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1. DeFi Degen: Crypto Carl

  • Fearlessly embarking on risky adventures with bold optimism to explore. DeFi Degen (Tarot: The Fool)

  • tl;dr

    DeFi Degens have an extreme-risk taking mindset. They chase the highest yields using high-risk strategies. Mostly comprised of retail investors, males in 25-35 age group, with primary user base in North America and largest growth volumes in Asia.

    • Fast movers, pushing the boundaries for trades and gains, appear as rash to traditional finance folks.

    • Work with significant capital towards yield farming (APY), memecoin snapping, leverage trading, and cross-chain arbitrage.

    • Believe in the core values of anonymity, decentralization, and asymmetric bets.

    • Willing to experiment and try new solutions to explore. Hang out on Telegram/Discord alpha groups, value influencer endorsements, and transparent community sharing of wins/losses.

    • Driven by exponential returns, early mover advantage, social status, and financial independence from traditional systems. Provide much needed liquidity and visibility to early stage projects.

    • Actively use platforms that enable flash loans, yield aggregators, trading bots, perpetuals, and security tools for rug pull monitoring. Struggle with slow settlements on blockchain.

    • Require real-time price feeds with instant execution, multi-chain wallet integration, smart contract audit indicators, portfolio tracking with APY indicators optimizing returns, social signals indicating community activity, and automated stop-loss or risk management as they often fail to set controls in the hurry to act.

    • Respond well to speed-optimized mobile first designs, one-click execution, comprehensive dashboard, and concise documentation.

  • Characteristics

    • High-risk tolerance, impatient, seeks highest yields
    • First to try new protocols and products
    • High affinity towards meme coins
    • Values anonymity and decentralization
    • Prefers high-throughput blockchains: Ethereum, BNB, Solana and Arbitrum
    • Resents "Low Float, High FDV" (Fully Diluted Valuation) tokens backed by Venture Capitalists

  • Behavior Patterns

    • Active 24/7 across multiple time zones
    • Engages in liquidity mining, yield (APY) and point farming (depositing assets to earn "points" for a future airdrop while simultaneously earning yield)
    • Shares alpha tips and farming strategies
    • Quick to move capital based on opportunities
    • Engages with automated sniper bots and tools designed for low market cap, high volatility assets like memecoins, that can quickly help in identifying and exploiting trading opportunities faster than other traders
    • Aggressively hunts for alphas in Discords/Telegram

  • Pain Points

  • Engagement Hooks

    • High-frequency trading
    • Complex, automated, bot driven DeFi strategies

  • Primary Platforms

  • Tech Affinity

    • Integration support for EVM-compatible chains
    • Cross-chain interactions (bridges, protocols that enable seamless capital movement)
    • Multi-chain usage (Preference for Ethereum, BNB, Solana, Arbitrum)
    • Flash loan and yield protocols (Aave, Dydx)
    • Integration with technologies that reduce gas fees, faster settlements across chains enabling DeFi Degens to exploit yield opportunities across fragmented blockchain ecosystems.s

How to Target?

  • DeFi Degen Mindset

    • Player vs. Player mentality
    • Embraces high-risk, speculative strategies in crypto trading and investing
    • Seen as pioneers in crypto and not gamblers
    • Thrives on short-term volatility rather than carefully evaluating long-term potential
    • Believers of rapid action, often without waiting for audits or security guarantees
    • Frequently disregards conventional risk management
    • Believes in go-big or go-home philosophy
    • Deeply involved in online communities, tribal loyalty but mercenary attitude, dumps the moment a narrative shifts

  • DeFi Degen Motivation

    • Excitement, social clout, eagerness to be the first and exploit opportunities early (to the moon!)
    • Yield farming, liquidity provision, and staking on new decentralized platforms
    • Leverage trading and perpetuals remains a popular tool for Degens chasing fast profits
    • Foster trust within the community through transparency, by sharing wins, losses
    • Stay updated on hypes, trends, celebrity endorsements, Reddit threads
    • Intellectually stimulated by complexity in DeFi, views DeFi loops as puzzles to be solved (loops refer to lending, borrowing, and bridging to maximize yield()

  • DeFi Degen Must-Haves

    • Privacy, decentralization, fair launch tokenomics (not VC funded ones)
    • Complex trading bots that scrape for the slightest edge in newly listed tokens
    • New technology whitepapers and tokenomics that can give them an edge
    • Participation in professional courses and obtaining certificates of accomplishment
    • Ability to find information faster, stay updated via community conversations
    • They like asymmetric trades - tools that can help limit downside are gaining popularity
    • Integration with 'social signals' for smart money flows, 'who else is buying' validations

Action Plan

  • Research & Refine: Do your own research and refine this persona based on your target audience. Use this template to guide your design, documentation and product feature decisions. The lack of formal UX research reports in Web3 is a testament that this is an underexplored area where original research could provide significant competitive advantage.
  • Design Philosophy: Focus on demographic concentration and geographic hotspots, dark mode, data density, enable Ape Buttons and provide gamified feedback such as animations and sound for dopamine hits. Leverage behavioral psychology (risk taking ability, gambling streaks, gaming wins) to enable fast execution. Lean towards mobile first design, speed over efficiency and caution, comprehensive dashboards with risk alerts, concise and brief documentation, workflow notes, under 2 seconds landing page loading time.
  • Communication Style: To address the address span of a goldfish, engage with crypto native terminology, provide clear risk warnings. Focus on transparency, social proofs (audits) and community signals. Lead with Telegram, Discord alpha groups. Build on hypes, trends, celebrity endorsements. Get rid of corporate polish, be raw, direct, and self-deprecating. Partner with "degen" influencers who have a track record of high-risk calls. Degens rotate capital based on "metas," the narratives. In Q1 2024 it was AI, then Memecoins, then PolitiFi (Trump coins). Your marketing must pivot with these weekly trends.
  • Product Features: Leaderboards to highlight who profited this week, one-click copy of the top trader and trading pattern templates, revenue share models whereby a share of protocol fees goes to users who stake or hold the token (Real Yield narrative). Besides these, multi-chain portfolio dashboard, multi-chain friction-free (signature-less transactions), rug pull detection and alerts, sniper bot integrations, automated yield optimizations and enable leverage position management. Ensure one click, fast transaction and execution flows, user-friendly interface for yields, APY and other benefit indicators, integrate social features that enable them to engage with the community and see what others are doing, utilizing for better results.

See Also