I’ve spent the last year watching Web3 projects pour money into community engagement tools that don’t actually build community. They build traffic. There’s a difference.

If you’re running a project or community in crypto right now, you’ve probably evaluated — or are currently paying for — some combination of @Galxe, @cookie3, @KaitoAI, @zealy_io, or @layer3. And if you’re being honest with yourself, you’ve probably noticed that the engagement these platforms generate tends to evaporate the moment the campaign ends.

I built @resonance_app because I think the entire model is broken. Not the platforms themselves — they’re good at what they do. The model. The assumption that community engagement is something you rent.

The Landscape Right Now

Let’s be real about what each of these platforms actually does, because the marketing copy makes them all sound interchangeable when they’re fundamentally different products.

Galxe is a campaign platform. You create a quest — follow this account, join this Discord, bridge this token — and users complete it for a reward. Galxe has 15M+ users, which sounds incredible until you realize most of them are professional quest farmers who complete your campaign and never think about your project again. The user behavior is mercenary by design. They’re there for the airdrop, not for you.

Cookie3 is analytics. They track on-chain and off-chain signals to tell you who your users are, what they’re doing, and where they came from. Useful data. But Cookie3 doesn’t do anything with that data on your behalf. You’re paying ~$60K/year for a monitoring dashboard. The insights are real. The engagement is not — because they’re watching behavior, not driving it.

Kaito AI measures mindshare. How much is your project being talked about relative to competitors? What’s your share of crypto Twitter conversation? Again, genuinely useful intelligence. But at $50–132K/year, you’re paying for a rearview mirror. Kaito tells you what already happened. It doesn’t create what happens next.

Zealy is probably the closest to what communities actually need — ongoing engagement through daily quests, sprints, and leaderboards. But Zealy’s rewards (XP, roles) have no value outside the Zealy ecosystem. When the sprint ends, the engagement cliff is real.

Layer3 focuses on education and protocol adoption, which attracts higher-quality users than pure quest farming. But the core problem persists: users earn Layer3 XP that means nothing once they leave the platform.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I kept seeing when I talked to community managers and project leads:

• They’d run a Galxe campaign
• Spend $5–25 per user acquired
• Get a burst of followers, Discord joins, and wallet connections
• Then the campaign would end, and 80%+ of those users would vanish. Not slowly… immediately.
• The Discord would spike to 10K members and settle back to 400 active

The project would look at Cookie3 analytics and see the drop-off. They’d check Kaito and see their mindshare was back to baseline. Then they’d run another campaign. Same cycle.

The cost per retained user… not acquired, retained… was astronomical. And the users who stayed? They were usually the ones who already cared. The campaigns didn’t create loyalty. They created noise.

The industry has normalized this. “That’s just how Web3 marketing works.”

I don’t buy it.

What If Rewards Actually Belonged to Users?

This is the question that led to Resonance.

The traditional loyalty industry (the Starbucks cards, the airline miles, the retail points) has a dirty secret: $91 billion in rewards go unredeemed every year. Companies profit from broken promises. They issue points knowing most will expire, making breakage a revenue line item rather than a failure metric.

Web3 quest platforms inherited this same problem in a different form. Galxe XP, Zealy XP, Layer3 Cubes — they’re all closed-loop. The value is locked inside a single platform. Users accumulate something that looks like a reward but acts like a leash.

Resonance works differently.

Users earn RSNC credits… onchain asset, owned by the user, redeemable across any participating community or brand. Not platform points. Not expiring XP. Soulbound credits that move wherever the user goes. There is no market to dump on, there is no liquidity to extract.

This isn’t a philosophical distinction. It changes everything about how users behave.

When rewards are portable, redemption rates jump from 15–25% (closed-loop industry average) to 60–70% (open-loop). After a user’s first redemption, spending increases 83%, engagement triples, and churn drops 8–20%.

Research calls this the “Golden Moment”, the first time a user actually gets something tangible from their participation.

Galxe campaigns rarely create Golden Moments.
Resonance is designed to create them at scale.

The Real Comparison

I’m not going to pretend Resonance replaces every function of every platform listed above. It doesn’t. But I think it’s worth being honest about what you’re actually buying.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A community installs the Resonance bot (API, Web SDK & Discord available. TG soon). Takes about 2 minutes. They configure engagement events — daily check-ins, messaging rewards, event participation, whatever makes sense for their community. Users start earning RSNC automatically for doing things they were already doing.

• No quest forms to fill out
• No wallet connects
• No “complete 7 steps to earn 50 XP”
• Just: participate in the community, earn credits

Those credits are redeemable for perks — Discord roles, early access, custom NFTs, whitelist spots, merchandise. The community sets the perks. Users choose what they want. And because RSNC works across the network, a user can earn in one community and redeem in another.

The community manager sees engagement go up. Not because of a campaign — because the daily behaviors that define an active community are now being recognized and rewarded. GM messages, conversations, event attendance, referrals. The data flows on-chain, creating a transparent engagement record that the community owns.

When the RSNC pool runs low, the community tops up. Not because a contract expired but because they can see the engagement data and the ROI is obvious. The cost? Starts at $1. Scale with usage.

Compare that workflow to:

• Negotiate a Galxe campaign
• Design quest steps
• Set budget
• Run for 2 weeks
• Watch users complete and leave
• Analyze results in Cookie3
• Check Kaito for mindshare impact
• Repeat next quarter

The overhead alone is a full-time job. The outcomes are a series of spikes and crashes.

The Math

I’ll keep this simple because the numbers speak for themselves. Running engagement for 50,000 users across a season:

At 50K users, Resonance could generate over ~9 million onchain transactions — recurring, every season. That’s not a campaign spike. That’s sustained network activity.

Who Shouldn’t Use Resonance

I want to be honest about this.

If you need a one-time campaign to pump follower count before a token launch, Galxe is probably your tool. It’s optimized for exactly that use case. Resonance isn’t designed for hype-driven marketing.

If you need real-time mindshare analytics across crypto Twitter, Kaito does something we don’t even attempt. Different product entirely.

If you need deep behavioral analytics with customer segmentation and attribution modeling, Cookie3’s data product is more comprehensive than what we offer today.

Resonance is for apps, games, projects and communities that want to build sustained engagement… the kind where users show up tomorrow and next week and next month, not because there’s a quest ending, but because they’re genuinely earning value for their participation.

If that’s what you’re optimizing for, the quest platforms aren’t your competition. They’re your funnel. And Resonance is where the funnel leads.

What Comes Next

The Web3 engagement landscape is going to bifurcate. Campaign platforms will continue to serve the “acquire users fast” use case. They’ll get better at it. Some users acquired this way will always be mercenary, and that’s fine… some marketing goals require reach over depth.

But the projects that win long-term will be the ones that figure out retention.
Not analytics about retention.
Not mindshare metrics about retention.
Actual, measurable, repeat engagement from users who choose to come back.

That’s the infrastructure we’re building. Open-loop rewards that belong to users, flow across communities, and create network effects that make every participant more valuable over time.