Discord isn’t just for gaming, it’s also for crypto
Discord CEO and co-founder Jason Citron didn’t build his chat platform with crypto enthusiasts in mind. He made it for gamers, and gaming still dominates Discord.
But in 2020, Citron told Brew that “almost 30% of active server owners on Discord had created a server for something other than gaming.” Servers are central hubs where members of a community chat together. Discord had 19 million weekly active servers last year. In 2021, over 140 million monthly active users logged in to discuss their shared interests in anime, fitness, religion, books, parrots, and the topic you’re reading this article for: crypto.
Once upon a time during the halcyon days of dogecoin millionaires and the NFT craze, new investors flocked to Reddit and Discord to plan their portfolios. There are channels to discuss both stocks and crypto on both platforms, but Reddit became particularly famous for its meme stock rally. Meanwhile, Discord became the best platform to discuss the next 🚀 altcoin, build Web3 projects, and argue about the best crypto investment strategy.
Crypto is one of the largest nongaming topics on Discord with around 1,800 dedicated servers, per tracking site Discord.me, and several crypto servers have hundreds of thousands of members each. The game to make money Axie Infinity, for example, was at Discord’s default server limit of 800,000 members late last year before the in-game currency crash. (It still has over 700,000 members somehow.) Blockchain platform Solana’s server has over 130,000 Discord members, and crypto exchange Uniswap has over 90,000.
Most NFT communities have a Discord, and many – including the Bored Ape Yacht Club – offer membership as a perk that comes with purchasing an NFT. Web3 authority Packy McCormick put it this way in his newsletter, Not Boring: “Starting an NFT project today and inviting backers to a Slack group would be the kind of shibboleth you couldn’t escape; the crypto equivalent of using a hotmail account, or telling everyone you use Bing as your search engine.”
Like players, crypto stans prefer to remain anonymous. Blockchain technology is built for anonymous transactions, and its biggest believers typically mask their real names online and use NFTs as profile pictures.
But there is a major downside to discussing finances on a platform built for gamers: security. Discord doesn’t have much of that. Workers at traditional financial institutions send messages to each other on platforms built for security, such as Bloomberg Terminal, Instant Bloomberg and SWIFT. They are extremely expensive and promise secure communication and transactions. Discord does not encrypt its chats, and public chat history can be browsed by anyone on a server.
Traditional financial chat platforms monitor conversations to ensure users comply with regulations. Crypto holders will probably scorn the idea of moderators watching their chats. But as a trade-off for allowing users to remain anonymous and largely unchecked, Discord is teeming with scammers.
John Murphy, a moderator for r/CryptoCurrency’s Discord server, told Morning Brew that he has banned more than 150,000 malicious accounts from the server since it was created in 2017.
The problem is so widespread that most major crypto Discord servers ask users to disable instant messaging, shutting down all 1:1 communication for safety. Of course, crypto’s hacking problem isn’t limited to Discord (over $14 billion worth of crypto in total was swiped by fraudsters last year, per Chainalysis).
But Discord is a pocket of magma in a lava field. They are trying to change that. Late last year, Citron teased a new feature that will integrate users’ ethereum wallets into their Discord profiles, meaning users have no logical reason to share wallet details with scammers.
The reaction to his proposal was the same as talking up Jake Gyllenhaal to a room full of Swifties. Although there is a lot of overlap between gaming and crypto, a vocal faction of gamers openly despise crypto, especially crypto communities that have taken up space on their hallowed gaming platform. Numerous users responded to Citron’s post to tell him they were canceling their premium Discord memberships; one Twitter influencer wrote: “Sigh. *googles “discord options”*.”
Citron quickly stepped back. However, he said Discord is working to curb fraud in other ways. This will be a big step forward in improving the crypto community platform.
James Rothwell, Global Marketing VP for leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance, told Morning Brew that Binance only started increasing its Discord presence this year. But his reason wasn’t for the features or the aesthetics. Instead, he said Discord commands a wider audience in the US and Europe than Telegram, a competing chat platform that Binance also uses. To paraphrase, Binance looked at the options and said, “Why not both?”
In the future, Rothwell sees Binance expanding its presence on mainstream social platforms as cryptocurrency becomes a more common dinner table topic. He said, “I think as we grow … it will naturally expand us into some of the more traditional or larger platforms.”
Murphy, on the other hand, has a different theory for the future of cryptochat: He sees all current platforms, including Discord, as fundamentally different from what Discord’s usurpers might look like. That’s because they’re all Web2, and he hopes there will be a communication platform that allows people to build Web3 projects … on a Web3 project.
“Maybe in a few years it will be something that is a bit more self-hosted and under people’s own control, rather than a giant corporation,” he said. In other words, the next “Discord for crypto” could be decentralized – like crypto itself.
