Happy to see Balancer’s least performing department getting the attention and support it deserves.
I’m the co-founder of a social & on-chain analytics firm and we do sophisticated social network analysis on Twitter for hundreds of crypto projects using graph-theoretic and matrix algebraic methods. It gives us a good sense of how many unique tribes (nodes) each project’s community consists of and how they trend overtime (growth/contraction) on a daily basis. We also do psycholinguistic and psychographic profiling using NLP methods.
I’d like to share some insights comparing Balancer with Curve and Uniswap - this is for April:
Community Excitement:
Curve > Uniswap > Balancer
(Curve community has the highest excitement ratio of 25% of all tweets, Uniswap at 11%, Balancer at 5.1%)
Negative Topics - Marketing
Marketing only constitutes 4% of negative Curve discussions.
This ratio is 28.9% for Uniswap
50% for Balancer
Nodes (Tribes)
Uniswap > Curve > Balancer
Curve has 3x more individual tribes than Balancer.
Influencer Distribution (Excluding Nano Accounts)
Uniswap: 1289
Curve: 400
Balancer: 70
I’m going to add some personal observations as well. The only time I personally felt excited and part of a community was around Aura Finance launch - their discord was buzzing with life, excitement and all sorts of random interactions between early speculators.
Balancer has the most active governance across all DAOs, some really talented maxis who inspire awe and confidence, a novel architecture unlocking some great functionality for money markets, veToken based projects, liquid derivatives, but it is lacking a strong community.
Each project needs to strike a healthy ratio between moonbois to technocrats - so any effort in balancing that skew more towards moonbois would help with virality and amplification. Something Beets did really well on Fantom - therefore I’m particularly bullish on this collaboration.