In crypto, one often overlooked competitive advantage is how strong your support and external relations game is. Many projects underestimate this entirely.

Here's the thing: allocating real resources into building solid, outward-facing teams—people who actually know how to connect and collaborate with other players in the ecosystem—is one of the highest-ROI moves a project can make. I've seen it firsthand.

Yet teams repeatedly make the opposite choice. They'll pour everything into dev resources, marketing spend, or governance mechanisms, but skimp on the people who actually build bridges and maintain relationships. It's a mistake. The teams that win tend to be the ones who understand that ecosystem strength compounds over time.