Growth & Community
Take3
September 16, 2026
7
min read
Web3 Community Building in 2026
This article was written by Louise Macfarlane, Web3 Strategist at Take3.
The Web3 community playbook from a few years ago is mostly dead and buried. Air drops, giveaways, role grinding, and follower counts used to signal success, but in 2026, they mostly signal that a project hasn’t caught up yet and is still playing by an expired playbook.
Every project should be asking some hard questions about the community at the start of their journey, not halfway through.
- Is building a thriving community in Web3 still a valuable thing to invest time and effort into?
- How has the process of building Web3 communities changed over different cycles?
- What is the most important part of building a Web3 community that deserves focus now?
Three of the top community voices in Web3 in 2026, provided their unique insight into what is happening now and what we should be thinking about heading into future cycles.
As a leading voice in Crypto Compliance Stephen Sargeant has successfully built a community around trust, education and connection. Stephan’s compliance community has gone from strength to strength over the last few years, he knows what his community wants and needs to hear.
With years of Web3 marketing and community building experience behind her, Camillia Parisotto, founder of Mood Labs and Babes net, is skilled at building thriving and active communities in the Web3 space.
LinkedIn famous, for his engaging content, reviews of crypto events and deep knowledge of the industry, Martin Masser, Director of Strategic Partnerships at ChangeNOW, provided his perspective on the Web3 community in 2026 and what he thinks are some of the biggest mistakes founders make.
What “Web3 Community” Means
Web3 community used to have a couple of different meanings depending on who you spoke to and where they spent their time.
Sometimes it was a Discord server, full of token holders waiting for the airdrop or TGE so that they could sell as quickly as possible and move on to the next big thing.
Other times it was communities where people gathered and connected and who were along for the long term ride. Those who had done their research, fully supported the goals and roadmap of the project and were proud to be early.
These communities have dwindled since the highs of the previous cycles. Discord servers are ghost towns and communities of previously raving fans have faded.
The Web3 community is now very different to previous cycles and we can see at least three distinct groups, with each one behaving differently, needing to be spoken to uniquely and engaging on a variety of platforms.
Professionals working in the Web3 space
This is the largest group still active in the Web3 space. Builders, marketers, compliance leads, and other Web3 practitioners are still talking to each other daily across LinkedIn, X, and industry Telegram groups.
This group values signal over size and tends to ignore anything that looks like hype marketing that isn’t backed up with substance.
Everyday users of a Web3 product or service
These are people who are still using the products, a wallet, a trading platform or they are still holding a token without necessarily caring about the underlying technology.
Vanity metrics are the biggest risk factor to this group and leaves them vulnerable. They think a busy looking X profile is healthy while the actual usage of the product has quietly declined and largely goes ignored.
People coming through education and onboarding
A slim group of newcomers are still interested in learning what a wallet, a gas fee, or a governance vote actually is.
This group has always been most underserved, with only a few organisations taking new user onboarding seriously and designing for them, even though onboarding content tends to compound into long term trust when done well.
Where is the Web3 Community in 2026
While X remains a dominant meeting place for crypto communities, where people gather has fragmented across more platforms than it did two years ago, and each platform now serves a slightly different purpose.
- Telegram remains the default for fast, high volume, often multilingual community chat, especially inside ecosystems tied closely to it.
- LinkedIn has become a genuine home for Web3 professionals and thought leadership, particularly around compliance, marketing, and hiring.
- Real life events have consolidated around fewer, higher signal gatherings, rather than an endless sprawl of smaller meetups.
- Discord still anchors deeper contributor work, governance discussion, and token gated access to builders.
Stephen and Martin have leaned in strongly to building their LinkedIn profiles as a way to establish their credibility and build their communities within the professional Web3 and crypto network.
In person events are really powerful at creating those deeper long lasting connections, and Camillia and Martin both know that after the event is finished keeping in contact is really important and Telegram is proving itself to be their favoured tool with a range of features which make keeping track of contacts and growing focused communities relatively easy.
What is Working Now
During a bear market, Web3 strategy has to change along with the market. Focusing on core principles that will also flow over and benefit during the rush of the bull market is key.
Access beats hype. Limited seat calls with founders or engineers now outperform generic announcements, because they give serious members something they can’t get anywhere else.
Education compounds. Investing in onboarding content delivers stronger long term retention, faster time to value and increased lifetime value, than those chasing short term spikes in activity.
Smaller, verified spaces build more trust. Gated and verified communities are doing more for genuine trust than large open servers ever did.
Where Expectations Don’t Meet Reality
Just as important as what’s working is what’s not working, and many in the Web3 community are still mistakenly holding onto expectations that need to be let go, sooner rather than later.
Top expectations that need to go:
- WAGMI (We’re All Going to Make It) Once a symbol of unity across communities, Stephen has seen this old loyalty system disappear, as it is now “every man and woman for themselves”. No token, airdrop or NFT is going to bring that back soon.
- Bigger isn’t better. Camillia has noticed that the internal chase of follower count is not equaling commitment or long term support. A curated group of a few hundred people has more immediate impact.
- Hype and random releases. There is a misguided belief, according to Martin, that every Web3 team has endless funds and time and can push out every product update suggested on a community forum. With small teams and, during a bear market, smaller budgets, the prioritisation of survival takes centre stage.
Most of these expectations have been part of crypto since the start, so moving on from them is going to be an ongoing process.
Where Web3 Projects Should Focus First
If you’re building or supporting a Web3 community from scratch this year, the advice across the board is consistent in direction.
- Pick one platform to go deep on before spreading across all.
- Pay for a quality community manager with subject matter knowledge and expertise.
- Invest early in onboarding content, since it pays off far later than expected.
- Build in genuine access, not just announcements, for your most engaged members.
- Founders need to be involved in the community from the start.
Stephen Sargeant knows that building a strong community isn’t just a couple of posts and hoping for the best, but requires time, effort and acknowledgement of those supporters. In his view, the magic happens from someone provoking discussion and supporting the community members outside of the platform or group. That is where real trust and long term support is developed.
In addition to this, a great community manager will also help bring out the best in their founder and help them contribute to their community, which Camillia believes is one of the key items on the launch to do list.
Communities are watching founders and deciding if this is something and someone worthy of their support. If the founder isn’t showing up for their community, then don’t expect the community to continue showing up for them.
Where Next for Web3 Communities
There are multiple takeaways for anyone building a Web3 community in the back half of 2026, while the how might have changed, the what hasn’t.
The audience has matured, and the tactics that once worked on a less discerning crowd won’t work on this one.
People want more real connection, clearer communication and to feel like they are part of something.
Building and valuing communities now, during quieter times, will pay off greatly in the busy times, when you will have well educated, supportive community members, who are willing to guide and welcome others into your community.
Trust doesn’t just magically appear overnight, it is curated over time.
To check if your project has got the basics covered and is doing them well, check out our Web3 Community Guide, which will help set you up for success.
In Web3, the projects that win long-term aren’t the loudest, they’re the most trusted. Web3 doesn’t have a marketing problem. It has a trust problem. Take3 helps Web3 and emerging tech teams build, scale, and compound trust into long-term growth.
Take our Trust Audit in 2 mins and work out how you are positioned.
