It has been just over three weeks since the release of our testnet and we’ve been incredibly humbled by how many of you have jumped in to work with us. Our Discord community has grown by over 27,000, and twitter by over 17,000 since testnet launch on August 31. Over 7,000 people have submitted a ‘Superuser’ application to work directly with our team, and the information you’ve provided on features, exchanges, and assets has already been invaluable in prioritizing our development. Thousands more users have provided feedback and feature requests on our testnet through feedback forms and our recently implemented feature upvote page. In the first week our testnet was active, every day saw significantly higher active users than the Sushiswap mainnet! A lot of you (and some sneaky others) have been asking about how we've been able to achieve the amazing success we’ve had with our community so far - and well, we’re all about transparency, so let’s talk about it! We’d be lying if we said some part of this wasn’t up to luck and timing. We have been building since the beginning with the mission of creating a provably fair and transparent alternative to exchanges that exploit traders, LP’s, and market makers. In the past year, our industry has witnessed a true sea change in the understanding of “regular” traders, and a groundswell of demand for fair alternatives to an industry that forces traders to “play against the house.” TLDR: We’d like to express our genuine gratitude and thanks to Celsius, Voyager, 3AC, Robinhood, and so many others because, well… 

We’ve been working to build relationships with existing communities concentrated around individual traders and miners with sufficient experience to understand the proposition of a “fair playing field” for trading, and familiarity with the problems of internalization, PFOF, and toxic order flow. Our initial exploratory marketing efforts were greatly aided by the fact that we have spent the last year developing our technology. As a result, Deepwaters tech is uniquely mature for most projects just entering testnet - we were not asking future users to get excited about an intangible idea; this is something real.

This past summer, Deepwaters has built a repository of teaser materials for our community growth campaigns including video, graphics, technical documentation, and blogs/articles highlighting the inequities and exploitation of traders and LPs. As we began our first exploratory marketing efforts, we quickly saw that these materials resonated with the communities which we had identified. Crucially, our marketing team immediately engaged these pre-testnet community members, advocates, and leaders with incentives such as (non-asset) social tokens, social media titles, team access, and future inclusion in airdrops. 

Deepwaters has built our community assets and incentive programs around making our members/users feel like part of the team, and giving them purpose to ‘work for us.’ Our community management mechanisms empower community members to advocate on our behalf, and support/incentivise/reward their efforts to do so - instead of providing dictatorial mandates. To identify potential candidates for community leadership, we have looked to those who take it upon themselves to lead without directive to do so, and demonstrate mature management and effective advocacy. We then try to highlight and promote these individuals, and demonstrate our willingness to reward those who go above and beyond to contribute for us.

Don’t be greedy. Your fans are your biggest assets, and if you reward them honestly, you’ll create better influencers than you could ever buy. 

Don’t just pay lip service - truly listen and work with those willing to offer their time and expertise to you. Consensus is a better developer than anyone you could hire.

This is just the beginning - we have a TON more features to roll out, testing to be done, upcoming token sales and pre-sales, and ultimately mainnet in the coming months! To everyone who has supported us along the way so far - to all our investors, partners, and our amazing community: truly, thank you. We’ve never been more excited to build the future of fair, transparent finance with you. We hope to continue to earn your trust to build the best product for you, and profit not from your loss, but alongside your gain. <3 from the Deepwaters team.