Strength in Numbers: DeHub Community Exceeds 8,000 Active Members
By DeHub Team — 2021-10-05
Our community passed 8,000 active members in Q4 2021, up from around 2,000 early adopters two quarters earlier.
Growth numbers are the easiest thing in this industry to inflate and the least interesting to report, so the useful detail is the timing: this happened in the same quarter that our listing agent stole the fundraise and dumped our chart.
Growth during a good quarter is not a signal
A large part of that growth arrived with the run. DHB was up close to 1000x from launch and there was close to $10m in the pool. People arrive for that. Nothing about a community that forms during a run tells you anything, because the same conditions would have grown any community.
What was informative was the second half of the quarter, when the agent situation became public and the chart reflected it. That is the point at which a room that formed around a price usually empties, and a meaningful part of ours did not.
What we think held it
Not luck, and not loyalty in the abstract. A few specific things:
- The community had made real decisions. Chain, price, market cap and supply were voted on in Telegram before launch. People who chose the terms behave differently from people who bought into them.
- There was a product. The beta had been live since Q1 with a few thousand daily users, and prediction and raffle games shipped that quarter. Something existed to be part of that was not the chart.
- We had already handled one incident straight. When the v1 vulnerability appeared, holders were made whole 1:1 with no claim required. By Q4, we were not asking for the benefit of the doubt on a blank record.
What we got wrong
We over-indexed on total member count for a long time after this. Eight thousand is a good headline and a poor management metric — it does not distinguish somebody running a stream from somebody who joined a Telegram group in 2021 and never spoke.
The numbers we care about now are things like whether creators upload again, whether stakers stay staked through an airdrop cycle, and whether people come back to the app on a day with no announcement. Those are harder to grow and much harder to fake.
The through line
The community that came out of Q4 2021 is recognisably the one that later absorbed a contract malfunction and a full v2 relaunch, a migration of 25,000+ holders, and a real estate venture that did not survive its regulator. None of those were survivable on a community assembled purely by a price chart.
What eight thousand people are actually for
The most useful thing a community of that size did for us was disagree.
Several decisions in this archive were made worse by internal consensus and corrected by people outside the team saying so loudly — pacing around releases, the framing of certain announcements, and more than one feature we were attached to. A community that only celebrates is a marketing asset. One that argues is a functioning check.
That is also why the fork by a group of large holders in 2023 was not treated as a betrayal. People with real standing in a project are supposed to be able to act on their own judgement. If that is only acceptable when they agree with us, none of this means anything.