Web3 User Acquisition Strategy: The Framework Behind 1.5M+ Testnet Users

A user acquisition strategy is the plan for finding, qualifying, and converting new users, and it sets which channels run in which order and which metric proves that each stage worked. It is a sequence, not a channel list. Crypto user retention is a separate job, and an airdrop is only one incentive inside the plan.

Underneath sits a simple user acquisition definition, finding new users and converting them. Mobile teams shortened the user acquisition meaning to one thing, a paid install.

In Web3, the unit you count is a wallet. The public proof sits on a block explorer. The incentive is part of the product because the quest a testnet user completes is also a first use of the chain. Each stage feeds the next. Registered users invite more, and tracked sources show where to spend. Order compounds. Volume does not.

• A user acquisition strategy is the plan for finding, qualifying, and converting new users. In Web3, the order of the stages matters more than the choice of channels.
• Web2 buys installs and tracks them with attribution software. Web3 qualifies wallets and reads the result on a block explorer.
• Sequence, Activate, Optimize, and Scale make up the Four-Phase Ladder, the user acquisition model behind Incentiv’s 1.5M+ testnet users.
• Incentiv, a Layer 1 chain, added 300K+ social growth and 2M+ trailer views before mainnet, and our case study reports 4.6M+ mainnet transactions.
• Of all user acquisition metrics, the testnet-to-mainnet carryover rate, the share of qualified testnet users who transact on mainnet, matters most. A count like 1.5M+ testnet users is where measurement starts.

• What Does a User Acquisition Strategy Actually Mean in 2026?
• Key Takeaways
• Why Does the Web2 User Acquisition Playbook Break in Web3?
• What Is the Four-Phase Web3 User Acquisition Framework?
• How Did Incentiv Reach 1.5M+ Testnet Users?
• Which User Acquisition Channels Work at Each Phase?
• How Do You Measure a Web3 User Acquisition Strategy?
• The Web3 User Acquisition Playbook
• What Do Regulators Say About Incentive-Funded Acquisition?
• What Are the Limitations of an Incentive-Led User Acquisition Strategy?
• How Surgence Labs Does This
• Conclusion
• FAQs

Paid user acquisition buys installs and measures them with attribution software, but a chain has no install to buy and no cookie to track. The difference between Web2 and Web3 user acquisition is the unit. Web2 buys an install, while Web3 qualifies a wallet and measures it on-chain. Three things about a chain force that.

• The wallet is the identity. One person can hold many wallets, so a wallet count overstates headcount.
• The incentive is part of the product. A quest reward changes what a testnet user does on the chain.
• Sybil accounts are a cost of every incentive. A reward worth claiming draws repeat claims from one operator.

Each channel still has a job and a limit in a Web3 user acquisition strategy.

Paid media still earns its place. It works as retargeting aimed at people who watched your content, not as the top of the funnel. Our Incentiv campaign ran paid retargeting behind a trailer and creator cutdowns. If your product ships through an app store, our guide to app user acquisition for trading apps covers that funnel.

A team that keeps the mobile user acquisition meaning ends up with a dashboard full of reach and an empty explorer.

A free user acquisition audit. Free 30-minute call. No pitch deck. No obligation.

Sequence, Activate, Optimize, and Scale are the four phases of the framework, and each has its own mechanics and one metric. Call it the Four-Phase Ladder. It is the user acquisition model behind the Incentiv numbers.

One rule separates the framework from most user acquisition strategies. No phase starts until the phase before it has a qualified cohort to hand over. The table sets out each phase’s mechanics, its metric, and the way it usually fails.

Sequence is the first phase, and its mechanic is a pre-registration page with a referral engine attached. Registration comes before any on-chain action because it gives you a contact list for the day the testnet opens and a referral graph that shows who invited whom. Our guide to crypto referral program design covers reward timing and caps.

Put the fraud guardrails at the entry, where sybil resistance is cheapest. Three general types of checks do most of the work.

• Qualification tiers. A registered user moves up only by completing actions, so rewards follow effort.
• Rate limits. Caps on invites and claims slow anyone registering in bulk.
• Duplicate detection. Checks look for the patterns in the Arbitrum Foundation’s sybil detection method, such as addresses “that are funded from the same source.”

Measure Sequence by qualified registrations, meaning registered users who pass the guardrails. When every sign-up counts as a user, the phase fails because each later phase inherits a list full of sybil accounts.

Activate turns registered users into testnet users through a quest ladder with a public leaderboard. The quest ladder orders tasks from trivial to meaningful. An early rung is a wallet connection. A later one is a test transaction. Each rung teaches one action and filters out accounts unwilling to do it, so the quest ladder doubles as sybil resistance.

The public leaderboard does what private points cannot. Visible rank gives a testnet user a position to defend, which is a reason to return tomorrow. Incentiv ran both, a public leaderboard and a quest ladder our case study labels ActionFi.

Describe points and rank as testnet progress, never as a promise of value, because an incentivized testnet that implies a payout can create a compliance problem. If rewards follow, our airdrop marketing guide covers eligibility and distribution.

Measure Activate by the quest completion rate, the share of qualified registered users who finish each rung. The phase fails on a flat quest list, where every task scores the same and scripts finish all of them.

Optimize shows where the budget goes next, and it runs on partner quests, a weekly AMA (ask-me-anything session), and cohort analysis.

Partner quests borrow an audience. Another project’s community completes a task on your testnet, so you reach wallets that already transact elsewhere. A weekly AMA gives the testnet cohort a regular reason to return between quests, which fits the predictable weekly calendar our crypto community management guide describes.

Cohort analysis is the decision tool. Group testnet users by entry source, then ask which source produced testnet users who are still active three weeks later. Fund that source. Cut the ones that raised only the registration count.

Measure Optimize by the returning-cohort rate, the share of each source’s cohort that comes back in later weeks. When every source gets equal funding, the phase fails because the sources that sent sybil accounts keep their funding.

Scale is the last phase, and its mechanic is the carryover perk. Testnet standing carries over as something a qualified testnet user can claim on mainnet, which gives that user a reason to show up on day one.

The perk has to be useful, which usually means early access, a kept rank, or fewer steps on mainnet. It also cannot be framed as a financial return. Say what the perk does, never what it might be worth.

On Incentiv, qualification tiers and carryover perks carried the testnet activity into the mainnet launch. If your mainnet arrives with a token, design the carryover inside the token launch plan from the start.

Measure Scale by the testnet-to-mainnet carryover rate. Without the phase, your testnet users have nothing waiting for them on mainnet.

Incentiv reached 1.5M+ testnet users through a campaign that ran, in order, a pre-registration and referral engine, a testnet quest ladder with a public leaderboard, partner quests with weekly AMAs, and mainnet carryover perks. Incentiv is a Layer 1 chain, we ran the campaign, and the Incentiv case study publishes the results.

The task, in the case study’s words, was “to convert pre-registration interest into testnet activity and then into a live mainnet.” The same page describes what we built. “We built a pre-registration and referral engine with fraud guardrails, a testnet quest ladder with a public leaderboard, and a trailer with creator cutdowns and paid retargeting.”

That last item is the content layer that feeds registration. A quest ladder gives people something to do. A trailer, shorter creator cutdowns of it, and paid retargeting give them a reason to register.

Incentiv’s explorer did move, and anyone can check it. Our case study reports 4.6M+ mainnet transactions, and the Incentiv mainnet explorer shows the live count. The case study counts 1.5M+ testnet users, while the explorer counts mainnet transactions and addresses. Those are different units, so dividing one by the other does not give a carryover rate. Our case study publishes no carryover rate, so we state none. The mainnet figure is the one a partner can check without asking us.

A launch budget spent on one airdrop, with no quest ladder and no carryover, buys a claim count and no reason to return.

A free user acquisition audit. Free 30-minute call. No pitch deck. No obligation.

Channel choice follows the phase, and a channel that works in Activate can waste money in Sequence. Referral and creator content fill the top of a Web3 funnel, quests and leaderboards activate it, partner campaigns extend it, and paid retargeting recovers the people who dropped out.

Most launch plans list these channels side by side, and the usual attempt to increase user acquisition is to add one more. Our Web3 marketing playbook covers the wider channel mix. Give each channel a phase first, then run user acquisition campaigns one phase at a time.

Run every channel at once with no source tags, and no cohort is clean enough to learn from. You will know that the numbers grew but never know why.

Measure the strategy with one number, the testnet-to-mainnet carryover rate, which is the share of qualified testnet users who transact on mainnet. What most teams miss about testnet numbers is that the mainnet count behind that rate is always smaller than the headline.

Three supporting user acquisition metrics lead up to that rate, one for each earlier phase. They are qualified registrations, quest completion rate, and returning-cohort rate.

A qualified user is a registered account that passed the fraud guardrails and climbed the quest ladder to a rung you set in advance. That excludes sign-ups that never connected a wallet, wallets that connected and did nothing, and accounts the duplicate checks flagged. The definition also sets the cost of user acquisition, which in Web3 is cost per qualified user, and our crypto CAC benchmarks show which cost figures are published.

On-chain attribution follows the wallet a registered account connected and checks whether it transacts on mainnet. Its limit is that on-chain data shows what a wallet did, not who owns it. The a16z State of Crypto 2025 report put monthly active addresses at about 181 million and active crypto users at roughly 40 to 70 million. No address count here is a headcount.

A headline reported with no mainnet figure beside it tells partners how many accounts you rewarded, not how many reached mainnet.

Define the qualified user first, then build the stages in order, and start none until the previous one hands over a qualified cohort. That order is how to create a user acquisition strategy for a pre-mainnet chain, and it works like a software release, where a stage that fails its check does not ship.

1. Define the qualified user. Exit condition. Growth and product sign the same one-line definition.
2. Open pre-registration with the referral engine and guardrails on. Exit condition. Qualified registrations are reported by source, separately from raw sign-ups.
3. Launch the quest ladder and the public leaderboard. Exit condition. Every rung has its own quest completion rate.
4. Add partner quests and a weekly AMA. Exit condition. Every partner source is tagged.
5. Run cohort analysis and move the budget. Exit condition. Spend follows each source’s returning-cohort rate.
6. Publish the carryover perks, then report the carryover rate. Exit condition. The rate sits beside the explorer link.

Our published 90-day testnet-to-mainnet plan runs in three 30-day blocks, and the four phases map onto it as shown below. Treat the timing as typical, not as Incentiv’s schedule.

Run the steps in order, and each one hands the next a cohort you can measure. Run them together, and you reach mainnet without knowing which half of the cohort was real.

A free user acquisition audit. Free 30-minute call. No pitch deck. No obligation.

Referral rewards, quest incentives, and carryover perks can count as inducements to engage with a crypto asset, and in some jurisdictions, that makes them regulated marketing.

United Kingdom rules have covered cryptoasset promotions since October 8, 2023. The Financial Conduct Authority Handbook rule COBS 4.12A.7R(1) says that a firm “must not communicate or approve a financial promotion which relates to a restricted mass market investment and which offers to a retail client any monetary or non-monetary incentive.” Qualifying cryptoassets sit in that category, and the guidance beneath the rule names “offering bonuses where the client refers another person” as an example.

European Union rules sit in the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). Article 7, as read on October 5, 2026, covers marketing communications about a public offer, or admission to trading, of crypto-assets other than asset-referenced or e-money tokens. Communications must be “clearly identifiable as such,” and the information in them must be “fair, clear and not misleading.” Where a white paper is required, “no marketing communications shall be disseminated prior to the publication of the crypto-asset white paper.”

Whether a testnet with no token falls inside either regime is a question for counsel. Our CAC guide, under regulatory considerations for incentive-funded acquisition, adds the UK criminal penalty and the EU rule for service providers.

Design the incentive with counsel before the quest ladder ships because rewards are hard to withdraw once announced. None of this is legal advice.

Incentives buy activity. Activity is not the same as demand. Incentive-led user acquisition strategies share three limits, and no guardrail removes any of them.

• Sybil cost. Before Linea’s airdrop, Nansen’s analysis initially flagged about 516,960 of 1,297,203 eligible addresses as sybil accounts, as The Block reported in January 2025.
• Mercenary cohorts. Reward-led accounts tend to leave when the reward stops, and the baseline is already low. On Ethereum, the stickiest chain in CoinGecko’s retention study, 26.2 percent of wallets with five or more transactions in early 2025 transacted again a year later.
• Attribution limits. On-chain attribution cannot see the person, the device, or the off-chain channel that sent the wallet.

The framework also needs a product worth returning to, and no quest ladder fixes a chain nobody needs.

• Counting registrations as users. Every budget downstream gets sized against the wrong number.
• Adding guardrails after launch. Sybil accounts already sit on the leaderboard, and removing them becomes a public argument.
• Shipping a flat quest list. Nothing gets filtered, so completion tells you nothing.
• Building no carryover mechanic. The testnet cohort has no reason to arrive on day one.
• Announcing on-chain numbers no explorer supports. The first partner who checks stops trusting your other numbers.

Most are cheap to make during the testnet and expensive to discover on mainnet day.

We build the user acquisition strategy for pre-mainnet chains and protocols and run it as one ordered campaign. On Incentiv, that meant the four deliverables in our case study.

• A pre-registration and referral engine with fraud guardrails. Built so the list reaching the testnet is filtered at the door.
• A testnet quest ladder and public leaderboard. Built so each rung teaches one action.
• A trailer and creator cutdowns with paid retargeting. Built to carry one story beyond the project’s own followers.
• A testnet-to-mainnet bridge and partner quests. Built so qualified testnet users arrive with something to claim.

Our Incentiv case study lists them with the explorer link. We ran the same four phases on DAC’s testnet campaign, where 72,260 Q-CHIP claims in 72 hours led into a testnet that passed 32 million transactions.

Apply one test to any user acquisition agency. Ask whether an explorer backs its on-chain numbers. Ours link to one. Teams we have worked with include Binance, Animoca Brands, Polygon, Falcon Finance, Incentiv, Rails, Biptap, SendIt, Black Mirror, and Boost.

That quiet launch in the opening was decided months earlier, when wallets were reported as users, and nobody built the step that carries a testnet user to mainnet.

Order beats channel count. Open registration before quests, run quests before you bring in partners, and publish the carryover before you launch. A user acquisition strategy built in that order can give you a number you can point to on a block explorer. One built out of order gives you a testnet count and a launch day spent finding out what it was worth.

User acquisition is the process of finding new users for a product and converting them into active ones. In most marketing guides, the user acquisition definition stops at an install or a sign-up. Web3 counts differently because the unit is a wallet that completes a qualifying on-chain action, such as a quest.

A user acquisition strategy is the plan for finding, qualifying, and converting new users, and it sets which channels run in which order and which metric proves that each stage worked. It is a sequence, not a channel list. Without the order and the metric, you have user acquisition campaigns nobody can compare.

Define what a qualified user is, then build the stages in order, from registration through activation and optimization to scale. Give each stage its mechanics and one metric, and start no stage until the previous one hands over a qualified cohort. Agree on that definition before launch, so every report uses it.

Divide total acquisition spend by the number of new users acquired in the same period. Crypto projects should count token incentives as spend and count only qualified users because a count of registrations understates the cost. Our crypto CAC benchmarks guide covers a worked example, including which user count to divide by.

Paid user acquisition is buying new users through advertising, usually priced per install or per action. During a Web3 launch, it works best as retargeting behind content and quests because a chain has no app store install to optimize toward. Use it to bring back people who left registration unfinished.

Fix the stage that leaks before you add a channel. Cohort analysis shows which entry source produces testnet users who are still active weeks later. Put the budget there, and cut the sources that inflate only the top-line count. Adding channels to a leaking funnel raises registrations but can leave qualified users unchanged.

Scale through channels whose cost does not rise one-for-one with new users, which means referral loops, partner quests, and creator content. Paid spend raises cost with every user it adds. Referral and partner campaigns can grow registered users faster than cost grows, provided sybil resistance holds. If it fails, you are scaling sybil accounts.

An incentivized testnet is a pre-launch network where testnet users earn points, rank, or carryover standing for completing tasks. It tests the chain under load and builds a testnet base before mainnet. Without a carryover mechanic, much of that base never arrives on mainnet, because nothing links testnet standing to mainnet.

Fewer than the testnet headline suggests, on every campaign. Testnet activity risks no real funds, so the headline includes accounts that will not return. Our Incentiv case study publishes no carryover rate, so we state none. The rate depends on how strictly you qualify testnet users and on what waits for them on mainnet.

Incentiv reached 1.5M+ testnet users through a campaign we ran as four sequenced mechanics. They were a pre-registration and referral engine with fraud guardrails, a testnet quest ladder with a public leaderboard, partner quests with weekly AMAs, and mainnet carryover perks. A trailer with creator cutdowns and paid retargeting supplied the content.

• How to Launch a Token in 2026: The Pre-Launch to Post-TGE Marketing Playbook
• Web3 Go to Market Strategy: From Testnet to Mainnet in 90 Days
• Cost per User Acquisition in Crypto, 2026 CAC Benchmarks
• Crypto Referral Program Loops That Compound in 2026
• Incentiv: 1.5M+ Testnet Users to Mainnet