Author: Stacy Muur, Crypto KOL

Translated by: Felix, PANews

Web3 is not just Web2 with tokens added. Founders who view Web3 this way will ultimately be either eliminated by the times or end up in prison.

The difference between successful protocols worth billions of dollars and failed cases worth billions boils down to understanding what changes occur when ownership, incentive mechanisms, and transparency become inherent attributes of the product.

If done right, you can build Uniswap, Coinbase, or Aave; if done wrong, you could become Do Kwon—triggering a chain reaction across the entire industry due to a collapse and facing 12 years in prison.

This report summarizes the core founder framework extracted from research, portfolio experience, and operational guidance from a16z crypto. The content covers protocol design, token strategy, community architecture, enterprise adoption, communication collaboration, security protection, talent acquisition, market cycle resilience, and long-term strategies built during the evolution of crypto.

1. Web3 is "read-write-own", not "read-write-monetize"

Argument: The transition from Web2 to Web3 is not about adding cryptocurrency to existing business models, but about the reorganization of value control. Finance is the first experimental field, but this primitive can be extended to any system that coordinates people and capital directly embedded with ownership on an internet scale.

Chris Dixon's framework remains the most authoritative explanation: Web1 allowed users to "read", Web2 allowed users to "read and write", and Web3 enables users to "read, write, and own".

In Web2, Instagram users created approximately $100 billion in value for Meta shareholders. In Web3, early Uniswap liquidity providers not only use the protocol but also own it.

Dixon reinforced this framework again in early 2026, arguing that the current "financial era" of blockchain is not a failure of macro theory but the operational sequence of expectations. Blockchain introduces a new primitive: the ability to coordinate people and capital on an internet scale, with ownership directly embedded in the system. Finance is the most natural proving ground for this primitive, hence it emerged first.

“We are clearly in the financial era of blockchain. But the core idea has never been that all crypto applications would emerge simultaneously, nor that finance wouldn’t develop first.”

—Chris Dixon, a16z Crypto (February 2026)

Effective Practices:

• Accept the operational sequence of "finance first"
• Design protocols that enable users creating value to capture value
• View token ownership as a coordination mechanism rather than a fundraising tool
• Establish governance rights that have substantive meaning

Success Cases:

Hayden Adams: Developed Uniswap for three years without tokens, relying solely on a $50,000 Ethereum grant to survive. When UNI launched in 2020, it was distributed to users who had already proven the protocol's effectiveness.

Stani Kulechov: Adopted the same strategy on Aave; first built the lending protocol, then launched the token after achieving product-market fit (PMF). Both projects have weathered every market cycle, while 90% of DeFi protocols around 2020 have perished.

2. Launch tokens after achieving PMF, not before

Argument: Tokens launched before PMF optimize for short-term price movements. Tokens launched after PMF optimize for long-term protocol value. Token issuance is a one-time opportunity.

a16z Crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin documented three of the most common protocol design mistakes. The most fatal one is: issuing tokens too early.

“The biggest mistake is launching tokens before achieving product-market fit. Token issuance is a one-time opportunity. If you launch tokens before PMF, you will attract mercenaries rather than advocates.”

— Eddy Lazzarin, a16z

Launching tokens too early leads community members to focus only on token price, not on the success of the protocol. When prices drop (which will inevitably happen), they will leave. In contrast, when you issue tokens after PMF, you attract users who already love the product. Tokens become an additional benefit rather than the entire value proposition.

Effective Practices:

• First, launch the product, validate market demand, and build a core user base
• Reward existing users with tokens
• View token issuance as a liquidity event for the existing community, not a customer acquisition strategy.

Success Cases:

Brian Armstrong: Founded Coinbase in 2012. The company went public on Nasdaq in April 2021, taking nine years. Sequoia Capital's investment return exceeded 1000 times. Armstrong was not in a hurry to tokenize because he didn't need to. He built a regulated entry point, weathering every cycle, regulatory scrutiny, and multiple competitors. Coinbase's success came from solving a real problem (buying cryptocurrency without being hacked or scammed) and operating compliantly from the start.

3. Community is protocol infrastructure, not a marketing channel

Argument: In Web2, you develop the product first and then build the community. In Web3, the community itself is the product infrastructure.

Mary-Catherine Lader, after years in traditional finance, is now responsible for operations at Uniswap Labs. Her observation is that the go-to-market strategy in Web3 is structurally different from that in Web2.

“In Web2, you could secretly develop and then release a polished product. In Web3, your community needs to be involved in the product development process as they will become your infrastructure—your liquidity providers, your governance voters, your evangelists.”

—Mary-Catherine Lader, COO of Uniswap Labs

This means transparency becomes a competitive advantage rather than a risk. Traditional companies worry about competitors copying; Web3 protocols worry more about releasing products without community support.

Effective Practices:

• Build products transparently from the outset
• Release incomplete products and let the community decide the development direction
• View early users as co-builders, not testers

Success Cases:

OpenSea: Founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah started with $120,000 from Y Combinator in 2018. They built the NFT marketplace in a public environment, directly engaging early collectors on Discord and Twitter, and made decisions based on the community's actual needs. When the NFT craze hit in 2021, OpenSea didn't need to hurriedly build a community because they already had one. The two founders became billionaires because they understood that community is not marketing; it is infrastructure.

Failure Cases:

Between 2018 and 2022, dozens of VC-backed "Coinbase killers" claimed to have better user experiences, lower rates, and larger marketing budgets, yet almost all failed.

Because they treated crypto users as Web2 consumers—secretly developing, relying on press releases to launch, and expecting users to flock in, users did not come. In the Web3 space, community-first will always beat product-first.

4. Communication is infrastructure, not marketing

Argument: Founders cannot outsource the narrative. Communication strategies must revolve around three questions: What are the business goals? Who is the target audience? Which strategy most effectively reaches them? Press releases are dead; blog posts, direct channels, and media relations are the operational toolkit.

a16z Crypto communications partner Paul Cafiero documented a communication model built around these sequential questions regarding business goals, target audience, and optimal strategy.

Core narrative: The problem you are solving, the vision of the world after the solution, who will benefit—these core narratives must always hold regardless of how channels or audiences change. However, different audiences need different emphases: investors care about growth prospects, while media care about headlines.

Five Communication Levers

Cafiero points out that every founder can leverage five strategies:

• Owned content (blogs, white papers, videos)
• Social channels (brand accounts and individual accounts)
• Community platforms (Discord, Telegram, Signal)
• Speaking engagements and conferences
• Media relations

No single lever can dominate; the best combination depends on the objectives and audience.

Media Relations (KOL): Still crucial yet often misunderstood

Despite some hostility from tech circles, media coverage can combine third-party validation with audience expansion. It can reach people outside existing communities, such as potential employees, customers, and thought leaders. When Kalshi's founding team appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, the audience they reached was starkly different from the crypto Twitter audience.

“Founders are the best spokespeople. You cannot outsource the company's narrative or story.”

—Paul Cafiero, a16z Crypto

Four Principles of Media Engagement Proposed by Cafiero:

• Founders must personally craft and convey their own stories
• Media relations are akin to business development
• Media are neither friends nor foes
• Your story must fit into the macro context of the world

Effective Practices:

• Build communication strategies around "goals, audience, strategy"
• Founders as primary spokespeople; never fully outsource the narrative.
• View media and KOL relationships as business development: enhance their value before pitching projects.
• All announcements should be made via blog posts, not press releases.
• Build communication infrastructure before crises arise, as the best defense is offense.

Success Cases:

Kalshi: Founder Tarek Mansour skillfully utilized both traditional and crypto-native media to strategically reach broad audiences, driving $1 billion in financing with a valuation of $11 billion. The founders understood that different audiences require different channels, and media relations can amplify all other communication methods' effects.

Counter Cases:

Projects that relied entirely on paid news release channels for distributing press releases found their messages drowned in noise. In an environment with a PR-to-journalist ratio of about 6:1, generic promotions and empty promises hardly stand out.

5. Security is about the survival of the protocol

Argument: In Web2, security vulnerabilities result in loss of money and reputation. In Web3, they result in losing everything.

Battle-tested libraries, validation, and multi-signature governance are not optional but the cornerstone to preventing hundreds of billions in losses due to hacking and cryptographic failures. But merely having technical security is not enough. When your protocol is successful and holds significant value, you become a target for attacks. Founders constantly face threats from nation-state level attackers.

Carl Agnelli worked for the U.S. Secret Service for 13 years before joining a16z. His perspective is that Web3 founders face physical threats that traditional tech companies have not encountered.

“Criminals follow a five-step attack process: identify, observe, filter, plan, execute. Once you publicly associate with crypto wealth, you are already on their database.”

—Carl Agnelli, former U.S. Secret Service agent, a16z

Stanford University cryptographer and a16z advisor Dan Boneh documented technological issues: insufficient randomness in key generation, improper key management, and improper application of zero-knowledge proofs have resulted in billions in losses.

Effective Practices:

• Backup wallet strategy: store 5-10% of assets in a "secure wallet" for emergencies
• Never reuse keys across different protocols
• Conduct formal validation of smart contracts before mainnet launch
• Maintain a security-operation mindset of assuming constant surveillance

Success Cases:

Surviving founders adopted hardware wallets, multi-signature setups, and formal audits from the start. They kept their home addresses confidential. They never posted photos that would reveal their locations in real-time. They recognized that publicly revealing crypto wealth would make them targets, because that is indeed the case.

Threats are real:

Ledger co-founder kidnapping case: In January 2025, David Balland was kidnapped at his home in France. The attackers severed his finger and sent a video to his partner demanding a ransom of 100 BTC. Although he was eventually rescued, this illustrates what happens once you publicly associate with crypto wealth. It is highly targeted: surveillance, planning, collaborative execution. Whether acknowledged or not, this is a threat every Web3 founder faces.

6. Hire "missionaries" not "mercenaries", and learn to distinguish

Argument: Web3 talent seeks token rewards, not salaries. This attracts both the most like-minded builders and the most dangerous speculators.

Carta CEO Henry Ward provided a clear framework for a16z to distinguish between true PMF and false prosperity.

“Missionaries love the product and the vision. Mercenaries love money. In a bull market, they look identical. In a bear market, mercenaries disappear, at which point you can see who the true believers are.”

—Henry Ward, Carta CEO

Jeanne Tsan documented the hiring challenges of Web3: while equity and token rewards can align goals, they can also lead employees to sacrifice the long-term development of the protocol for short-term token prices.

Effective Practices:

• Set token unlock plans with multi-year commitments
• Recruit individuals who have used the product before applying
• Build a team culture that can endure multiple years of bearish markets

Success Cases:

Stani Kulechov: Founded Aave in 2017, weathered the 2018 bear market, and assembled the team before launching the token in 2020. When the token price dropped from $667 to $50 in the 2022 bear market, his team did not leave. They delivered Aave V3 amid the market crash.

By 2025, the AAVE price rebounded to $400, and the protocol’s total TVL across multiple chains reached $38 billion. Kulechov hired those who believed in decentralized lending, not those chasing token price spikes. This is why, even with a 92% drop in token price, his team continued development.

Counter Cases:

In 2021, during most protocols' recruitment, huge token rewards were offered to Web2 executives who had never interacted with DeFi. When the tokens crashed in 2022, these executives left. These protocols realized they had built teams for bull markets, not for development.

7. Market cycles are not a bug, but a necessary characteristic for your survival

Argument: Bear markets eliminate inferior projects and refine excellent ones. Surviving founders are not just those avoiding the lows but those who have prepared for them.

a16z Crypto general partner Arianna Simpson has repeatedly supported founders through market cycles. Her observation is that outstanding founders view bear markets as unfair competitive advantages.

“Bear markets are a great opportunity to lay a solid foundation, allowing you to scale up in the next bull market. Those founders who can survive often lower their burn rates early, continuously release products, and do not rely on token prices to validate their missions.”

—Arianna Simpson, a16z

Effective Practices:

• Always maintain a capital reserve of over 24 months
• Have a clear path to profitability or sustainable development, not just reliance on token speculation
• Have a roadmap capable of withstanding a 90% token price decline

Success Cases:

Brian Armstrong: Survived all bear markets of 2014, 2018, and 2022. He viewed bear markets as periods for product development. While competitors fell, Coinbase continued to deliver mobile wallets, institutional custody, and staking infrastructure. When the market recovered, they already had products and moats that had not existed before.

Counter Cases:

Sam Bankman-Fried: Couldn't survive even a single bear market.

In 2021, FTX seemed unstoppable: valued at $32 billion, Super Bowl ads, and stadium naming rights. But its foundation was fraudulent. When liquidity ran dry in 2022, the truth emerged: customer funds were misappropriated, FTT tokens were used as collateral for Alameda's gambling, and $9 billion in customer deposits vanished. SBF was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. He pursued the appearance of a bull market, not the survival of a bear market.

8. The paradox of product-oriented CEOs: you cannot fully let go, but you must let go

Argument: If founders focus too much on product details, bottlenecks will form. If founders let go too early, development momentum will be stifled. The key is knowing when to intervene and when to withdraw.

Ben Horowitz studied the greatest product-oriented CEOs in history (such as Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg) and uncovered a paradox:

“Worse than product-oriented CEOs over-involving themselves in details is them completely disengaging from the product. The best founders seamlessly switch between the two: diving into details at critical moments and stepping back completely when trivial.”

—Ben Horowitz, a16z

Outstanding founders flexibly switch: diving into details at critical moments (core mechanism design, fundamental restructuring of the protocol) while fully delegating during inconsequential moments (community management, partnerships, marketing).

In Web3, this switch is crucial because Web3 cannot iterate like Web2 applications; decisions regarding the protocol architecture are often irreversible.

Effective Practices:

• Deeply engage in protocol design and core mechanism decision-making
• Delegate community management, partnerships, and marketing
• Return to product when significant transformation is required

Success Cases:

Hayden Adams was deeply involved in the AMM design, LP fee structure, and gas optimization of Uniswap. But he delegated growth, partnerships, and ecosystem development to Uniswap Labs. When it was time to launch the fundamentally restructured V3 version with concentrated liquidity, he returned to the details. This switching allowed Uniswap to achieve a cumulative transaction volume of $20 trillion while maintaining technical innovation.

Counter Cases:

Most founders of failed DeFi protocols either micromanaged everything (stifling development speed) or became caught up in the "thought leader" model (stifling product quality). Actively participating during critical moments while stepping back during inconsequential times is rare and cherished; this is why most protocols fail.

9. Business development is a strategic lever

Argument: Traditional Web3 narratives (maintaining decentralization, avoiding collaboration, letting the community grow naturally) work for some protocols, but for most, this is merely an excuse to evade the hard work of integration. Do not confuse “decentralization” with “isolation”.

Strategic integration is key for protocols to achieve liquidity and distribution speed that far exceed natural growth rates.

“When I founded Aave, we realized how much work there was in building oracles. That’s why we began engaging with Chainlink.”

— Aave Founder Stani Kulechov

Collaboration with Chainlink made Aave the first lending platform to use off-chain data to achieve standardized interest rates, deployed across more than 60 blockchains. This is strategic leverage.

As mentioned above, Tarek Mansour spent years working with the CFTC to make Kalshi the first regulated prediction market in the U.S.; regulatory business development ultimately led to $1 billion in financing and a valuation of $11 billion.

Effective Practices:

• Integrate early with the largest liquidity pools and wallets
• Collaborate with compliant fiat on- and off-ramp channels
• Do not confuse decentralization with isolation

Conclusion

a16z's theory is that only when ownership, execution, and community unite into a single system, and all participants' incentives align, can the value of the protocol achieve sustainable growth.

The founder strategies summarized in their research represent an integrated operational model, within which each layer reinforces the others:

• Issuing tokens after PMF attracts true advocates rather than opportunists;
• Community is infrastructure, building an organic distribution network for enterprise partners to access;
• Bear markets eliminate projects that do not hold market value.

Current marketing strategies are undergoing significant changes, with many traditional methods fading away. However, regardless of how the market shifts, the key principles outlined in this article will always remain effective.

Love Web3.

Further Reading: Interview with the Founder of Sui: Leaving Meta at 50 to Start a Business, How to Rebuild the "Foundation" of the Internet

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