Author: ivangbi Source: lobsterdao Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

This post is divided into 3 parts:

• The importance of proper communication with ordinary users and partners. The preface uses a generic example and sets the context for the topic.

• 1-9-90: The second part discusses the 1-9-90 guidelines and my interpretation. It can be widely applied to bootstrapping any community.

• The difficulty of coordinated communication in large groups, and the possibility that it may not be needed in later stages (today's Ethereum). You can think of the third part as a sensational overview of the Ethereum debate over the past week, which is also a part of the same question. Is Ethereum suitable for 1-9-90? is one of the questions being addressed in this part.

1. Introduction: Common Misunderstandings Between Developers and Holders

• Holder: “Exchange, listing?”

• Developer: “We are focusing on product services now.”

• Holder: “You don’t care about the community at all, screw you!”

• Dev: “You are just a price gouger, go away!”

You’ve seen this before, right? This is what happens in every project chat on Discord, Telegram, and Twitter. I can guarantee you that both sides hate each other in this conversation. The developers think that the holders are a commoner who wants to pump and dump quickly. Meanwhile, the holders think that the developers are an elitist asshole who is building castles in the air.

Both statements are right, but wrong at the same time. They just can't communicate. They speak different languages. The holders just care about the value of their bags, but do you think the developers don't care? The developers care too. Whether the developers lack business capabilities - is another question, let's not talk about it for now.

PS: Please note that I don't worship either side, because they are both right and wrong. It is a bad idea to advocate for either side, you need to see the middle ground.

1.2 Direct Solutions to Prevent Negativity from Spreading

• Holder: “Exchange, listing?”

• Response: “I can’t respond publicly to this question yet, but it’s certainly an important question. You can join the discussion . In the meantime, we’re preparing to release some cool products, so please post your opinions in this topic , and I hope you can bring it up!”

The above holders may not participate further, but they won’t cause trouble either. They desperately need a response, and they have the opportunity to go and voice their opinions at the end of the day. Win-win!

Experienced people will understand that the responses they get are very superficial, so you can’t say too much. You need to direct people to some relevant and helpful context so that you don't sound condescending like you're talking to a child. Again, a simple detour can work once or twice: it's just a delay until you get the real answer. Repeated detours will eventually have a negative impact. This strategy also won't work if the accumulated anger has reached a peak. In this case, you must give a genuine and long reply, or accept temporary defeat.

In WEB2, there are teams dedicated to social media FUD prevention. In restaurants, there are trained staff to handle the angriest and most drunken customers. Why do you think the situation here is different?

Conceptually, no developer owes the holders anything (morally I think they do, but that's another topic), but, no one owes the developers any recognition or money either.

You two, stop putting on airs.

1.3 Structural Fixes for Root Causes

Their goals are somewhat similar: tokens go up. However, their paths to achieving their goals are different, and therefore their timelines are different. Developers need the project to be valuable in order to have enough liquidity to exit. Also, believe it or not, some developers want to build cool stuff! Holders, on the other hand, can sell as long as they have $100k in order depth. So while their incentives are generally aligned, they work on different timeframes. I know this is obvious.

Nevertheless, the best way to achieve both of their goals is to work together. Developers need a lot of holders, and a lot of holders need good developers to build. They can't coexist with each other, because if they tried to coexist... you'd end up with the market we have today. 90% of the people are in meme coin gambling PvP, and 1% are elitist scammers building castles in the sky and spending their summers in Switzerland, right?!

PS: There have been cases where developers have made false promises, or holders have become negative for whatever reason because the market was red hot. In this situation, neither side can do anything. You need to rally with your core supporters, agree when the vision must be updated, pick yourself up, and work hard. If you make some progress and don't go out of business, you'll be stronger. In the case of total failure, only brutal honesty works.

So, what exactly is 1-9-90? What does it have to do with all this? I didn't come up with this concept myself, and even Wikipedia has a page about it. I'm not sure if my interpretation is really what Wikipedia suggests, but I've found it to be valid for years. Everywhere.

2. 1-9-90 Community Building

To simplify it in a crypto context, you can think of it as:

• The 1% are the developers, builders, teams, and creators.

• 9% are writers, funds, researchers, and angel investors who passionately observe the space and comment on it. Not real teams, nor rookies passing through.

• 90% are random traders and speculators who actually never read the documentation. They read the headlines, buy and trade coins, and hold cryptocurrencies - but they don't bother with research questions. Just yellow page enthusiasts and traders. They are not stupid, they just don't want to marry any investment. For them, fundamentals usually don't exist, they just want charts.

All of these groups are important. If isolated, they will all slowly die.

Speculation stimulates capital markets and investment, which in turn provides developers with resources to build, which then adds foundations for pure speculation, and so on. It's like a living organism. Cut off one part and it withers.

Don’t get too cocky!

2.2 1-9-90 Why it works?

We can’t know everything, or keep up with everything. We may not like over-generalized statistics and the carefully crafted feeds on Netflix, but we can’t live without them. If we allowed multiple options for everything we encountered, our brains would explode. Especially in startups. We want others to do the work for us. Those who dig through a pile of garbage can find the finer gems, but sometimes it’s okay to follow the crowd.

• Why listen to the 9%? — These funds, researchers, and angels are seen as trustworthy in many cases. They’ve been around for years, so they won’t succumb to cheap, cheap scams. Or at least that’s the hope. Therefore, it is easier for traders and gamblers to choose assets with the most reputable group of backers behind them.

• Why do the 9% bother acting as screeners? -- Because the better they screen, the more money they make. And they are likely to attract more followers in the long run. If you can pick gems early, you will get better valuations, and you can also show others that you have the skills to be a gem hunter.

The 9% is the glue between the 1% of hardcore autistic developers and the 90% of trading holders who have to accept the more refined narrative. If you want to be specific about what the 9% does, I would say it is organic marketing and some enthusiastic introductions to BD. Essentially injecting reputation and glamour into early unknown projects. 2.3 What the 1-9-90 phase looks like These 3 factors don’t usually align at the same time, and that only happens in a bull market. The goal is to always have 2/3 aligned, and that can be done. By definition, 1 and 90 are unlikely to align, because the key to translating news into 90 is these 9 factors. Therefore, you must always start with 1+9 and work from there. The exception is 1+90, because you are building something completely easy to use for 90. That would be memecoin, click games on Telegram, and similar phenomena. In these cases, 9 is not needed for bootstrapping. However, after these things go live, things change and some sustainable coordination is needed, but this coordination is not necessary for bootstrapping because everything happens in the hype.

This would be a typical startup project with a team, angel investors, and community holders. The team (1%) starts something, then (9%) pushes it further and makes it visible, then the trader-holders (90%) buy into the narrative and move on.

1. The 1% of developers start working on an idea and start making something.

2. They consult with friends, angels, capital allocators, researchers, etc. The 9% gets excited about some of these ideas.

3. Then, for some reason, these ideas are picked up by many of the 1% and 9% players and somehow make their way to the 90% players.

This is the recipe and direction that every company has. While this doesn’t guarantee success, this approach usually gets the first step off the ground. If you already have a network, it’s usually easy to go from 0 to 1 because they will accept and support whatever you throw at them.

A bad example of this is Worldcoin, which was a weird product with a weird token strategy (despite how cruel and dystopian what they had), but a lot of “9s” supported it and accepted it into their community simply because of the founders’ network.

2.4 The Problem of Not Having 9s

You usually don’t want to be the exception to the rule and go the 1+90 route because 9s are more long-term focused than 90s. If you end up with a hype-driven community without nurturing the 9s, you may be left with just the 1 during any market turmoil. That’s the problem with hype-only projects. It’s a great bootstrapping strategy, but ultimately, you have to find your 9s, or turn your 90 members into 9s. You can’t do without evangelists and those who are willing to stick it out for you.

Remember the secondary market sales of the “fair launch” in 2020-2021? Some projects launched without any sales, only the contributor and/or DAO portion. After a few weeks or months, they needed funds to maintain and further build the brand/protocol. So they conducted secondary market OTC transactions. The price of these transactions may be different, but it does not change the dynamic. Ultimately, although they started with 1+90, they eventually had to find their 9.

Another reason has to do with people’s perception. If I’m a researcher and I go into a chatroom and all I see are giveaways and airdrops — I’ll immediately think “this is a scam”. And most of the time I’m right. This is an overgeneralization to save time, but it works. So you generally want to start off lean, produce technical content to grow 1%+9%, and then move on to a larger coverage strategy. Otherwise, you might attract the 90% and create too much noise to attract neither the outside 9% nor convert any of your 90% to the 9. Be careful! This is especially dangerous for those who want to get tokens fast and launch IEOs quickly. Fortunately for these founders, most of the time these are made and set up like scams, so they don’t care about community building anyway. Tech → Angel Investors → Hype Yes, this can indeed turn into some kind of gatekeeping. But if there is no ill will, it saves everyone time and allows for real community building. Alternative approaches exist, so just check what the team's strengths are.

2.5 Real-life Example: Ethereum Conferences

The most obvious example of 1+9 interaction in the real world is the Ethereum conferences. Many developers come here, talk to funds and angel investors seeking alpha, and projects are born as a result. Investors #9, those funds and angels, may also like crazy dreams and ideas, but at the end of the day, they want to make money (more than investors #1), so they need to check with investors #90 about how much any given narrative is needed now, or may be needed later.

1+9 can indeed force the 90s to buy in, but this is harder than expected. It's hard to do this artificially. You need some fundamentals and numbers to back up your claims: this is not always easy. You can look at Celestia as an example of a well-crafted and slightly forced niche, from a valuation perspective. I'm not criticizing it at all, they have great brains, but it's not easy to push a new story to $10 billion+ and sustain it for months. No one in the 90s knew about DA, and they certainly didn't think it was a $10 billion+ market.

Anyway, problems also arise when the supply of the 9s gets too high. That's what happens when they only spend time with the 1s and forget to check their reality with the 90s. Then you end up with a closed-door party of developer elitism that does no one any good. It's important to focus on reality, otherwise everyone suffers.

Perpetual optimism and dreams are great, but excessive is not. 2.6 How to Maintain 1-9-90 Alignment After the Bootstrap Phase Because nothing goes up forever, even if you have a perfect 1+9, there will be times when your confidence and consistency in the future is broken. At those times, you need to find the reason. Did the team stop working or did the market just turn red? Are the developers working, but they are building castles in the air that even the 9% can't understand? These are some questions that can check sentiment. If the team is working on it and the narrative is complete, then it is likely 1+9 and consistent. So they need to build through the red market and then it will be fine. There is nothing you can do here.

In moments of crisis, you should simply chat with your partners, let them know some new details, and reaffirm their biases if needed. No one fully trusts anything new from the beginning, but time creates strength in brand and vision. Cultivate it first, then it will happen naturally. This can actually be applied to trading as well: when all tokens were red during the bear market, MATIC was the only token that went up a little, and traders started to mimic it as the "all-market green haven". Fr!

You can never confuse the 9% with the 90%. This means that developers will face complete alienation. You need the core team to talk to the angels and researchers, and you need the angels and researchers to know what to convey to the 90%. BTW, this is not some kind of pyramid, this is just the way news spreads from person to person. It is a fact.

It is also true that "actions speak louder than words" and "best technology wins". The opposite happens when there is too much (good) bad talk or marketing of inferior technology is good. Humans and markets are irrational.

2.7 Checks and Balances Between Groups

• 1%: Can be overconfident in their wealth, too elitist, and think too highly of themselves. The more capital they get, the further they are from reality. Their ideas are overly optimistic.

• 9%: Should do research, but only know bits and pieces at the end (like me). The problem is that they give themselves too much trouble and waste the founders’ time explaining things to them — otherwise, they might be full of wrong statements and ideas. These people tend to talk a lot because, for many of them, it’s their job to give their opinions. It’s easy to be hypocritical.

• 90% of people: Nothing bad! They take all the risks, and they get the least opportunities. Sure, they have the least patience and survivability, but that’s because they don’t have a golden cushion when the developers decide to rebel and take the cash.

3. Ethereum: Vitalik vs. DeFi vs. EF.

What’s happened in the past few days is that a lot of people are angry at each other. There’s nothing unusual about that in itself; people are just confused and can’t find a way to express their confusion. They’ve been working for more than 3 years since the last round, and there’s no new sales or users to buy their bags, so everyone is frustrated. It’s just a fact. I haven’t come up with a reason or a solution — that’s for another article. Just stating the way things are.

In the midst of all this, some people tried to have a proper discussion. For example:

• Vitalik (1%) expressed his concerns about DeFi. It was well written, and there is much more in that post. He may have been too caught up in his own overly grandiose vision, but he was polite and provided context. He wants to think about the bigger goal and inspire others to look beyond what we see today, to not be held back by what we have, to look to the future. That’s what having a vision is all about. He doesn’t need to be right either, he doesn’t own Ethereum.

• The Ethereum Foundation (1%) was silent on the sale for years, and then Aya responded with a somewhat insensitive response. Not because she said anything bad or wrong, just because the EF was so far away from everything the general public was dealing with that it “didn’t read the situation”. But the EF was and is maintaining a ton of transparency.

• DeFi founders (1-9%) are confused because although they are powerful and don't care about the support of external bigwigs, they don't mind someone patting their shoulders, at least not bashing finance step by step as Vitalik used to joke. Maybe he did too much and it finally affected people.

Communication breakdown is happening. The Ethereum Foundation and brain developers are too focused on the future, so it sounds like they don't care about today's problems. Although they care, they are just one step further in thinking. This is difficult for the other party to understand because they don't have much understanding of all the brains and thought processes.

The end result is as follows:

3.2 Is there a structural problem with the 1, 9, or 90 here?

As mentioned before, any criticism is conceptually valid, depending on the root cause. What is the cause here: are the developers alienated, or are the 90s unsure of what is going on, or are it just the 90s complaining about the price? That's the question.

Let's start with 1%.

Are developers working? Yes. Are they participating in public discussions? Yes. Are different development teams working on different things simultaneously? Also yes. Are there events and hackathons to attract new developers? Also yes. Now that scalability has been partially solved, are there structural ways to solve L2 fragmentation? Also yes. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the 1%.

Let's quickly check in on the 90%.

Okay, they know ETH is a great asset. They know the market can go red. They're no doubt confused about how many of those 9 are confused themselves. Unwarranted panic could lead to actual structural problems.

That leaves the 9%.

In my opinion, the crying 9s we see are former 9s that have turned into sensational traders. There is nothing wrong with that, they are just not considered 9s anymore. They no longer dig beyond a page and just read the headlines. Confusing them with 9s might lead you to think there is a structural problem. If you want to double check this, ask the developer. If the developer confirms, then there is indeed a problem.

No disrespect, but if you research L2 and conclude "fragmentation is killing ETH, it's all over" while ignoring all the research on scalability - that's a skill problem.

3.3 Is the effort being made or is the problem being ignored?

9 The reason for confusion is obvious and easy to understand. Ethereum is constantly evolving and has had an L2 roadmap for many years, resulting in a split in its development path. It is normal to have problems connecting the pieces back together when you go modular. As long as the goal (scalability, larger platform) is valid, it is open to interpretation.

So if anyone is pessimistic in the short term, I understand, but saying "Ethereum is dead and doing nothing for scalability" is an intellectual lie. Those 9s involved are just marketing their alternatives and are turning into 90s. Watch out for the sensationalist tweets.

I am not being self-protective because this post will not affect anyone. I am happy to see and accept that structural problems exist, but I don't see any arguments other than "EF members got some advice" and "EF sold some ETH that was less than 0.1% of total circulating supply". You can do better.

But anyway, should 9s be accommodated as the guidebook states?

I further point out that the answer is no. This is no longer necessary, nor possible.

3.3 Separation of Church and State. Forget leadership? Forget 9.

At this point Ethereum is clearly in the network phase. Asking for "adjusting the roadmap" is a misunderstanding of the entire purpose of the operation. This does not mean that there is no need to try to make macro adjustments, but now they are happening ad hoc. If you see the first picture, think of the main orange connection points as the main Ethereum teams: clients, large funds with research departments, ecosystems of interconnected protocols, etc. As long as they sometimes coordinate with each other, it's fine. So ask yourself: if you don't know what the orange people are doing, maybe you haven't dug deep enough. So this is a skills problem, not an ecosystem problem. Stop being so cocky.

All of this discussion, criticism, etc. should happen. The difference this time is that too many formerly decent actors have turned into hardcore troublemakers, stirring up trouble. This is especially true for the GPs of certain funds (you know who I'm talking about). Mainly the ones pushing their own stinky L1 bets. If they think other L1s are better, they support them, etc., that's fine. However, doing so at the expense of made-up fugazi arguments is intellectual suicide. Like this:

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a large ecosystem come to this. Fragmentation, disparate interests, and so on — it’s really right in front of us at this point. But rather than turning to communism and a centralized roadmap, perhaps a better path is to elevate this all to a non-fragile state. None of this matters, bells and whistles aside. DeFi, social, whatever it is — it doesn’t matter what Vitalik thinks, what the Ethereum Foundation thinks, or what any cult leader thinks.

So what to do?

1. Vitalik may be too elitist and doesn’t want use cases that don’t exist yet or will never exist. People want more tangibility, and that’s what DeFi brings.

2. Of course, the Ethereum Foundation could be more transparent.

3. The Ethereum narrative has become multifaceted, so it’s hard for 9 to understand a clear agenda, so they’re confused.

…but the answer is: it doesn’t matter.

3.4 You can’t and no longer need to be fully aligned.

How many cabals are there on Ethereum right now? Client teams? VC funds? Voting groups? The answer is: a lot. When was the last time you needed EF’s approval or Vitalik’s blessing to build anything (not related to the core protocol)? — Never.

The Ethereum Foundation could dissolve tomorrow, Vitalik could go wreak havoc with his yacht — it wouldn’t matter. Even if transparency is an issue, even if Vitalik is wrong, who cares? Ethereum is at or should have been at a stage where the core initial group doesn’t matter. So attempts like the following to turn this into some kind of “Ethereum culture issue” shouldn’t be true. Culture is about open level playing field, not central viewpoints. Bitcoin has been through similar trials before, so this is an actual test of the strength of the argument.

In my experience and that of my contacts in the crypto space since 2017, not a single person has received any meaningful support or funding from Vitalik. He was furious about ICOs during the boom, he’s furious about DeFi in 2020 — that’s OK. He doesn’t need to be right. He had to be right in 2015, 2017, and after about building communities and being visionaries… but at this point, some people formed a coalition against EF. That’s fine!

None of the DeFi founders needed his blessing or the support of EF. In fact, it was built with hatred on their side in the beginning. Yet DeFi survived and thrived, so why ask for any blessing now? One thing to note is that as long as they don’t make some core protocol changes that make DeFi less usable, everything will be fine. For example, the gas costs of certain DeFi key operations. Basically, they are chasing their grand vision at the expense of DeFi's usability and growth.

This way, grandstanding enthusiasts can rest assured that they won't turn small arguments into big problems.

3.5 Other things to consider

• No matter what Vitalik says, people will get angry. Responding to angry Twitter users can sometimes generate negative emotions unless they have legitimate criticisms. But if they’re nitpicking every word out of spite, let them be. Still, it’s good to read the room. Vitalik is good at this, but it wasn’t always.

• The Ethereum Foundation has built in a ton of transparency, but could do more. It’s OK if they don’t, since almost no one interacts with them directly. So it’s not about creating systemic problems where it doesn’t have to (9s forces this narrative to be systemic). Maybe look at other players in the ecosystem that are growing and becoming big.

• Other foundations spend more and have foundation presidents run venture capital funds (Solana) and even have foundations almost buy meme coins (Avalanche). Again, this is both good and bad, and I’m not trying to say “they’ve done worse things, so it’s OK to be a little bad”. No. I’m just saying that those garbage can guys at other chains should probably fix their problems before they rant.

By now, I hope you understand the importance of proper messaging and communication. These fundamentals extend beyond raw technology to general community building and your positioning with other partners in the space.

As for Ethereum, no more hand-holding. No more leadership. No more top-down centralized roadmap. So let people fight, exploit each other, and support the free market…

And be careful who you listen to. 9s tend to be 90s. The only exception is that 90s don’t lie about their intentions, while 9s love to peddle lies.