The Crypto Illuminati
The Illuminati Round Table
Community Building
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Community Building

Insight into Kudasai, a strong and vibrant Japanese crypto community

Illuminati Round Table Call Notes:

About Watacchi

  • Twitter: @watacchikasou

  • Formed Kudasai, which is a Japanese community established in 2020

  • Kudasai started as a trading group

  • 69k Twitter followers and 20k telegram group members

  • Have 40 core members

  • It is the most aggressive crypto community

  • Plan to grow the community more internationally

How is the market for trading in Japan?

  • Most Japanese are YouTube influencers

  • Most Japanese prefer to buy from Japanese exchanges 

  • Some people use foreign exchanges to buy

  • They have become more active in crypto in the past two years

  • In 2020, people started using Pancakeswap as their exchange because Pancakeswap was a bubble in Japan at that time

  • Japanese influencers helped onboard people onto the Pancakeswap exchange and community, mainly YouTubers

  • Pancakeswap has a lot of GameFi tokens

  • BSC has its roots in South Asia

  • Japanese people love GameFi projects

  • Koreans have coins and projects that have yet to be heard of

  • These coins can pump up to 500% daily, and no one will know about it except Koreans

  • Korea has its closed-out ecosystem

  • Many people in Japan don't speak English fluently, and it is often a barrier

  • The ways Japanese get access to information are pretty limited

  • Japanese projects are only marketed to the Japanese community

What are some of the biggest exchanges in Japan?

  • There are a few, like Bitfire, Coincheck, and Bitbank

  • To get listed on Japanese exchanges is quite hard 

  • Fewer Japanese projects are trading on exchanges because of their low cap

Are Japanese people only using Japanese exchanges?

  • Japanese users don't need VPNs to use other exchanges

  • In 2018 the number of people using other exchanges was low, but the number has increased over time

  • Recently Binance announced to establish Binance Japan which will open Japan up to other internationals

  • Users use Japanese exchanges to trade from fiat to crypto or crypto to fiat, but they also use ByBit and other exchanges too

What are the big ecosystem players in Japan?

  • Many new web3 projects are coming to Japan in recent times

  • Koreans are crazy about creating NFTs 

What's the information flow in Japan like?

  • Japanese users get information from YouTube online

  • Then if they want to learn more about a token, they search via Twitter, Telegram, and Discord 

In terms of community, how did you begin, and what was your turning point?

  • In 2020, it was a trading group with 1000 people.

  • We hosted an AMA session with another project in our telegram group and offered 500 USDT as a reward. This was one way we got the community to grow.

  • To grow a community, you need to Incentivize the community

  • To do that, we needed money for the AMA sessions hosted in the group. That way, the community can learn and earn from a crypto project

  • In 2020, he hosted many projects and got the community to participate in their testnet

Is there a different way to avoid AMA hunters and get more legit members through AMA sessions?

  • We only host AMA sessions with projects that Watacchi and the telegram group members are interested in

  • Our target is to select good projects to host carefully

  • Hosted an AMA session with Hashflow back in March, the only community that did that in Japan

  • We are more of a quality base community than a volume base community

What are the other communities in Japan doing?

  • Due to the language barrier and lack of manpower, most communities haven't reached the internationals yet

  • It is more of an inside community where they talk about crypto

  • At Kudasai, we want to move between people in Japan and other countries and get information to move in both ways

  • While building communities, you need to focus on harmony

  • Also, consider the cultural difference when building an international community

What are the different things you do in your community?

  • Quality AMAs

  • Finding out what the community wants

  • Watch out for what projects people talk about on Twitter

  • Share new information

Do you guys have any community calls in the group to get more community participation? 

  • We have an Admin group where we talk about what we should focus on in the next few months and years or what we should do right now

  • We built a governance forum where people can vote on initiatives they want to do

What are the initiatives that people are voting on right now?

  • The launch of governance NFTs

What will the community be paid with? 

  • Mostly USDT or USDC

  • You need to have the NFT in order participate in the governance

  • The NFT grants you access to the governance to vote

  • We added 500 free mints NFTs with no utility, just a chat room for its holders. But it has a 1ETH floor. This will be moved to governance and be more open for the community

  • It starts with 800, but the limit is 2000 mints

What does the Telegram group look like?

  • Our community is a place where everyone can chat

  • We cover Defi, GameFi, NFTs,

Final Thoughts

  • Anyone can join the Kudasai community via the link on Twitter

  • Kudasai means “give me money”

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