Many web3 companies focus on bootstrapping interest and participation via tokens—only to wonder why their users aren’t keen to stick around. 

Have their users been incentivized to care about the project? Not in a sufficiently personal and psychological way, says Variant’s General Partner Li Jin. While tokens are an important tool in web3, founders also need to get users emotionally invested in a project.

Li has written and spoken extensively on the topic of psychological ownership, which she defines as “the feeling of possession or ‘mineness’ over a product or service.” 

Here, she speaks to our inaugural Variant Founder Fellowship cohort about how web3 projects actually go about instilling that “mineness” in their users.