How the Aptos ‘Community Takeover’ Revived Dev Interest in the Network

Layer-1 blockchain Aptos saw an increase in new developer interest following the viral social media campaign from user BuzzlamicJihad. So much so that Ash Pampati, head of ecosystem at Aptos, told Decrypt that the Aptos Foundation would be “super open” to bringing the user onto its team.

Aptos surged 17% in a single day in February, as BuzzlamicJihad’s unofficial “community takeover” of the network went viral on social media. Following Aptos Labs founder and CEO Mo Shaikh stepping down in December, the pseudonymous BuzzlamicJihad started to claim that his community takeover, or CTO, hadn’t been priced in.

Over the coming months, the user created catchphrases that went viral and have since become canonical crypto phrases. “Aptos looking good here,” Buzz repeatedly posted on social media—despite many believing otherwise. When people suggested that Aptos was indeed not looking good, he’d respond, “sidelined?”

“There are very few people as good at marketing as him. He clearly knows something about marketing that I don’t think Web3 has really come close to touching,” Pampati told Decrypt at Token2049 in Dubai. “People always think they’re really good at Web3 marketing. I’m like nah man, you can’t touch BuzzlamicJihad […] that guy knows growth marketing on an insane level.”

BuzzlamicJihad turned Aptos into a meme with his campaign. Internally, some Aptos team members were upset that the community wasn’t focusing on the technical work that they were doing. But, Pampati said, the memes eventually translated into real value for the network.

“It’s just about taking advantage of that attention,” he explained. “I got tons of new developer interest. There are companies that work in crypto, that are big [but] I won’t mention, that ask me about BuzzlamicJihad all the time. Yeah, it’s been amazing at creating awareness.”

During its viral peak, the CTO also prompted interest in the Aptos trenches with new users trading and shilling meme coins on Emojicoin.fun—a launchpad akin to Pump.fun where all of the tokens are emojis. So, with the increased buzz from Buzz, would Aptos consider hiring the pseudonymous social media user?

“We’re always in the BuzzlamicJihad business,” Pampati told Decrypt, “yeah, [we’re] like obviously super open.”

“While nearly everyone assumes the Aptos CTO was a joke from my shitposting, it’s quietly coming to fruition behind the scenes with more to come public soon,” BuzzlamicJihad told Decrypt. “I stand by my previous statements that my motion has not been priced in yet…”

A major learning from the experience, Pampati explained, is that the best crypto marketing is organic and comes from the bottom up. He said that part of the beauty of the campaign was that Buzz clearly “loves Aptos” and started to implement more serious technical details into his posts.

“All good marketing is bottoms up. The community drives the storyline. It doesn’t come from the foundation,” Pampati said. “The [projects] that are successful know [community is] the most important thing ever. I mean, Solana case in point, right? That’s the reason why they were able, in my opinion, to rise from the ashes when there was no trust in the industry.”

Solana took one of the biggest hits amid the FTX collapse, due to its close ties to exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried. While sentiment was at an all-time low in late 2022, the BONK meme coin was launched and airdropped to Solana developers and community members to encourage people to continue building.

And it worked.

Solana climbed back to its spot as the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

In many ways, Aptos hopes that embracing BuzzlamicJihad’s viral campaign could help prompt a similar remontada for the network that is down 76% from its all-time high achieved in 2023.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.