The Experimentation Cycle

The Follower-Buying Era (Pre-2021)

Projects incentivised followers, engagement, and social proof. Numbers went up, but nobody asked if those followers became users.

The underlying assumption was simple: visibility would eventually translate into adoption.

In practice, the metric stopped at attention, and no reliable mechanism existed to test whether that attention ever turned into product usage.

The Quest Platform Era (2021-2023)

Then came platforms like Layer3, Galxe, and others. For a brief moment, they looked like the answer.

Projects could finally drive measurable metrics - transaction volume, active users, protocol interactions. A protocol could launch a quest campaign and watch their daily active users skyrocket.

The problem quickly became obvious: users were farming projects and taking advantage of rewards.

Remove the rewards, and the users disappeared. Investors and stakeholders caught on to the complete vanity of these metrics. You weren't acquiring users — you were renting mercenaries who would move to whichever protocol paid them next.

The KOL Collapse (2024-2025)

KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) had an even shorter run. InfoFi platforms claimed to make influencer marketing measurable, but they ran into the same structural problem as quests: distribution could be tracked, but impact could not be verified.

Bots gamed the system, engagement was inflated, and audiences overlapped heavily.

Many KOLs delivered minimal incremental value while charging premium rates. As paid promotions increased, feeds filled with low-quality, automated content, and the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed.

The issue wasn't influence itself, but the absence of a reliable way to distinguish real user impact from manufactured activity.

The posts were obvious, and the effect on advertiser credibility was often negative rather than neutral.