The glue that holds a project together is its community. Memes, community projects and die-hard believers are all good signs of a strong community. 

This is especially important for projects that have “no intrinsic value” and are mostly fueled about speculation, like NFT pfp collections or meme coins. Having a strong community is a value of itself, and it also means a big percentage of the supply is basically locked forever, held by people that will never sell.

It’s not easy to recognize a strong community, but there are a few indicators of one:

  • Focus of the community isn’t on price (no “wen moon”, “!floor”, “wen binance” chats in discords)
  • Features and side-projects are born from within these communities and not only from the main dev team
  • Community-specific memes are born (i.e. 3,3 for OHM)

Some projects that initially suffer price-wise from unfortunate launch timing, hacks or bad decisions from the dev team might still have a strong community that will make the project raise from the ashes in the long run. Think of SUSHI and the whole Chef Nomi fiasco.

Alchemist (MIST)

Alchemist is a collective of people working together to create “Defi products that promote a fairer and more transparent crypto ecosystem”.

There is no roadmap, no company and no “dev team”, only the Alchemist community. It goes without saying that being able to create several functioning products such as Copper and mistX relying only on community members means that the Alchemist community is of a different breed.

Having no clear long term goal also means that Alchemist can quickly pick up and follow new trends to always stay relevant. Separate teams within the community building different products also means that it can accrue value back to the token in many different ways, surviving the cyclicality of trends within the crypto ecosystem (think of DeFi or Solana summer, only that it’s always Alchemist season). 

Toptick has done a much better job than I ever could at explaining MIST from a value investor approach. You can read his thoughts about it here.