Table of Contents
Researcher
Who needs to read this?
Founders who say “our community is everything”
VCs who hear it in every pitch
Degens who think discord activity = conviction
Now answer this:
What is your community’s shared belief, if any?
Who contributes, and how often?
What happened to your discord during the last 70% drawdown?
Are they a network or just a crowd?
If you can’t answer those in 30 seconds, you don’t actually know your community. You know your audience, and those aren’t the same thing.
*Special thanks to poopmandefi , 0xjunkim, devrelius, 0xBrans, 100y_eth for the valuable feedback on this article.
Key Takeaways
“Community” is the most misused word in crypto. The BARD framework breaks it into four real signals: Belief, Action, Resilience, and Density to separate substance from hype.
Belief is the emotional moat. It turns holders into missionaries through shared values and rituals. Without a unifying “why,” there’s no community, just exit liquidity.
Action is the strongest signal. Real communities build. The value of a community = the value it creates.
Resilience shows under pressure. True communities survive bear markets and setbacks with conviction, not silence. If they vanish at -70%, they were never real.
Density is the hidden moat. Strong communities form tight internal webs (group chats, sub-DAOs, shared lore) that make them self-sustaining and hard to kill.
1. The Overused Buzzword of Crypto
Scroll through CT or any Web3 pitch deck and you’ll see it: “We have an amazing community!” Every token presale, every NFT drop, every L1 with a slick website boasts about community. But scratch the surface and “community” often means nothing more than a crowd of speculators in a Telegram group. In crypto, community has become an all-purpose buzzword, like “decentralization” or “innovation,” vague enough to mean anything and therefore almost nothing. If everyone claims they have a community, then no one really does.
This memo is a call-out and a reset. It’s time to get serious about what “community” actually means. Not in vibes, but in structure. Not in slogans, but in systems.
Enter BARD: Belief, Action, Resilience, Density. This four pillar framework is a bs detector for crypto “community” claims. It breaks down the intangible vibe of a community into components we can evaluate. Whether you’re a crypto founder trying to foster a loyal user base, a degen hunting for the next narrative, or a VC vetting projects for long-term network effects, the BARD framework helps you separate real community from manufactured hype.
Before we dive in: Think of this as a mental model; not a precise formula, but a way to turn “community” from a fuzzy feel-good notion into something more systematic. More importantly, it’s a lens for being directionally right before the crowd.
2. Belief (The Cultic Core)
Belief is the cultic core, a shared faith or ethos. Great communities behave like movements with a mission.
Every true crypto community begins with Belief, a conviction that unites its members around something bigger than price. In Web3, belief often borders on the religious. This isn’t hyperbole; crypto literally runs on narrative and faith. It’s no coincidence that crypto communities often resemble religious movements: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana each have its own maxis, and nearly every major project has a nickname for its faithful (Beras, Initiates, Ninjas; the list goes on). As one essay put it, the strongest form of narrative is religion, which combines morals, stories, and practices to “supercharge influence and create a self-perpetuating movement.”
Bitcoin set the precedent. “Decentralization is good, banks are bad. Individual sovereignty is good, government control is bad. Privacy is good, surveillance is bad.” These principles became scripture. Rather than just hodling BTC, Bitcoiners live the ethos (self-custody, anti-bank mantra, laser eyes). This belief is the glue that kept the Bitcoin community intact even when Mt. Gox collapsed or when the media declared BTC dead for the 89th time.
Ethereum also carries its own belief structure: open infrastructure, decentralize-everything, the “world computer.” When there’s a core belief, a mere user base transforms into a cause. It’s the difference between a group of people who all happen to hold the same token and a movement.
That said, belief can weaken when core ideals begin to diverge; not among the users, but among the leaders. Ethereum is now facing exactly this tension. Internal disagreements on upgrade priorities, leadership disputes within the Ethereum Foundation (EF), and recent controversies around conflicts of interest have exposed cracks in the once-cohesive narrative. While Ethereum still has strong cultural gravity, the lack of a unified direction, and the perception that key figures are pulling in different ideological directions, has led to growing concerns around mission drift. When belief splinters at the top, it inevitably diffuses across the community.
And this leads to a broader truth: belief can be a double-edged thing. When there’s no real mission and just empty slogans or blind faith that number go up, “community” becomes cult. In fact, one critic pointed out that crypto can resemble a “belief-powered economy,” unified faith propping up value, almost like a collective delusion. As long as everyone believes, the thing has value; when belief cracks, everything crumbles.
True community belief must be earned and reinforced by reality, not just wishful thinking. Projects that deliver (ship products, hit milestones, act in alignment with their stated values) give their communities a reason to believe. Trust isn’t airdropped. It’s reinforced over time.
How to gauge Belief: Can members clearly explain the project’s mission or values, without parroting marketing? Do they create memes, slogans, or rituals unprompted? If there’s no shared language or mythology, and no one can answer “why are you here?” without referencing price… that’s not belief, that’s exit liquidity.
Belief is the emotional moat. As the saying goes: if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. And communities that stand for nothing fall apart fast.
3. Action (From Tokenholders to Contributors)
Action is what separates a true community from a passive audience. It’s measured in contributions and participation. Strong communities have many hands on deck. They ship, they create content, they help each other, all driven by passion not pay.
Belief lights the fire, but Action sustains it. A real community doesn’t just believe, it builds. In crypto, where decentralization and open-source are core, the best communities are do-ocracies: judged not by what they hold, but by what they do.
Plenty of projects have 100,000 holders, but maybe 100 actual contributors. This is not a community, this is a watchlist. The strongest communities flip the ratio. They convert users into builders, educators, mods, meme-makers, or governance participants. Think Ethereum: thousands of developers, researchers, and enthusiasts write EIPs, develop dapps, run nodes, attend hackathons, moderate forums, translate documentation, you name it. It’s not great because people agree ETH is cool, it’s great because so many people roll up their sleeves to improve it. As one OG community builder noted, “taking action to contribute is really powerful. Ethereum has done a great job with this so far.”
Many of the strongest ecosystems thrive on community-built tooling, self-organized events, local ambassadors, and endless unsolicited contributions. Largely grass-roots and volunteer-driven, spreading adoption in their locales. They prove their value through what they ship, not what they shout.
This is the difference between engagement and activity. You can fake 50k TG members, but not 500 contributors who show up every week. A Discord with builders, translators, and docs authors is 10x more valuable than one filled with “when airdrop?” spam. If a discord is just vibes and moonboy memes, that’s just speculation with better branding. The value of a community equals the value it creates.
To unlock that, projects need to lower the barrier to entry and recognize those who contribute. Some use grants and bounty systems. Others rely on status and social capital. But in the end, it’s the same play: create space for contribution, reward effort, and elevate community members who take initiative. Crypto is full of volunteers doing meaningful things without being asked because they care.
How to gauge Action: Look for tangible output and distributed participation. Who’s writing proposals? Who’s running calls? Are there independent projects, dashboards, local meetups, or side tools? If 90% of all contributions come from the core team, you’ve got an audience, not a community. But when randos on the internet start creating unsolicited value, writing explainers, helping onboard, fixing bugs, you know it’s alive.
One could argue “contributors are the currency of community.” The more people invest effort (not just money) into a project, the more genuine and valuable that community is.
4. Resilience (Diamond Hands)
Resilience is the diamond armor of community. The true test of community is adversity (bear markets, hacks, setbacks). Strong communities not only survive these; they often emerge stronger, bonded by having weathered the storm together.
Crypto is built on volatility. Markets crash, protocols break, founders vanish. Resilience asks: when things go sideways, does the community scatter or rally? When the hype tide pulls back, are you left with believers or just an empty beach?
Shared risk creates real bonds. Nietzsche wasn’t talking about crypto, but he might as well have been when he exclaimed that the greatest rewards go to those willing to “live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!” Degens have taken this literally. Locking funds in volatile protocols, aping into obscure tokens, surviving multi-cycle crashes: these shared experiences forge camaraderie. Survive a few 90% drawdowns together and you’ve got a tribe.
Resilient communities build through the pain. They have conviction. They’re not here just for the airdrop; they believe in the mission. If a project’s members keep contributing, keep memeing, and even double down during bear markets, that’s strength.
If your ‘community’ disappears in a bear market, it was never a community to begin with.
Also, surviving a crisis isn’t just about making it through; in strong communities, those scars become badges of honor and lessons that galvanize members even more. Solana post-FTX is a textbook example. The price nuked 95%. Its biggest backer (SBF) disappeared. Headlines called it dead. But the builders stayed. Hacker houses were still full. NFT drops didn’t stop. Defi apps launched. The memes even got better. Solana’s community absorbed the hit, internalized it, and rebuilt the narrative around survival. That post-FTX trauma became lore, filtered out the tourists, and hardened the core. Today’s Solana believers wear it as a badge: they were there when it all fell apart, and they stayed. That kind of battle-tested loyalty isn’t manufactured. It’s earned.
Contrast that with EOS. Despite raising over $4 billion in its record-breaking ICO, the project failed to foster a resilient, conviction-driven community. When momentum slowed and governance drama surfaced, participation dried up. Core contributors drifted away. The ecosystem thinned. Without strong cultural roots or shared belief to fall back on, EOS couldn’t weather the downturn. What looked like a thriving community during the bull was, in hindsight, largely superficial.
How to gauge Resilience: Look at behavior in the bad times. Did the community disappear, or did activity stay consistent, or even rise? Check TG/discord engagement during market drawdowns. Did contributors stick around or rotate out? Do members share war stories like “we survived 2022”? That’s cultural memory, and it matters.
Conviction is quantifiable to some extent: you could measure the staking rate or long-term holding stats even when prices drop, or the number of core contributors who stick around year after year. A community that’s resilient has patience and memory. They remember why they’re here and stick to the mission through the cycles.
Quantitatively, you can track wallet retention, staking rates, or proposal participation through bear cycles. Qualitatively, observe tone: resilient communities joke about “build markets” and keep showing up. Fragile ones spiral into FUD or go silent.
5. Density (It’s Not How Many, It’s How Connected)
Density is the connective tissue of community. It’s about internal relationships, a tight web of member-to-member connections. The richest communities are networks, not audiences, and they prioritize deep engagement over vanity follower counts.
The final pillar, density, is perhaps the most overlooked. Crypto loves to brag about big numbers. Followers, tokenholders, discord members, but raw count is meaningless without connection. Density measures how many of those people are actually linked to each other. Do they collaborate, talk, share ideas? Or are they just loosely orbiting the core team?
A dense community behaves like a living social network. The more connections between members, the stronger the trust, coordination, and retention. If everyone’s just following the official account, you’ve built an audience. One crypto consulting group described community density as the connectivity between a project’s followers beyond just following the official account. If they follow and talk to each other across X, discord, forums, you’ve built a network.
High density = people aren’t just aligned, they’re entangled. They’re in group chats, meetups, side DAOs. They meme together, build together, and show up for each other. It creates a sense of belonging. And when one node drops off, the graph still holds.
Why does this matter? Because network effects grow from density. In dense communities, information spreads faster, coordination is tighter, and belonging is stronger. Real connections foster loyalty. You’ll often see sub-DAOs, regional meetups, or niche channels emerge like neighborhoods within a digital city. That’s a healthy sign of density: people forming real bonds, not just all listening to one megaphone.
And if the founder bails? The project doesn’t die. Dense communities don’t rely on a single voice or hype machine. They persist because members are bound to each other, not just to the brand.
Think quality over quantity. Ten thousand followers who never engage are worth less than a thousand who talk every day. A small DAO with strong internal ties will often outperform a giant one with surface-level engagement. Metcalfe’s Law reminds us: value scales with the number of meaningful connections, not just headcount.
How to gauge Density: It’s tough to measure directly, but there are strong signals. Look at engagement ratios (active chatters vs. total Discord members, reply-to-like ratios on X, number of mutual follows among community members). Are the same names popping up across forums, proposals, meme accounts, and governance? That’s overlap. High density often manifests as a kind of family vibe. When you join such a community, you feel the web of friendships; when you join a low-density community, you mostly hear an echo chamber with a leader at the center. A stage, not a network.
Density is what makes a community self-reinforcing. The tighter the bonds, the harder it is to fade away.
6. Bringing It All Together
It’s high time we demand substance behind the word. Because “community” isn’t magic pixie dust you sprinkle on a project; it’s earned through Belief, built by Action, proven by Resilience, and strengthened by Density.
Each pillar offers a lens on community strength. Individually, they can tell you a lot; together, they form a framework for evaluating and even scoring the health of a network. You can imagine giving a project a 1-10 score on each and seeing how it stacks up. A truly resilient project might score B=9 (clear ethos), A=8 (active contributors), R=10 (battle-tested loyalty), D=8 (interconnected network) (35/40 points). The overhyped “we have community!” project? Maybe B=5, A=3, R=2, D=4 (14/40 points).
For founders and community builders: BARD is a blueprint. Spark belief through a mission that matters. Lower the bar to contribution. Reward those who stay through downturns. Essentially, design your community to eventually outgrow you, such that it becomes self-sustaining. When a community starts creating its own momentum and traditions without the core team in every loop, you’ve hit gold.
For investors and observers: BARD is due diligence. Don’t just count Discord heads. Study behavior: who builds, who stays, who connects. That’s what compounds.
And tools like Kaito are making this easier to measure. By tracking organic participation, surfacing high-signal contributors, and helping projects properly reward meaningful engagement, Kaito is becoming a critical piece of infrastructure for operationalizing BARD at scale.
In crypto, tech is forkable. Capital is fickle. A real community and culture is arguably the one thing you can’t copy-paste. So the next time a founder or influencer boasts about their amazing community, ask them to break it down in BARD terms. If they can’t, they probably don’t.
