Crypto corner: The challenge of building 'sticky' communities

When I was running PokerNews.com during the poker boom, I would have people sitting in front of me in meetings, their eyes sparkly and bright.

You see, they were opening a new online poker site and they were going to be ‘bigger than PokerStars’.  I did leave some of those meetings feeling bad, but who was I to turn down their massively inflated CPA offer?  Had I known those were going to be the highest CPA numbers I would ever see; I might have negotiated harder.

In all my years in gaming, the only other time I felt like this in meetings was several years later when I met with people that were going to ‘solve social’ for gambling.  They were going to be the ‘Tinder’ of this or the ‘Hinge’ of that in gambling and create a vibrant, thriving community on their platform.

But just like their predecessors in online poker found that building a liquidity-based business is tough, these folks discovered that building a community based on that FOMO proposition was hard. Really hard.

Community culture

Of course, building genuine communities around a product or technology is never easy, but you know who has had arguably more success than anyone else in recent years? The people behind some of the world’s leading cryptocurrencies

Because crypto communities are built around a common belief; not a platform. Crypto communities are built by and for people with a passionate belief. There are at least 15-20 thriving, passionate communities surrounding the culture of particular cryptocurrencies.

Some would argue that large returns on investment is at the centre of the formation of these communities. While there may be some truth to that, that isn’t the reason they have stayed.  If it were simply down to ROI, most of these communities would have abandoned ship long ago – as many of these coins are down 70, 80 and some even 90% off their all-time highs.

There has to be something else that keeps the people around. I believe it’s the fact that they all feel the common bond of this belief that finance – not to mention, the world – is going to change over the next few years.  It’s also about the concept of having a choice around how you choose to run your financial life. Generally speaking, giving customers choices in areas that matter to them builds loyalty.

To me, this represents a massive opportunity for the gaming business.

I hope that the majority of people that read this believe, to at least some degree, that digital currencies will affect how business is transacted over the next decade or so.

Operators have an opportunity to embrace giving more control to customers with respect to their financial transactions they perform with them. I’m not talking about ICO coins, or the volatile trading markets – none of that has to matter. That may be what gets all the publicity with crypto and is a primary reason why many operators have legitimate fears about embracing the space.  It’s also managed to give compliance, treasury and legal departments heartburn, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Players now can connect to your brand via the currency they choose to play in. This opens many doors with respect to how you reward, interact and incentivise your player base to play more. A single, fluid currency that the player can gamble, spend or otherwise use in your universe. The real crazy part is that this actually gives the operator more control over their gaming ecosystem.

And that’s the point of all this. It’s about choice for the player. It’s also about your choice as an operator as to how you transact business. Choice builds loyalty and, in the case of crypto, it’s clear the loyalty sticks.