Summary:

In this case study, we’ll explore how leading blockchain ecosystems like Arbitrum, Linea, Optimism, Ripple, Berachain, and Movement Labs leveraged Galxe’s growth platform to overcome common challenges faced during their journey from launch to ecosystem expansion. By utilizing Galxe’s suite of tools, these projects were able to attract new users, engage developers, and build loyal communities.

Galxe’s platform delivered tailored solutions at every growth stage—from building early awareness and community to driving testnet activation and supporting the mainnet launch. Through seamless integrations and data-driven strategies, these projects not only gained initial traction but also maintained long-term momentum, achieving sustainable growth and increasing ecosystem vitality across every phase of their lifecycle.

Understanding Blockchain Ecosystems

A blockchain is more than just a protocol. It’s a foundation for a wider ecosystem of applications, users, developers, and infrastructure. From the moment a blockchain project comes out of stealth, it begins the journey of bootstrapping attention, community, and traction, both for itself and the dApps building on top of it.

This journey usually unfolds in four distinct phases and each phase comes with its own growth challenges and milestones:

• Phase 1: Social Awareness and Community Growth 

• Phase 2: Devnet and Testnet Launches

• Phase 3: Mainnet Deployment and Token Generation Events

But growth doesn’t stop at the chain level. For a blockchain to thrive long term, it also needs to foster a strong ecosystem of builders who have the tools and audience they need to succeed. That means solving not only for user acquisition, but also for retention and scalable marketing infrastructure.

Challenges at Each Stage

Phase 1 - Education and Community Growth

In the earliest phase, the goal is to build social traction and educate users across channels like X, Telegram, and Discord. But with no token live yet, projects need creative reward options to drive engagement. It’s also a challenge to find the right audience - early adopters who are genuinely interested in the project’s vision, while avoiding bots and Sybil attacks that can distort metrics and drain incentive budgets. Education is equally important, as users need to understand what the blockchain is building and why it matters.

Phase 2 - Devnet and Testnet Readiness

As the blockchain matures, the focus shifts to technical testing and ecosystem readiness. Projects need to onboard developers and real users to stress test the chain, validate core infrastructure, and experiment with different dApp experiences. This includes everything from bridges to early DeFi protocols and native tools. Without enough high-quality testers, it’s difficult to simulate mainnet conditions and ensure that the chain can perform at scale.

Phase 3 - Mainnet Launch and Token Generation Event

The TGE marks a major milestone, but it also introduces new operational risks. Projects need to reward early contributors, ambassadors, and testers in a fair and scalable way, often requiring the development of custom token distribution websites. These sites must handle massive traffic, prevent exploitation, and support secure reward distribution across potentially hundreds of thousands of users. Without the right infrastructure, this can become a technical bottleneck and a major source of risk.

While the potential of blockchain ecosystems continues to grow, so do the challenges that web3 brands face along the way. From fragmented tooling and disjointed user journeys to shallow engagement loops and ineffective growth strategies, teams often find themselves building in silos, without the infrastructure to scale efficiently or the insights to make data-driven decisions. Navigating each phase of a blockchain’s journey requires more than one-off solutions. It calls for a unified, intelligent platform that aligns engagement, distribution, identity, and analytics across every stage of growth.

How Galxe’s Platform Enables Growth from Stealth to Mainnet and Beyond

To remove the complexity from web3 growth, Galxe offers a secure, all-in-one platform to build the foundation for authentic, scalable growth by unifying engagement, identity, and automation. Equipping web3 brands with the tools they need to build effective, data-driven strategies at scale, Galxe Platform helps chains and their ecosystems acquire, engage, and retain real users through proven tools and strategies tailored to every phase of the journey. 

Phase 1 - Awareness: From Stealth to Sustainable Communities

The earliest stage of a blockchain’s journey is all about visibility: building a presence, crafting a narrative, and finding the right community. But reaching the right audience is easier said than done. Projects are up against spam, bots, and fragmented attention across multiple platforms. Without a native token, it’s also difficult to design compelling incentives that drive real engagement.

Galxe helps blockchains overcome these hurdles with Quest, the most widely used growth tool in web3 with over 33 million users, 7000 partners, and 1.3 billion quests launched. Projects can easily launch reward-based campaigns and loyalty programs that guide users through educational tasks, social actions, or product onboarding across offchain channels such as X, Discord, Telegram, as well as onchain behaviors like wallet creation or bridging. 

Quest also supports alternative rewards such as NFTs, loyalty points, all distributed through gamified mechanics like mystery boxes and raffles, making it ideal for pre-TGE growth strategies. Embedded identity solutions such as Galxe Passport and Score ensure seamless user verification, Sybil resistance, and compliance, enabling early-stage blockchain projects to activate, educate, and retain high-value users at scale. 

Arbitrum Odyssey Campaign 

The weekly Arbitrum Odyssey campaign by Galxe and Arbitrum engaged 623k unique users. Participants earned NFTs for completing tasks related to projects like Yield Protocol and Uniswap, resulting in 1.67 million NFTs minted. This initiative highlighted the collaboration and enthusiasm within the web3 community.

For long-term growth, Galxe’s latest product, Starboard, gives blockchain projects an even more powerful way to measure and scale community contribution. Built for marketing and growth teams, Starboard offers real-time and intelligent data analytics to monitor performance across social and onchain channels, turning fragmented numbers into actionable insights for specific growth objectives and data-backed decision making. 

The capabilities of Social Starboard allow projects to go even deeper. It brings in AI-powered sentiment analysis and topic-based tracking, allowing teams to monitor community response, measure brand health, and align campaigns with what’s actually resonating, while contributors are rewarded transparently based on relative impact. 

By shifting from vanity metrics to impact-based rankings, Starboard turns growth into a collaborative game, where contributors are recognized for real influence, and projects can sustain momentum far beyond launch.

Phase 2 - Onboarding: Testnet and Developer Activation

As projects move into devnet and testnet, the focus shifts from awareness to onboarding and converting real users. This is when teams need to activate developers, simulate user activity, and validate their infrastructure by stress-testing core protocols like DeFi apps, bridges, and staking platforms. But testnets often struggle to attract meaningful traction, resulting in low participation or being overrun by bot activity.

Galxe helps turn testnets into high-signal growth phases. Campaigns can be structured around specific technical actions such as interacting with contracts, providing liquidity, or participating in governance. With Galxe Passport and Galxe Score, projects can also ensure that activity is coming from real users. Passport is a secure, compliant, and privacy preserving solution using zero-knowledge proofs, while Score calculates each user’s reputation based on wallet behavior and ecosystem engagement.

The Linea Voyage Campaign 

Galxe supported Linea's ecosystem launch by driving community and protocol growth. The Linea Voyage campaign attracted 5.6M unique wallets across 50 applications, resulting in 50M testnet transactions and 800K Sybil-prevention credential claims. This campaign significantly increased Linea's social presence, educated users, and provided protocols with a foundation for future sustainable growth.

The March of the Beras Campaign 

The 80-day March of the Beras quest significantly increased Berachain's engagement, liquidity ($25B TVL on BEX, $64.3M staked BGT), dApp visits, and community participation, drawing 8.5M participants and 10.9M visitors. The Galxe-powered quest with Berachain dApp tasks expanded the community to over 930k X followers and 470k Discord members.

For projects seeking more customized campaigns, the Galxe API allows deeper integration and automation. This enables teams to embed core questing functionalities directly into their products and track real-time user actions, offering more targeted engagement strategies and immersive experiences. 

Movement Labs x Galxe Integration 

Movement Labs integrated Galxe's GraphQL API for its "Building the Parthenon" testnet quest, which included over 400 tasks for 50 dApps and attracted over 2 million participants. This initiative, supported by Galxe, helped Movement grow its community to 2.7M on Galxe Space, 858K on X, and 844K on Discord, while also testing its testnet performance.

Together, these tools allow blockchains to not only drive testnet activity, but to assess the quality of that activity and prioritize users who are most likely to convert into long-term contributors.

Phase 3 -  Long-Term Growth: Mainnet & Beyond

The mainnet and token generation event (TGE) represent a critical inflection point. Once a blockchain launches its mainnet, the focus shifts to activating the ecosystem. By this stage, the project has built traction, tested its infrastructure, and grown a community - now it’s time to reward that community. But with that comes a new set of challenges: distributing tokens securely, handling massive traffic spikes,complex distribution logic, and significant security risk.

With Galxe Earndrop, teams can execute large-scale token distributions without building from scratch. Earndrop supports customized airdrop sites with full security, analytics, and infrastructure - capable of handling over a million simultaneous claims. Projects can define contribution criteria, enforce Sybil resistance via Galxe Passport and Score, and distribute tokens in a seamless, automated flow.

Chaz, Founding Engineer at Solayer said “Launching our $LAYER airdrop with Galxe Earndrop was a seamless experience. We had our own airdrop site, but handling mass traffic during a TGE is tough. It’s clear Galxe designed this to handle scale, making sure our community could claim without issues. Plus, the Galxe team was incredibly supportive and easy to work with throughout the process.”

Because it runs on the Galxe Platform, Earndrop also connects directly with other growth efforts, so projects can track engagement across the full user journey from the first quest to the final claim.

XRP Earndrop Campaign

Ripple airdropped 500k XRP to XRP Ledger Universe quest participants. Phase 1 invites Web3 users to explore XRP Ledger dapps, earn NFTs, points, and XRP, and unlock Phase 2 "secret advantages." The XRP Ledger is a layer-1 blockchain focused on value transfer.

But post-TGE growth doesn't end with airdrops. This is where Starboard becomes a long-term engine for traction. Projects can launch targeted campaigns designed around specific growth goals, whether that’s driving lending volume, boosting TVL, or onboarding users to a newly launched product and feature. Starboard’s real-time dashboards and impact-based rankings give projects clarity and control over performance, while contributors earn rewards based on actual outcomes, not just participation.

By aligning incentives with measurable growth objectives, Starboard helps blockchains sustain momentum far beyond their mainnet launch and TGE.

Ecosystem-Level Impact

Galxe doesn’t just help individual blockchain teams grow. It powers entire ecosystems by enabling dApps within those chains to run their own growth campaigns using the same platform. Whether it’s an NFT project launching on a new L2, or a DeFi protocol bootstrapping liquidity, Galxe helps these ecosystem projects onboard users through quests, sybil-resistant campaigns, and integrated token rewards.

Optimism Quest Campaign

Optimism Quest significantly boosted ecosystem user discovery and engagement, leading to 3.4 million NFTs minted and increased user retention. Post-campaign, Optimism usage rose nearly 50%, and daily unique transacting wallets doubled. Individual dApps saw substantial growth, with Granary's user acquisition increasing by 276.9% and Perpetual Protocol gaining 7,000 new users. Overall, participating projects averaged 23% growth.

This has a flywheel effect. As more successful dApps grow on a blockchain, the chain becomes more attractive to both users and builders. By unifying campaign tooling, analytics, and sybil prevention into one platform, Galxe gives ecosystem teams everything they need to grow in alignment with their parent chain.

Galxe: An Industry-Leading Web3 Growth Platform 

With over 34 million users and a growing suite of products, Galxe has proven itself as the go-to growth platform for web3. From early awareness to sustained ecosystem engagement, the Galxe Platform supports blockchain teams at every step of the journey.

Whether you're launching a new layer 1 or helping a testnet ecosystem come to life, Galxe gives you the tools, data, and distribution to grow with confidence.

To learn more or get started, visit www.galxe.com and get in touch with our ecosystem experts.