Like Dan, one of our buddies at the blocmates HQ, would say, “Market’s down, time to raise your head and notice that you somehow have a gorgeous girlfriend.”

Well, it is indeed time to log out from your wallets for a second. Staring at those figures won’t bring the gains back. And for what it’s worth, you’re not alone.

The best of us are holding a bit of rotten potato sack—tokens with price action that has us questioning the tech.

However, rather than folding the bag entirely, it’ll be a lot more beneficial to look into other projects, specifically ones that are yet to have their TGE, and perhaps, interact with them.

While there’s literally no guarantee that you would possibly be incentivized so much that your portfolio is healed, what else could go wrong?  

There are quite a few interesting projects building great things and combining community engagement with fun and incredible lore. One of those projects is Tanssi.

Tanssi is a network infrastructure protocol that helps developers launch permissionless, decentralized layer-two (L2) networks with robust shared security in minutes.

It reduces the complexity of bootstrapping a network and significantly reduces the time, cost, and dependencies required to launch an L2.

If you’re not familiar with Tanssi, we recommend reading one of our previous articles.

In the next few paragraphs, we will explore how Tanssi combines fun and community engagement and how all of this snowballs into their upcoming TGE. We will detail how you can join in and participate.

Let’s Forkin Launch: Tanssi’s Fun Seasons

Ahead of the Tanssi network launch, the team mapped out an exciting campaign. The goal of this was to bring the community together in an enjoyable way.

To this effect, Tanssi deployed a three-phase campaign that gamified the Tanssi incentivized testnet into three islands, developing an entertaining environment.

The First Island (LFDegen District)

The LFDegen District comprises tasks that help familiarize users of the community with Tanssi.

The tasks on this island allowe users to join various Tanssi touchpoints, become familiar with Tanssi’s value-add, while preparing them for further exploration into other islands.

In tandem with the lore, the LFDegen district is the only island where The Beat never rests. Community members are encouraged to participate and be creative.

Engaging with the island involves a sleek mini-app on Telegram, with daily quests. This interactive experience revolves around a dynamic storyline featuring Forky, where players shape the narrative by casting their votes each day.

Over 150,000+ users participated in quests hosted by 45 teams in the Tanssi ecosystem, initiating 2.7 million transactions, and launching 2,500 appchains on the testnet. This also fostered a 10x growth of the community.

One important thing to note here is that while making community engagement fun, creating a lore, and building emotional connection to the project, the team is circumspect about the stratification of participation.

What this means is that participation is tiered into three groups: Tanssians who can be classified as general users, builders (devs deploying appchains), and block producers.

At the end of the Season 1, incentives were shared as follows:

• 40% to Tanssians
• 40% to builders
• 20% to block producers

The top 4,000 Tanssians received from a pool of 4 million future Tanssi tokens. On the builder's end, a total of 4 million future Tanssi tokens were split evenly between five tiers: Forkin Star, Dancer, Rising Rhythm, Groove Maker, and Aficionado.

Now, the lore gets even more interesting. In Season 1, a rogue Tanssian was exiled. This event set the stage for another exciting, inventive campaign—LFD Season 2.

The Second Island (Forktified)

If you missed participating in the first incentivized Tanssi testnet activity, you can still participate in Season 2. As of the time of writing, this is still ongoing.

The lore is simple and interesting: the exiled rogue Tanssian (Mr. Whale) is back, and he’s trying to steal “The Beat.”

Wondering what The Beat is? Picture how vital vibranium is to Wakanda… exactly! The Beat powers Tanssiland with three core elements: creativity, strength, and joy.  

In this season, Coco enters the scene, joining Forky to guard the beat. The goal for the community is to join them in protecting The Beat from the rogue Tanssian.  

This island is where community members get to try out Tanssi’s testnet, getting their hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of on-chain moves.

In the Forktified island, tasks are carved around staking, chain registration, and trying out the sequencer. Users get to interact with projects building using the Tanssi stack, exploring the on-chain experience of Tanssi ahead of mainnet launch.

The reward at the end of this exciting Season 2 will be 10 million future Tanssi tokens.

70% (i.e., 7 million tokens) of this will be allocated to Tanssians (general participants) for joining the campaign and participating in the challenges, and 30% (i.e., 3 million tokens) will be allocated to high-performing network operators based on their performance.

The campaign officially kicked off on January 23, 2025, and is already a couple of months old. That being said, you’re still early.

The Third Island (Builder’s Bay)

The Builder’s Bay is the third and final Tanssi island. Participants will get to interact with 30 projects featuring partners, integrations, and apps in the Tanssi ecosystem.

Projects include: Symbiotic, Mellow, Trexx GG, eNations, Lumia, Flow Podcast, Zap labs, Aya wallet, Gotas, Tools for the commons, Level, Renzo, Subwallet, Particle network, Dragon Slither, BlockBR, TripFlip, Hyve, Cycle network, Kalypso prover, Everclear, Deviants, Peer3, Diode, Octane, Dare, BITGET wallet, and Bybit wallet.

Builder’s Bay will also feature a mini-game called “Groove Builders” that users or participants can play, interacting with the aforementioned 30 projects and climbing up the leaderboard as they do.

The game includes a level system, different game modes, and power-ups.

The experience will traverse ecosystem trivia quizzes, community spotlights, and interactive social quests.

In totality, the adventure will include dancing, strategizing, and building across the three islands. It will also include challenges across the board to protect The Beat.

Getting involved in the campaign will enable you to earn from the incentive pool. You can join here, beginning at the first island and gradually adventuring through to the third island while climbing up the leaderboard.

Concluding thoughts

Rumor has it that Tanssi is edging closer to mainnet. The islands are an ingenious way to keep things interesting for their community, and the participation levels are proof that folks love a good lore (pun intended).

Creating a storytelling experience through the project's testnet phase is pretty genius, as it also allows the Tanssi community to interact with partner projects and familiarize themselves with what Tanssi is building.

Tanssi will power numerous app chains, AVSs, and L2s. These infrastructural pieces will not only benefit from an easy plug-and-play stack and shared security but will also be able to tap into a community with significant experience and knowledge of how things work through Tanssi’s unique testnet engagement activities.