Think back to a time when you felt complete trust in someone.

Maybe it was your shaman in Peru because he played his little guitar with such heartbreaking beauty.

Or perhaps it was the nurse in Paris who gave you daily sponge baths as you recovered from your first (and last) parkour meetup.

Whatever the situation, those feelings occurred because there was a human connection.

If a human touch is needed for building trust, then where does the blockchain's “Trustless” nature come into play?

Preethi Kasireddy says it best in his article “What do we mean by “Blockchains are trustless”?

“… the term “trustless” is ambiguous, confusing, and most importantly, inaccurate.

Blockchains don’t actually eliminate trust. What they do is minimize the amount of trust required from any single actor in the system.”

By understanding that smart contracts are not really “Trustless” but instead a tool to minimize the amount of trust required, we realize that an active effort to build trust is still necessary.

As I consult with more and more NFT Projects and community leaders on trust-based marketing, I notice the majority are focusing time on developing passive trust solutions.

Since NFTs are part of the tech scene, this does not surprise me.

Passive solutions are trust-building tools that don’t require actual human social interaction.

Creating contracts to enforce trust is like designing a kissing booth because you want to hook up.

It’s gonna takes a more personal approach.

To fully bask in the benefits of a community where trust thrives, your strategy needs to lean heavily towards active trust building, with a human touch.

Before we get into the power of active trust building, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.

There are some passive tools that are useful, innovative, and have the potential to change the game. I want you to focus on active trust building but I can’t leave these tools out of the conversation ...

• Asca (anti scam) bot for Discord — Discord is a wonderfully open platform but it is a horrendous environment for building trust. Millions of dollars have been scammed in the NFT space on Discord alone. The Asca bot moderates and deletes scam messages 24 hours a day. Its effectiveness has been proven in the popular Discord Servers: Duelists Unite (120k+), Dueling Nexus (85k+), and YGOPro — Kaiba Corporation (79k+).

• Assured Defi — By working with Assured Defi for project verification, project owners can gain more confidence from their investors while still protecting their anonymity. With all the rugpulls by anonymous founders, there needed to be a way for founders to stay anonymous yet protect collectors. Assured Defi uses KYC (know your customer) to give communities confidence in their pseudonymous founders.

• Oort Digital — This is an ecosystem to add utilities to your NFTs through financialization, gamification, and interoperability. That means, by having reputation points, you as a hero identity can borrow NFTs without collateral (even if the NFT collection has not been integrated). The Oort digital ecosystem lets you earn reputation through consistent gameplay. They call it ‘Play-for-Honor (P4H).”

Consider using these high-tech solutions to add value and trust to your NFT Project.

Active Trust building involves making friends. It involves talking and showing interest in other people.

It’s a slow build-up but a project with a strong foundation of personal trust is the optimal environment to let ideas and creativity flourish.

When a new community member feels trust and belonging, he will become your greatest promoter. And no marketing is as powerful as old-fashioned word of mouth.

Vocal tone is a powerful indicator of emotion — research has shown … it’s one of the most reliable indicators of deception. — Forensic Strategic Solutions

Would you be shocked if I told you that almost everything you see in the NFT space is potentially fake?

What if I told you that those “influential” Twitter accounts you follow with 140k followers are mostly bots? They’re just good ones that are hard to detect (even for Twitter’s in-house nerds).

Have you ever wanted to do a giveaway and have it go viral? With thousands of NFT people on Twitter liking it, retweeting it, and tagging 3 of their friends? There’s a bot for that too.

Maybe you would like your NFT floor price to go up, enticing new collectors. There’s a deceptive and common way to do that too, it’s called wash trading.

If everything can potentially be fake, how do you make an intelligent decision on what NFTs are legit and who’s reliable?

In an environment where everything has the potential to be fake, we search for truth in whatever nook or cranny it may be hiding.

Dr Robert Krauss & colleagues from Columbia University discovered that experimental subjects listening to someone's voice were able to identify features (height, weight, age) of the person with the same accuracy as someone looking at a photo of them.

That means our ears are capable of capturing the same amount of truth as our eyes. Amazing!

If you truly believe in what you’re doing — and you have passion for your project — it will come through in your voice. And the beauty is that it can’t be faked.

Our ability to detect bull-shit in the human voice is so nuanced that we can even detect when someone is trying too hard.

Don’t worry, you can still build a powerful project without the pressure of presenting your brand alone to the public. You can do this by hiring an Alliance Manager.

An Alliance Manager is a professional who helps a community facilitate positive partnerships and identify and build personal relationships with influential NFT community members like whales, collectors, OG artists, journalists, podcast hosts, and other influentials.

The professional Alliance Manager should have experience in public relations, in writing, marketing, and public speaking. They should be masters at networking and know how to bypass gatekeepers to get to the heavy hitters.

This person represents your project using podcasts, audio chat rooms, cross-promotional AMA’s, sales videos, Twitter Spaces, Medium articles, interviews, and webinars.

When it comes to gaining trust, growing your network, and facilitating collaborations, there is nobody more valuable than your “Alliance Manager.”

Trust is the biggest closer when it comes to selling NFTs or building a web3 community.

When building trust, there are two types: passive and active. Most NFT creators and project leads focus too much on passive trust-building tools.

For passive trust building, you can use tools like Asca, a programmable and time-tested Discord bot designed to remove scam messages.

If you’re looking for a powerful tool to build trust, look no further than your own voice. The human voice is a powerful messenger of truth and can’t be faked. Tools like Twitter Spaces let you leverage your voice to build your community.

Most readers come to Medium.com to read articles that are informative but not too long. This article gives you the overall concept between passive and active trust building, but if you’re looking for a deeper explanation, more examples, and personal help growing your web3 community, let me know.

You can email me at: submit@nftpump.io

Thanks for reading.

Think back to a time when you felt complete trust in someone.

Maybe it was your shaman in Peru because he played his little guitar with such heartbreaking beauty.

Or perhaps it was the nurse in Paris who gave you daily sponge baths as you recovered from your first (and last) parkour meetup.

Whatever the situation, those feelings occurred because there was a human connection.

If a human touch is needed for building trust, then where does the blockchain's “Trustless” nature come into play?

Preethi Kasireddy says it best in his article “What do we mean by “Blockchains are trustless”?

“… the term “trustless” is ambiguous, confusing, and most importantly, inaccurate.

Blockchains don’t actually eliminate trust. What they do is minimize the amount of trust required from any single actor in the system.”

By understanding that smart contracts are not really “Trustless” but instead a tool to minimize the amount of trust required, we realize that an active effort to build trust is still necessary.

As I consult with more and more NFT Projects and community leaders on trust-based marketing, I notice the majority are focusing time on developing passive trust solutions.

Since NFTs are part of the tech scene, this does not surprise me.

Passive solutions are trust-building tools that don’t require actual human social interaction.

Creating contracts to enforce trust is like designing a kissing booth because you want to hook up.

It’s gonna takes a more personal approach.

To fully bask in the benefits of a community where trust thrives, your strategy needs to lean heavily towards active trust building, with a human touch.

Before we get into the power of active trust building, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.

There are some passive tools that are useful, innovative, and have the potential to change the game. I want you to focus on active trust building but I can’t leave these tools out of the conversation ...

• Asca (anti scam) bot for Discord — Discord is a wonderfully open platform but it is a horrendous environment for building trust. Millions of dollars have been scammed in the NFT space on Discord alone. The Asca bot moderates and deletes scam messages 24 hours a day. Its effectiveness has been proven in the popular Discord Servers: Duelists Unite (120k+), Dueling Nexus (85k+), and YGOPro — Kaiba Corporation (79k+).

• Assured Defi — By working with Assured Defi for project verification, project owners can gain more confidence from their investors while still protecting their anonymity. With all the rugpulls by anonymous founders, there needed to be a way for founders to stay anonymous yet protect collectors. Assured Defi uses KYC (know your customer) to give communities confidence in their pseudonymous founders.

• Oort Digital — This is an ecosystem to add utilities to your NFTs through financialization, gamification, and interoperability. That means, by having reputation points, you as a hero identity can borrow NFTs without collateral (even if the NFT collection has not been integrated). The Oort digital ecosystem lets you earn reputation through consistent gameplay. They call it ‘Play-for-Honor (P4H).”

Consider using these high-tech solutions to add value and trust to your NFT Project.

Active Trust building involves making friends. It involves talking and showing interest in other people.

It’s a slow build-up but a project with a strong foundation of personal trust is the optimal environment to let ideas and creativity flourish.

When a new community member feels trust and belonging, he will become your greatest promoter. And no marketing is as powerful as old-fashioned word of mouth.

Vocal tone is a powerful indicator of emotion — research has shown … it’s one of the most reliable indicators of deception. — Forensic Strategic Solutions

Would you be shocked if I told you that almost everything you see in the NFT space is potentially fake?

What if I told you that those “influential” Twitter accounts you follow with 140k followers are mostly bots? They’re just good ones that are hard to detect (even for Twitter’s in-house nerds).

Have you ever wanted to do a giveaway and have it go viral? With thousands of NFT people on Twitter liking it, retweeting it, and tagging 3 of their friends? There’s a bot for that too.

Maybe you would like your NFT floor price to go up, enticing new collectors. There’s a deceptive and common way to do that too, it’s called wash trading.

If everything can potentially be fake, how do you make an intelligent decision on what NFTs are legit and who’s reliable?

In an environment where everything has the potential to be fake, we search for truth in whatever nook or cranny it may be hiding.

Dr Robert Krauss & colleagues from Columbia University discovered that experimental subjects listening to someone's voice were able to identify features (height, weight, age) of the person with the same accuracy as someone looking at a photo of them.

That means our ears are capable of capturing the same amount of truth as our eyes. Amazing!

If you truly believe in what you’re doing — and you have passion for your project — it will come through in your voice. And the beauty is that it can’t be faked.

Our ability to detect bull-shit in the human voice is so nuanced that we can even detect when someone is trying too hard.

Don’t worry, you can still build a powerful project without the pressure of presenting your brand alone to the public. You can do this by hiring an Alliance Manager.

An Alliance Manager is a professional who helps a community facilitate positive partnerships and identify and build personal relationships with influential NFT community members like whales, collectors, OG artists, journalists, podcast hosts, and other influentials.

The professional Alliance Manager should have experience in public relations, in writing, marketing, and public speaking. They should be masters at networking and know how to bypass gatekeepers to get to the heavy hitters.

This person represents your project using podcasts, audio chat rooms, cross-promotional AMA’s, sales videos, Twitter Spaces, Medium articles, interviews, and webinars.

When it comes to gaining trust, growing your network, and facilitating collaborations, there is nobody more valuable than your “Alliance Manager.”

Trust is the biggest closer when it comes to selling NFTs or building a web3 community.

When building trust, there are two types: passive and active. Most NFT creators and project leads focus too much on passive trust-building tools.

For passive trust building, you can use tools like Asca, a programmable and time-tested Discord bot designed to remove scam messages.

If you’re looking for a powerful tool to build trust, look no further than your own voice. The human voice is a powerful messenger of truth and can’t be faked. Tools like Twitter Spaces let you leverage your voice to build your community.

Most readers come to Medium.com to read articles that are informative but not too long. This article gives you the overall concept between passive and active trust building, but if you’re looking for a deeper explanation, more examples, and personal help growing your web3 community, let me know.

You can email me at: submit@nftpump.io

Thanks for reading.