GCR

Introduction

Global Coin Research (GCR) is a research and investment DAO focused on Web3. Our mission is to pioneer the future of community-driven investing.

At GCR, the community is our edge in attracting the most promising Web3 projects. We want to prioritize our community members by crafting the best membership experience for them.

To that end, GCR conducted an anonymous survey this past month (Apr 2022). This is a real-time overview of the community members that make GCR what it is, and is our first step of many in better understanding their needs and capabilities.

Note: Survey results are on a limited number of respondents. But we want to share some early findings with the community before learning more!

Membership Demographics

Geography

Global Coin Research has been global since day 1. We believe that the best crypto builders and investors won’t emerge from Silicon Valley, but from all across the world. The decentralized, permissionless future allows anybody with talent and drive to build and invest in Web3.

Our membership base reflects this global ethos.

Our members come from 23+ countries. Only 28% are based in the US, while the remaining 72% are international and abroad.

Age / Industry

Web3 may certainly be full of 18-year-old superCoders, but our membership base skews a bit older. This isn’t surprising, as we are an investment DAO where members often contribute significant amounts of capital for Web3 investments.

In fact, 93% of our membership base is 25+, 58% is 35+, and 20% is 50+.

Our membership base broadly fits into two categories:

First, working professionals in their 20s and 30s in crypto / tech / finance made up 80%+ of our membership base.

Second, older HNWIs (High-Net-Worth Individuals) who are actively investing their hard-earned capital and sharing their knowledge from years of building and investing.

Distributed AUM (dAUM)

Now here’s the fun part.

As a decentralized VC, we think of ourselves as investing from a distributed capital base. Let’s call it distributed AUM, or “dAUM” for short.

Not only do our members now source ~30% of the deal flow shown to the community, but they also provide 100% of the capital on a deal-by-deal basis.

We asked our members approximately how much they planned to invest through GCR over the next 12 months.

The average was ~$125K, meaning that each new member that joins GCR, we can expect our dAUM to increase, on average, by +$125K.

Investment DAOs are pioneering what it means to invest as a community. Just as Web2 investors created metrics like LTV / CAC, investment DAOs need something similar for measuring community growth, engagement, and health.

We’re starting with dAUM, which for GCR is ~$125K / member.

We also asked our members approximately what percentage of their existing angel investing is done through GCR.

The answer is roughly 33%. This means that roughly $1 out of every $3 each of our members commits to angel investing goes through GCR. How do we get this to 100%? In that future, how do we get GCR to become the premier investing community for all angel investing across the world.

So far, we’ve focused mostly on increasing our membership count but we’re now beginning to focus on increasing engagement among our existing members.

The path is long, but at least we know where it leads.

Note: We understand that this dAUM figure is forward-looking and based on self-reported estimates. Over time, our hope is to gather more accurate information and to study historical, on-chain data as well.

Sector Base

What we’ve seen from talking with hundreds of Web3 founders is that they either want to raise from a brand-name VC or from DAOs. Nothing in between.

The GCR community is one of our biggest selling points to founders. We have a passionate, crypto-native group of DeFi and NFT enthusiasts who offer early product feedback and marketing. To put numbers to it, we asked our members what their DeFi and NFT holdings were.

Our average member has ~$250K invested in DeFi, and ~$125K invested in NFTs. 

Over time as other crypto sectors mature, we hope to gather information about DAO, GameFi, ReFi, etc. holdings. As we continue to partner with exciting DeFi / NFT projects, we want to learn more about our members’ DeFi / NFT holdings to better engage them with the projects we partner with. 

Final Thoughts

Every community will look different. Following in the steps of Electric Capital’s developer report, we hope the Web3 ecosystem will begin creating more comprehensive community reports to measure the engagement and health of the membership base.

We started off this membership exercise through an anonymous survey. But as we look to better understand our community’s capabilities and needs, we’re continuing to ask ourselves:

• What community metrics are most helpful in evaluating community health for DAOs?
• For evaluating GCR specifically?
• What are creative ways of measuring membership engagement?

We hope you found this report useful and will continue discovering, learning, and investing together with us, here at GCR. If you have any suggestions, give a shout to dan@archive.globalcoinresearch.com or find us on Discord!