Rewriting the growth logic of Web3: The story behind Spike Labs
On the outskirts of Moscow, a small technology laboratory is quietly nurturing an ambitious plan. Their goal is not to build a blockchain game or issue a popularity token, but to "reconstruct the user growth structure of the Web3 world."
The name of this team is Spike Labs. It is fully incubated by DST Global, a world-renowned Internet investment institution. The team members come from multiple core nodes of Web2 and Web3, such as Mail.ru, Yandex, Axie Infinity, and DeepDAO. The project has not yet been officially launched, but has completed the complete growth system design, fission protocol modeling, and the deployment of the token incentive structure. It is regarded by the industry as an important pioneer in the direction of "Web3 growth protocolization".
No longer relying on advertising, but on structural growth
In the past few years, from DeFi to GameFi, Web3 projects have experienced repeated cycles of explosion and cooling. Traffic comes and goes, users rely on airdrops to attract new users, and asset precipitation is not systematic.
The Spike Labs team is very alert to this.
"Users stay not by spending money, but by paths and recognition," said Alexey Voronov, founder of Spike Labs. He worked at Mail.ru for more than ten years and was one of the first Internet people to embed behavioral incentives into product design. In 2017, he turned to Web3, just to answer one question: "Can user growth also be Web3-ized?"
Spike Labs' answer is to build a structural fission protocol so that every invitation, upgrade, interaction, and task completion are embedded in a set of traceable, accumulative, and consumable incentive networks, no longer relying on central operations or high marketing costs.
Its native token $SPT will be 100% released through user behavior and bound to structural computing power, entering the chain game consumption scenario, NFT upgrade path, DAO governance mechanism, etc., to complete an ecological closed loop from incentives → output → consumption → precipitation → governance.
The structural obsession of the founding team
In the view of Yakov Melnik, head of technical architecture at Spike Labs, Web3 is far from solving the problem of "how to drive participation with structure." "Most project incentives are separating user behavior and asset ownership, and there is a gap between participation and value."
So they made three bold decisions:
- All incentive structures are built based on the chain model of "matrix slippage + computing power weight"
- Token output is bound by behavior, and users are not speculators but ecological nodes
- Build a reusable protocol that can be accessed by any chain game, task platform, and public chain ecosystem in the future
It can be said that Spike Labs is not trying to create an "application product", but to build a "growth base" to become a truly usable, scalable, and reusable fission protocol engine in the Web3 world.
Not only a project, but also a proposal for a set of ecological standards
The Spike Labs team has never been limited to "one project". Their global node layout is taking shape:
Moscow, as the strategic headquarters for technology and models;
Singapore and Hong Kong, connecting Southeast Asian traffic and capital;
Dubai, connecting Middle East GameFi resources and Web3 Foundation;
And has established ecological cooperation with MetaMask, ENI, Bitget Wallet, Galxe, etc.
In the future, Spike Labs will gradually open its incentive system SDK, provide "Incentive-as-a-Service" protocol templates for developers and platforms, and promote the growth mode of the entire Web3 world from "advertising to attract new users" to "structured participation drive".
"We don't want to just launch a product, but leave a set of structures behind."
At the end of the interview, Alexey said something impressive: "Every successful Web3 product is worthy of admiration, but what we hope to leave behind is not a short-lived popular project, but a growth structure that can be reused by 1,000 projects in the future. Make growth sustainable, the ecosystem can settle, and users become real participants."
Spike Labs is not following the trend or catching up with a wave of hot spots. What they are doing is - answering the core questions of Web3 development: Where does growth come from? How do users stay? How does the ecosystem self-circulate?
And this persistence in long-termism may be one of the values that Web3 needs most.