I’d like to share a story from my experience as an ambassodor that happened largely by accident.
I am not trying to correct anyone, this is my attempt to give information, nothing more.
I’ll have to give a bit of backstory.
In late 2023, ZecHub released a video about InterProtocol https://youtu.be/ndFcZStt_Zw and the Akash Network - https://youtu.be/SVekeNU6_-g
I don’t know why these videos originated on ZecHub, what served the idea, but I used to look for some meaning in everything and in my big video review of Zcash events for 2024 mentioned these videos and that it’s likely Zcash will have bridges with Cosmos networks or something like that. Because that makes sense given that Zaki Manian is in the Bootstrap lineup (at the time we were talking a lot about permutations and Bootstrap), and even a future PoS network variant is going to be built on a variation of Tendermint. That’s what I said in the video, which leads me to definitely think about future close partnerships with Cosmos. So I left the hashtag #Cosmos in the video description.
Somehow this video became a real hit on my channel (relative to my usual positions). And it was watched by a person who in my opinion is one of the coolest Russian-speaking authors of crypto channels today, but who completely specializes in Cosmos. He wrote to me and asked for an interview about Zcash. I didn’t understand at all what kind of guy was writing to me and declined because I don’t want to do an interview. At that time it would be his very first interview. But I said that I was ready to support him and answer all his questions. Then he asked me to write Zcash news in his Discord channel and gave me the role.
He had 3 thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel then, and now he has almost 10 thousand subscribers in just one year. https://www.youtube.com/@defigeek
He’s already got 7,000 subscribers on Discord.
I’ve seen with my own eyes how fast its audience is growing. Trying to figure out what the secret is and I’ve highlighted a few important things. But first, I’ll describe the whole concept.
First of all, he is unrealistically productive. He makes videos very often, and doesn’t worry about the picture. Usually his videos are just discord-streams, but for YouTube he edits them, taking out the unnecessary stuff. He talks a lot about what can be claimed where and as I see, those who follow his advice get some profit. He gives a lot of what people think is useful information and probably is, I just don’t participate in these events. Information about where things are going in the Cosmos ecosystem he takes from the Twitter accounts of developers. He talks about each project in detail about the prospects, but doesn’t advertise them. All presenting information with advanced critical thinking. He tries inviting some of the developers over and talks to them about what they’re doing, seemingly nothing out of the ordinary. But he negotiates bonuses for subscribers. And not just for subscribers, but for holders of the NFT collection, in which he has invested a lot of resources. By the way, he gave me one of the NFTs and made such a gift to every representative of the projects he talked to, as well as to strangers who wrote very informative tweets about Cosmos. In this collection, each item is given some DAO role in discord, which he explained in detail. I have the role Navigator, for example.
This means I’m promoting crypto as a new financial system, not just trying to make money. And this gives me some advantages in his discord, for example so I can write in the news section. There were also some hidden roles that opened up over time. For example, if I would entering a poker tournament that they were running, I could use the Lucky role, which is tied into the NFT, in some cases. There are roles that give a little more tokens when airdrop is given by his guests to his community. All in all it all looks very attractive and interesting and in game form. With exclusive NFT roles, the author has literally hired dozens of assistants for free who help him find interesting information, news and do many other useful things for his channel such as translations, full video production process. They have NO budget at all, except for what the guest developers allocate to their community. They also provide a great VPN for those who are blocked by Discord and YouTube - anyone in Russia.
So to structure all of this:
- People really want “insides”. Not just ads, not just information about how privacy is super important. But some specific things, like that video on ZecHub about InterProtocol, which has become one of the most popular on their channel.
What is “insides?” It’s not about disclosure, it’s about the way information is presented. It’s one thing to say “Zcash will have ZSAs soon, but it’s not certain”. It’s quite another to say “we found out that we are in talks with Paxos about adding stablecoins to the Zcash network”. This is open information right now on the forum. But who reads the forum except us? Not many people at all. The task of the author of a YouTube channel is to transform public, but intricate things into digestible information, which the author got firsthand because he has connections to developers. Absolutely any information can be fueled with something interesting and passed off as an exclusive. Dude just takes stuff from Twitter and tells YouTube. What could be easier? Zcash is full of stuff like this.
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People really love movements. Too bad our CPZ collection so far has been completely useless other than avatars. I honestly had no idea what could be done with NFT, but it seems releasing the collection on Ethereum was a mistake from the beginning because of the expensive nature of the action on that network. So all these cool things like discord roles are not available to us. And without movements, many people lack the feeling of exclusivity of being in a community. But then you have to look for other options, like Zelly events or something like that. But movements is very important.
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Collaborations are needed. As it turned out it makes no sense for me to develop a Russian-language branch in discord. I tried, but it was 3 people. It takes huge resources to raise the Russian-speaking community in discord. It turned out much easier to get a good audience with clear priorities in the already promoted community as a representative of the affiliate network. Although in fact this is just my speculation. As far as I know, no one has ever claimed Cosmos is our affiliate network but ZecHub has made a couple of videos that in particular influenced my score for the year. Today ZecHub and Zcash Brazil are developing one powerful discord channels, and I think we need this big one, not many small ones. ECC had the channel, every ZCON had a channel which is now abandoned. AV Club has a channel. There are some dead Zcash Community channels, the Halo channel, ZCash R&D. It seems to me we could have one but powerful channel with roles than many disparate channels. And of course we won’t get many people at our events if we make a new channel for each ZCON. And all of this is important because it should mutually promote our social networks in tandem. And in countries where discord is not popular or even blocked, it’s easier to join someone.
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As far as I understand cool graphics are not of primary importance at all. What people care about is useful information. In our videos it can be just online scrolling from an interesting forum topic. Regional communities should focus less on graphics and more on information. Let it even be information from other networks that Zcash is not competing with at all, but the main thing is that it should be really interesting. Just glorifying privacy - unfortunately that doesn’t hook people. We should have to tell how to set up NYM in practice, for example, not give uninteresting theory. We’ve gotten a lot better in that regard in the last year and I’m happy about that.
That’s it for now, I may have missed something and then I’ll catch up later.
A few examples of how I post news in their discord:
