A chain doesn’t acquire end users. Its applications do.
Which means the audience for chain marketing is a few thousand people worldwide — the developers and founders deciding where to deploy. That’s a fundamentally different job from consumer growth, and most chain marketing gets it wrong by treating the network as a product for users rather than a platform for builders.
Your product is the experience of building and shipping on your network. Everything else follows from that.
What developers actually evaluate
Having sat in on a lot of these decisions, the criteria are remarkably consistent and mostly unglamorous:
Can I get something working today? Time from arriving at the docs to a deployed contract that does something. This single measure predicts adoption better than any technical specification. If a competent developer can’t get to a working deploy quickly, they leave, and no grant recovers them.
Is the tooling mature? SDKs that work, an indexer that exists, block explorers that don’t break, wallet support, testnet faucets that dispense. Boring infrastructure is the actual product.
Are there already users and liquidity? Nobody wants to be the first application on an empty chain. This is the cold start problem and it’s why a young network needs concentrated effort rather than broad campaigns.
What does production cost and how reliable is it? Fees, uptime history, and how the network behaved during its worst day.
Will this exist in two years? Funding position, team stability, whether the roadmap has been delivered before. Teams have been burned by chains that went quiet.
What doesn’t move the decision
Throughput numbers. Every chain claims a large one, the methodology varies, and experienced developers have stopped reading them.
Novel consensus design, unless it enables something specific the developer needs.
Partnership announcements with other infrastructure providers. These are announcements to the market, not to builders.
Grant money on its own. It moves decisions at the margin. It doesn’t overcome bad documentation, because a team that struggles in week one leaves regardless of funding.
What a chain marketing programme consists of
Developer relations, properly staffed. Not a community manager with a technical title. Engineers who can debug a stranger’s integration in a public channel. This is the single highest-return hire in chain growth and it’s routinely under-resourced.
Documentation as a product. Versioned, tested, with working examples that actually run. Documentation quality is a growth channel and most chains treat it as a chore.
Reference applications. Build things yourself. Open source them. A developer who can fork something working starts from a much better place than one starting from a specification.
Hackathons and residencies, judged on what still exists three months later rather than demo day polish.
A grant programme measured honestly. Track projects still deployed and used a year later, not projects funded. That number is always far smaller than the one in the annual report, and knowing it is what lets you fix the programme.
Application-level growth support. Help your best applications acquire users. Their success is your traction, and most chains under-invest here because it feels like someone else’s job.
The cold start problem
Every new chain faces it. No users because no applications, no applications because no users.
What works is concentration. Pick a narrow category where your network has a genuine advantage, get a handful of quality applications live in that category, and make that vertical work before broadening. A chain that’s clearly the best place to build one specific kind of thing has a story. A chain that’s a general-purpose alternative to everything has a specification.
What doesn’t work is incentive-led growth that produces transaction volume with no underlying demand. It’s visible, it’s temporary, and sophisticated observers discount it entirely. Incentivised activity is a cost, not traction — the question is whether anything remains when it stops.
Measuring honestly
The metrics that mean something:
- Active developers who deployed more than once, which filters out the tourists.
- Applications with real users, defined as users doing something with no incentive attached.
- Non-self-referential transactions. Bots moving value between their own addresses is not usage.
- Value that stays. Bridged-in value that leaves within a week never counted.
- Retention of deployed applications over twelve months.
The metrics that get inflated: total value locked, transaction count, unique addresses. All three are cheap to buy with incentives, which is exactly why they lead most decks.
What drives the work
- Whether you’re pre-launch or established, since the cold start problem dominates everything early.
- How differentiated the network genuinely is, because positioning can sharpen a real advantage and can’t invent one.
- Tooling maturity, which determines how much of the effort is engineering versus communication.
- Target verticals, since gaming, DeFi and enterprise builders need entirely different programmes.
- Regional focus. Developer communities are geographically clustered and local presence matters more than in most categories.
- Whether you have a grant treasury and how disciplined the allocation process is.
The summary
Stop marketing the technology. Start marketing what a builder can ship on your network that they can’t ship elsewhere, and prove it with reference applications you built yourself.
Then help the teams who show up succeed, because their users are the only users your chain will ever have.
Common questions
How do Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks actually grow?
They grow by attracting teams that build applications people want to use, then getting out of the way. A chain does not acquire end users directly — its applications do. That means the primary marketing audience is developers and founders deciding where to deploy, and the primary product is the experience of building and shipping on your network rather than the network itself.
What do developers actually evaluate when choosing a chain?
Tooling maturity, documentation quality, how quickly they can get something working, whether there is liquidity and users already present, the cost and reliability of running in production, and whether the network will still be supported in two years. Grant money moves the decision at the margin but rarely overcomes bad documentation, because a team that struggles for a week in the first month will leave regardless of funding.
Are grant programmes an effective growth tool for chains?
They work when they fund teams that would have built something regardless and simply needed runway. They fail when they fund teams that build for the grant, ship a proof of concept, and leave. The measure worth tracking is not projects funded but projects still deployed and used a year later, which is a far smaller number than most grant programmes report.
How should a new chain measure traction?
Active developers building repeatedly, applications with real users rather than incentive farmers, transactions that are not self-referential, and value that stays on the network rather than bridging out immediately. Total value locked and transaction counts are both easy to inflate with incentives, and both are the numbers most likely to appear in a deck for exactly that reason.
What is the biggest mistake in Layer 1 and Layer 2 marketing?
Marketing the technology instead of the outcome. Throughput and finality numbers matter to a small group of people and mean nothing to the founder deciding where to build. What that founder wants to know is what they can ship on your network that they cannot ship elsewhere, and whether anyone will be there when they launch.
