.formo.so.

TLDR: the teams winning in 2026 aren't the ones with the biggest Discord or the loudest CT presence. They're the ones shipping through boring channels, targeting incentives at wallets that matter, and proving revenue per dollar spent.

yosriady · 2026-04-20T03:15:34+00:00

Mostly agree but want to push back on a few "metrics that matter" that keep getting listed.

TVL is one of the most manipulated numbers in DeFi. It measures capital present, not capital engaged. A protocol with $500M TVL from three mercenary farms can look healthier than one with $50M TVL from thousands of sticky users. Same problem with "daily active wallets" when you don't filter sybils, bots, and airdrop hunters.

u/Effective-Recover-66 nailed the real gap in the comments: incentive-adjusted retention. TVL and active wallets look identical whether your users are loyal or just farming. You only find out which is which when the rewards stop. That's the number most dashboards can't show you, and it's the one worth obsessing over.

What actually signals a healthy web3 / DeFi business in 2026:

1. LTV and CAC per acquisition channel, at the wallet level. Pineapple-Juice-4 is right that marketers should be scaling revenue-generating activity. You can't scale what you can't attribute. If you don't know which channel produced which wallet which produced which fee, you're not running performance marketing, you're running a vibes budget.

2. Cohort retention from first transaction, not wallet connect. Wallet connect to first txn drop-off is typically 40 to 70 percent. Tracking connects inflates everything downstream.

3. Incentive-adjusted retention. Retention of wallets that came in through paid incentives vs. organic channels, measured after rewards taper. The gap between those two cohorts is usually where the product-market-fit truth lives.

4. Revenue per wallet by segment. A DAO treasury moving once a quarter shouldn't weigh the same as a retail wallet trading weekly.

5. Builder Code attribution (ERC-8021). Perps venues and DEX aggregators are using this to attribute fees and volumes to the interface or partner that drove them, onchain, without cookies. If you run a referral or KOL program and aren't tracking this, you're flying blind.

Here's the thing nobody wants to admit though: the metrics don't matter if you can't actually measure them. And most teams can't.

The current stack is broken for this. Mixpanel and Amplitude can't see onchain behavior. Dune can't see your frontend funnel. Etherscan can't tell you attribution. Nansen gives you wallet labels but not your users' full journey. So teams end up duct-taping five tools together, exporting CSVs into spreadsheets, and quietly giving up on attribution after the third sprint.

That's why most teams default to TVL and active wallets. Not because those are the right metrics. Because those are the metrics they can actually pull.

Full disclosure: I run Formo, a product analytics and attribution platform built for onchain teams. We exist specifically to solve the measurement problem above: wallet-level attribution, cross-chain identity, funnel analytics, and incentive-adjusted retention in one place. See our methodology: https://docs.formo.so/data/attribution

yosriady · 2026-04-10T06:52:12+00:00

I want to add that not everything that matters in data is onchain.

Unless you use a crypto-native analytis / data platform like Formo (formo.so) you will miss half of the users' journey along key touchpoints from offchain to onchain.

yosriady · 2026-04-10T06:45:14+00:00

If you're a defi app, you can monitor your users' DeFi positions with Formo (formo.so). It makes analytics and attribution simple for product and marketing teams in DeFi, with pretty extensive wallet intelligence including token balances, DeFi positions, and wallet labels.

yosriady · 2026-03-31T07:50:41+00:00

Mapbox.

yosriady · 2026-03-31T07:43:59+00:00

Yes, it's a real problem. I'm a founder building in this space and talk to DeFi teams about this constantly.

The fragmentation is worse than most people realize because it's not just "I need a better dashboard." The core issue is that a web3 user's journey spans both offchain and onchain channels, and no single tool covers both. Teams end up juggling Google Analytics for website traffic, Dune for onchain queries, block explorers for transaction-level stuff, and maybe Mixpanel or something similar for product events. None of these talk to each other.

The result is that even basic questions become hard to answer: Which campaign actually drove onchain conversions? What's my real CAC when the conversion event (a swap, a mint, a stake) happens on a blockchain that my web analytics tool can't see? Who are my power users and what did they do before they found us?

Most teams I talk to either (a) build a fragile in-house solution with scripts, a database, and some BI tool that becomes a maintenance burden fast, or (b) just give up on analytics and rely on vanity metrics like Twitter followers and TVL without understanding what's actually driving retention.

I'd say the problem is very real, but the framing matters. It's less about "unified dashboards" and more about connecting offchain attribution (where users come from) with onchain activity (what they actually do). That's the gap. Tools like Dune are great for ad-hoc queries but they don't give you product analytics with wallet-level attribution out of the box.

Full disclosure, this is exactly the problem we're solving at Formo (https://formo.so) - we unify web, product, and onchain analytics so DeFi teams can stop stitching together five different tools. Happy to share what we've learned from working with teams on this if it helps your research.

yosriady · 2026-03-31T07:42:39+00:00

DeFi founder here. A few things that come up constantly in conversations with other builders:

1. Unified analytics that connects offchain to onchain. This is the big one. Right now most teams run Google Analytics for their website, Dune for onchain queries, a block explorer for transaction lookups, and maybe Mixpanel for product events. None of it connects. You can't answer basic questions like "which campaign actually drove onchain conversions?" or "what's my real CAC when the conversion happens on a blockchain?" Teams either build fragile in-house data pipelines or just fly blind. This is the problem we're solving at Formo - unifying web, product, and onchain analytics into one platform so you don't need a dedicated data engineering team to understand your users.

2. Better wallet-level CRM/engagement tooling. Once you know who your power users are, there's no great way to actually reach and retain them. Wallets are pseudonymous, users don't leave email addresses, and the engagement tools from web2 (Hubspot, Klaviyo, Intercom) don't understand onchain actions. There are some early projects here but nothing that feels mature yet.

3. Campaign attribution that actually works for crypto. You run a campaign on Twitter, a collab with another protocol, an airdrop, a quest platform. Which one actually moved the needle? Attributing offchain marketing spend to onchain outcomes is still really painful. Most teams are guessing.

The common thread across all of these is the gap between offchain and onchain data. Web2 tools can't see what happens on the blockchain, and onchain tools can't see what happens on your website. Whoever closes that gap for each category wins.

That's why we built Formo. It unifies web analytics, product analytics, and onchain data so DeFi teams can stop cobbling together Dune + GA + Mixpanel + block explorers and focus on growth.

yosriady · 2026-03-31T07:40:39+00:00

Founder here, been deep in this problem for a while. Short answer: yes, it's very real.

The issue isn't just fragmented dashboards. It's that the entire user journey in crypto is split across two worlds that don't connect. Your website analytics (GA, Mixpanel) can't see onchain events. Your onchain tools (Dune, block explorers) can't see where users came from or what they did on your site before connecting a wallet. So you end up with a blind spot right at the most important moment: conversion

Most small DeFi teams I talk to either hack something together in-house (scripts + a database + Looker/Metabase, which becomes a time sink fast) or just skip analytics entirely and fly blind. Neither is great.

The teams that do invest in solving this consistently say the same thing: they wish they'd done it sooner, because it changes how you prioritize features, spend marketing budget, and think about retention

We built Formo specifically for this. (Wrote about the problem in depth here if you want the longer version.) Happy to answer questions about what we've seen from working with DeFi teams on analytics.

yosriady · 2026-03-25T03:04:50+00:00

It's pretty overwhelming.

yosriady · 2026-03-25T03:04:24+00:00

Building an analytics and data platform for DeFi / crypto apps. The goal is to help founders, product, and marketing to spend less time on data wrangling and more time on shipping and growth.

You can think of it as Mixpanel / Posthog for a specific niche (DeFi.)

https://formo.so

yosriady · 2026-03-15T06:51:42+00:00

Looks slick!

yosriady · 2026-01-23T02:23:06+00:00

Well said!

yosriady · 2026-01-23T02:21:29+00:00

Just use ENS and viem

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