There's a crucial growth metric that's NEVER mentioned by leading crypto industry research organizations.
This stat is staggeringly important for our industry, and favors the ICP ecosystem. Everyone should know about it โ
CPA, or "Cost Per Acquisition".
Some background first: the last significant thing I did before going full-time in crypto in 2013, was create an MMO game that grew to approx ~3M users. It was the first and only game I created, and its relative success rested in no small part on its super-low CPA metric.
CPA โ or Cost Per Acquisition โ measures how much money must be invested into growth activities, including marketing, to get a new user.
Essentially, at its peak, my MMO game was acquiring new users at a rate of about 1 for every 20 cents of marketing expenditure. That compared to around $4-12 for the rest of the industry. Our super low CPA provided enormous leverage from a disadvantaged position. First-time game designers/entrepreneurs usually do not succeed in creating hits of any kind, especially with limited resources, and from London.
The CPA metric reflects what must be spent to find users/customers/whatever that connect with a service, and persuade them to stick with it. The higher the CPA, the higher the costs of driving growth, and the less sustainable driving growth over the long-term becomes. This applies even if you have Sam Bankman-Fried and his merry band of VC (venture capitalist) followers backing you โ resources are finite, and eventually the laws of gravity come into effect if CPA is too high.
So, circling back to the blockchain industry, why is this important?
I regularly hear of VCs, especially in Silicon Valley, who extol the merits of blockchain X or Y, on the basis of the number of developers they have building in their communities is the largest. Almost always, they largely base their thinking on a) group-think, and b) reading the reports of certain industry research organizations, without ever considering who their backers are, what their backers have invested in, and even what networks those research organizations (or their leaders) may have directly invested into themselves, largely as a result of historical relationships with their backers. They treat the reports that come from these crypto research organizations as though they come from Gartner.
The blockchains the VCs extol have ecosystems funded by billions of inward investment, which usually includes theirs too, which has often, to all intents and purposes, been used to pay developers to build there. In reality, contrary to the marketing, the blockchain's technology involved had very little to do with why the developers and their companies chose to build there โ in fact they chose to build on these chains to obtain freely-flowing investment sometimes measured in the tens of millions per project deriving from bull market era "flywheel" growth engines.
CPA calculations need to include the cost of these investments. Having a low CPA is incredibly important.
SBF, through his instruments Alameda and FTX, was a key example of a crypto industry titan who was a practitioner of the flywheel model. The essential aim was to combine influence and capital (which could be acquired through murky means), in order to drive the value of tokens in which the titans were invested. In particular, the titans obtained highly discounted positions in layer 1 blockchains, in return for promoting them using various mechanisms โ through social media, through influence over the crypto press, through influence over apparently neutral industry research organizations, through power projected through high-profile relationships with regulators, and control of key infrastructure such as exchanges and funds, and ultimately through vast injections of capital into their ecosystems, in which they were joined by traditional venture capital in grand schemes aiming to create the next Ethereum.
As flywheels spun faster, more and more hype was generated, more investors were sucked in, more investment was funneled into projects and developers agreeing to build on their chains, more parties became tribally aligned, more acclaim was generated, and the more their base tokens rose in value, making more liquidity available to spin the flywheels faster.
Was this a racket, or was this akin to Uber offering discounted rides to build its customer base? The truth is somewhere in between. Perhaps it's telling that those traditional investors sucked in will often share their honest belief that the developers that chose to build on these chains into whose flywheels they became ensnared did so because of the technology, rather than for the money, or other reasons, which is simply not true, as most true crypto industry insiders are fully aware (and arguments about "community" are misleading, since the availability of capital is often what that was about during the bull run). Many venture investors seem unsure of the game they joined, or even what the technological differences between chains are.
Certainly, these traditional investors have somehow now been hoodwinked to never to think about CPA, which is a key metric that those of us with prior backgrounds in tech before crypto, such as games, or Web 2.0 services, hold as crucially important, along with measures of viral growth.
Here's the rub. When you look at the aggregate capital flows into the ICP ecosystem, through DFINITY's developer grants program, investments by independent investors, and decentralized crowdfunding performed by projects the network itself, and compare that to the billions that flowed into some of the main flywheel chains championed as the future by interested parties, and then consider the fact that despite these huge capital inflows their developer ecosystems are not that much larger at all โย and do the math โย you see that the Internet Computer ecosystem's CPA ("cost per acquisition") is something like 200X lower.
Yes, you read that correctly, 200X lower!
This difference is simply staggering, and has very positive implications for long-term Internet Computer ecosystem growth. It's simply much more competitive thanks to the network's technology, and how it empowers developers to go far beyond simple tokens and NFTs, and if/when/as the capital flow changes course, it indicates that the Internet Computer ecosystem will race ahead very quickly indeed.
We can already see it happening. Many of the main chains acclaimed as the future by the flywheel system, plowed hundreds of millions into wasteful endeavors such as expensive sports sponsorships, which they are now quietly abandoning. One secretly paid an enterprise "customer" tens of millions to build a dubious beverage loyalty system on their chain, so they could proclaim they were being selected by industry, which approach they are also quietly abandoning. And they and their supporters often funded, for example, grand web3 games projects to the tune of tens of millions each, in the hope and expectation that they would become successful simply because they pressed NFTs on their users, and members of their own community would choose play them and kick off network effects. These projects are now already often seeking follow-on investments to cover their excessive burn rates, and solve for their shortening runways, because they did not begin as organic startup organizations, but were really edifices quickly bootstrapped with the hidden purpose of proclaiming to the world that the chain they were essentially paid to build upon had arrived.
We are now already seeing such projects quietly disbanding in the realization that the flywheel model that created them cannot support their continued existence, and others beginning to look around for the best tech on which to build genuinely self-sustaining futures, rather than gamble on how long their flywheel ecosystems can support them. Many who wish to remain, are now making calculations about the real power of the technology on which they are building, and what it can enable them to do before their money runs out โ and they are now quietly looking at ICP. From my own direct experience, I can tell you this is accelerating.
My view is that in the long-term technology matters, and integrity matters. Despite having to weather extraordinary attacks from key players backing major flywheels โย as can be read about on investigative journalism websites like Crypto Leaks โ we at DFINITY have never wavered from our technology-first strategy, and since 2018 have continued to run crypto's largest layer-1 focused R&D operation at scale, to contribute technology to the Internet Computer network. The result is that the capabilities of the network are simply years ahead.
Moreover, our ecosystem is a relentless beast, and in the past year we have seen more than 20 independent ICP.hub organizations launch worldwide, which are expected to double in number this year. Meanwhile, the power of mutli-chain "chain key" crypto is slowly being unleashed, the capabilities of the network in important areas such as AI are expanding, and the forthcoming UTOPIA project focused on enabling secure computing in the enterprise and government sectors is expected to drive new network effects into the public ICP network.
Zooming out, there is one hidden statistic that tells the overall story, and it's CPA. We believe that organic ecosystems will ultimately outpace and outperform paid ecosystems that depend on flywheels that need a constant flow of inbound capital to keep them spinning. They are also far more robust: when an ecosystem depends on a flywheel, and it stops, much of what has been built on it begins to stop too.
For everyone who believes in ICP, 2024 will be a pivotal year. We may not yet have the backing of Silicon Valley players sucked into flywheels by yesteryear's crypto titans โ although this is now changing โ but we have incredible superpowers deriving from genuinely game-changing technology, resilience earned from weathering unimaginable storms of attacks designed to dissipate our disruptive potential, and an ecosystem with a CPA number unlike any other.
Those interested in what crypto ecosystems were meant to be, and the future of its technology and the internet, should join us as we begin a battle for the soul of our industry.