There is something remarkable about the Nigerian Web3 ecosystem: it thrives on communities. Give us a new protocol and, within weeks, there will probably be a community around it.
Developers explore new blockchains, people show up at hackathons, apply for the ambassador programme, and organise and attend meetups. We know how to create activity. While that is genuinely impressive, we must also ask what happens after everyone leaves the event.
Somewhere between the community meetup, the hackathon, the Twitter Space, and the ambassador programme, the Web3 ecosystem has created a blind spot. It became very good at building communities but probably not as good when it comes to building products.
Communities are incredibly important because they introduce people to technology. They also create networks and provide mentorship. Furthermore, communities have helped newcomers find opportunities and given founders access to talent and users, creating the social infrastructure around emerging technologies.
Without communities, ecosystems struggle to grow, but they must come to understand that communities are not the destination.
Communities Are Infrastructure For Something Else
If we organise fifty events and none of those conversations eventually produce a product, a company, an open-source tool, a research project, a developer or a new way of solving a real problem, what exactly have we built? An ecosystem cannot survive indefinitely on activity. At some point, activity has to become output.
The problem begins when community activity becomes an end in itself.
A community should create the conditions for people to learn, collaborate, build, and eventually produce something valuable. A hackathon should ideally be more than a weekend of coding, and a developer workshop should ideally create pathways into actual development.
This does not mean every event needs to produce a startup, as that would be an unreasonable expectation. But when an ecosystem spends years organising activities without seeing a corresponding increase in durable products, companies, open-source infrastructure or real-world adoption, it becomes reasonable to ask whether we are measuring the right things.
Have We Developed an Event Economy?
One pattern that has stood out around the Web3 ecosystem is how quickly we can move from one ecosystem opportunity to another. A new protocol enters the Nigerian market; a community forms around it; an event follows, then perhaps a hackathon or an ambassador programme. There is excitement, engagement and a lot of conversation. Then another protocol arrives, and our attention shifts.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Emerging technology is constantly changing, and people need opportunities to explore different ecosystems. The problem is what happens when participation itself becomes the product.
We begin to measure success by the number of people who attended an event, joined a community, completed a programme or participated in a campaign. Those numbers can look impressive, and sometimes they genuinely represent meaningful growth. But they do not necessarily tell us whether the ecosystem is producing lasting value.
A person can attend ten blockchain events without ever building a product. A developer can participate in several hackathons without taking any of those ideas beyond the prototype stage. Someone can join twenty communities without becoming a customer of a single locally built product.
The activity is real. The question is whether the activity is translating into outcomes.
Perhaps We Have Been Talking to Ourselves Too Much
This is one of the more uncomfortable possibilities.
If most of our conversations happen within the Web3 ecosystem, then it is easy to develop a distorted understanding of what ordinary people actually need from the technology. We begin discussing decentralisation, tokenisation, wallets, Layer 2 networks, DeFi and governance with people who already understand those concepts. We then interpret their enthusiasm as evidence that the wider market is ready.
But the average Nigerian consumer does not wake up asking how to participate in decentralised infrastructure, and that is where the industry needs to meet them.
The best Web3 products may ultimately be the ones that people use without caring that they are using Web3 at all.
What Would a Healthy Community Actually Look Like?
Ultimately, the answer is not to organise fewer communities or stop holding events. The answer is to think differently about what communities are supposed to accomplish.
A healthy community should create a pathway.
Someone joins because they are curious. They learn, find collaborators, and then build something that someone outside the original community begins using. The product improves through actual market feedback. Eventually, the product becomes useful enough that people no longer need to understand the community that produced it.
We need stronger pathways from community to builder, from builder to product, from product to user, and from user to sustainable business. Without those pathways, we can continue producing highly engaged participants without producing enough institutions.
This is why I think the next phase of Nigerian Web3 should be less concerned with how many people we can gather and more concerned with what those people are empowered to create.
If we have already demonstrated that Nigerians can build communities around emerging technology, perhaps the next challenge is to make those communities more productive.
