The Tattoo Test
Measuring a Crypto Community's "Skin in the Game"
In the most intense kind of organization, members abandon the outside world and hang out only with other members. We have a word for such organizations: cults. Cultures of total dedication look crazy from the outside. But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously.
-Peter Thiel, Zero to One (2014)
I’ve written about this one a bit on Twitter already, but do want to take a moment to immortalize it a bit better here on Speculations.
As we frolic around in this lovely Crypto Summer weather, everyone’s riding a bit hot, lives are changing, fortunes are being made.
Inevitably, people are going to want to capture and commemorate this feeling, to show devotion, to pledge fealty.
There’s something I want you to keep an eye out for, I submit to you: The Tattoo Test.
The Tattoo Test
The strength of a Crypto Community’s fanaticism can be measured by whether its members have gotten tattoos of the project.
I first commented on the Tattoo Test observation back in mid-2018, right at the tail end of the last ICO mania, but since then the proliferation of Crypto Tattoos has continued to rapidly expand. Let’s examine a bit.
“What Does Your Tattoo Mean?”
Tattoos are not cheap signals.
Tattoos are a display of long-term commitment. Tattoos require high conviction. Tattoos are about as on-the-nose as you can get for “skin in the game” without having to bleed for it.
If a project’s community members are getting tatted up, they are signaling long-term dedication, probably even irrationally so.
If community members have tattoos, departure from a project won’t just be the loss or reallocation of funds, it will take on a very serious, embarrassing social cost beyond anything merely monetary could take from you.
The people with tattoos are the zealots, the true believers. To some extent they are not to be reasoned with - and at the project level that’s an incredibly valuable thing.
In a hyper-volatile crypto cycle, you need cult followings like this to stay strong and maintain the community through the long Crypto Winters.
Projects that pass the Tattoo Test have a baseline of cult believers who will always have the project’s back.
Tattoos signal a track record of prior success.
It’s very unlikely that someone would get a tattoo before the project has done anything for them, by the time you are at the true believer / “Tattoo Believer” level the project has very likely already changed your life in some gigantic way.
Fans of projects that don’t have Tattoo Believers yet are still waiting for the project to do something for them - it’s still a proof of concept in many ways.
Projects That Pass The Tattoo Test
Since my initial observation of the Tattoo Test, there have been a huge proliferation of Crypto Project Tattoos.
It would be impossible to chronicle all of them, but I will share some of the ones here that I thought were interesting or that had inherently interesting stories behind them.
Of course, this list is non-exhaustive!
Large Caps - Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
This should go without saying, but basically large cap blue chip cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been around sufficiently long that they have legions of their own Tattoo Believers already.
Of course if you’ve ever interacted with a Bitcoin or Ethereum Maximalist, these tattoos and more should not be particularly surprising. I have no doubt there are hundreds of Bitcoin and Ethereum tattoos out there, the belief in these projects is very well-documented.
Tezos
Kathleen from Tezos actually responded to my original thread in 2018 we had a good laugh about how the results for “Tezos Tattoo” were WAY off the mark (literally a picture of Tupac as a Unicorn, not making this up).
Almost 2 years later, she returned to the thread to update their progress with a GIANT back Tattoo on one of their community members.
Apparently this Tezos-believer is also a male model, so I weirdly count that as even more skin in the game than usual since in theory it’s coupled with his livelihood!
Post-Publication Update: A week after this blog posted, Kathleen updated the thread with another Tezos community Tattoo!
Binance / BNB
This is a story that’s now pretty legendary, but CZ from Binance was out with the CoinMarketCap guys one evening and seemingly on a whim they decided to get the first three Binance tattoos in existence.
CZ basically also formulates the tattoo test, but as a way to gauge the belief of Founders and core employees instead of the broader community:
When listing coins on Binance, we always want to make sure the founders are dedicated to their project. It’s a key thing we look for. Now a simple question would do. Imagine if, on our listing application, we added a question:
“Are you committed enough to your project that you are willing to tattoo your logo?”
Or more simply:
“As a founder, have you tattooed your logo on your body yet?”
Savage, I know. But I do believe strongly that founders should be fully committed to their project before they do an ICO.
(Note: Lest someone think I am merely ripping off my then-future-now-current boss, CZ’s blog on this topic was written in December 2018 and my original Tweet above was written in August 2018! 😅)
Kusama
I thought this one was interesting. Not super familiar with the project, but Kusama essentially had the self-awareness of the Tattoo Test to try to use it as a way to jumpstart community commitment - paying people $3k to get a tattoo of the Kusama logo.
SuperRare
Not a token project, but huge shoutout to Zack, the CMO of SuperRare, for the BIG skin in the game move.
As an avid user of SuperRare, I love seeing their team have this kind of commitment to the work they’re doing! 💎💎💎
Axie Infinity
My understanding is that there are so many Axie tattoos now that this could probably become its own post! But I guess that shouldn’t be surprising given the well-documented, tight-knit, and empowered community that Axie has built.
One notable Axie Tattoo Test was from major community member Cloudwhite, who literally created and released a dedicated prize token for community members that went through with getting an Axie Tatoo.
The community rallied around the challenge and a ton of people got Axie tattoos. One of Axie’s leading investors, Delphi Digital, even got involved, offering free subscriptions to their Institutional Research portal for anyone that passed Cloudwhite’s tattoo challenge:
Notable here, is that major Axie whale OhhShiny then challenged people to specifically get a tattoo of his quadruple mystic Axie (one of the rarest in the game) and our #CryptoPH friend “Spock” rose to the challenge!
Yield Guild
An off shoot to all the Axie tattoo mania…
We were on our #CryptoPH Discord Server a couple months back, specifically talking about all the Axie tattoos, and Yield Guild Co-Founder Gabby Dizon (also my co-conspirator for Narra Gallery) kind of passively said he would give 10 Axies (the actual in-game NFT monster) to anyone that would get a Yield Guild tattoo.
I think we all thought it was a kind of joke or something lighthearted and not super serious, but literally the next morning, we all woke up to see that a YGG member named Oyik had gotten the tattoo in the middle of the night, literally less than 6 hours after Gabby made the passing comment in the Discord server! 🤯🤯🤯
Pancake Swap
My last one for now. I was in a Clubhouse room for work a couple weeks ago and CZ was taking open questions from the audience about various Binance initiatives.
One audience member came up and started asking really great questions about PancakeSwap, a project build on the Binance Smart Chain - he clearly knew a lot about the project and was a big fan.
Then he casually drops that he got the PancakeSwap logo tattooed on his neck and the whole room (CZ especially) was super impressed, kudos to that guy!
So What?
In the last crypto summer, we had an entire crop of projects that people claimed to believe in that aren’t around anymore. It’s easy to say a project is good when we are in a bull market, but you need to consider which projects are already preparing for the next long crypto winter.
Community is a critical part of surviving the winter and the fanatical believers are the fire that keep that community warm in the darkest of days.
Longevity is the name of the game here - track the fanatics!
-Colin Goltra, March 2021