The CKBA Reddit AMA Recap
Cheers everyone,
Thanks to everyone who joined our Reddit AMA with Stefan, who leads CKBA’s Content & Communications team. As part of our series introducing CKBA’s team leaders, the discussion covered growing CKB’s visibility, promoting Fiber, the Association’s role in the ecosystem, and the team’s priorities.
Stefan has been part of the Nervos ecosystem for over three years. He started as a writer at the Nervos Foundation and stepped into the team lead role when CKBA was formed. His team focuses on communicating on behalf of CKBA and helping more people discover, understand, and get involved with CKB.
Below are the community’s questions and Stefan’s original answers.
Question 1
What is CKBA’s strategy for promoting Fiber beyond the CKB community and supporting ecosystem adoption and partnerships? Are you satisfied with communications’ current reach, how are established social audiences being used, and are there plans to update Nervos.org?
Stefan:
On promoting Fiber beyond the existing CKB community: Yes, that is absolutely the goal. I don’t think Fiber succeeds if we only market it to people who already follow CKB.
From the Comms side, we’ve been deliberately shifting the messaging away from “here is another CKB product” and toward the problems Fiber can solve: programmable payment channels, stablecoin and multi-asset payments, AI-agent payments, machine-to-machine payments, x402, interoperability with Lightning, etc.
The audiences we ultimately need to reach include developers building payment applications, AI projects, payment providers, infrastructure companies, merchants, and other networks, not just crypto investors/users.
That said, there’s an important distinction between marketing Fiber and getting Fiber integrated into companies and products. Content and communications can generate awareness, educate or explain why the technology matters, generate inbound interest, attract new devs and so on. We cannot replace dedicated business development, ecosystem development, or the builders themselves.
So this is really a question for CKBA’s DevRel/Ecosystem Support teams. I don’t know much about their strategies re; Fiber so I can’t speak on that but, again, from the Comms perspective I definitely want us to become much better at identifying good projects early and helping amplify them to the right audiences.
Am I satisfied with our current reach and impact? No.
There is a lot of room for improvement.
Nervos has accumulated significant audiences across several channels over the years, but those channels also carry a certain historical and institutional context. An audit of all of our communications channels was one of the first things we did when the Association was established and I took over the Comms team, and since then we’ve tried to be much more deliberate about what each channel represents and how it is used.
I understand that from the outside, using our largest account primarily to amplify ecosystem updates can look like a wasted opportunity, but there is a broader principle behind that decision.
CKBA is a membership-based association whose long-term role we see much more as a steward of an open, decentralized public protocol than as “the entity behind” CKB. The Linux Foundation is probably closer to the kind of institutional model we have in mind. We don’t want CKBA to function like today’s typical crypto foundation that becomes the central operator, marketer, and decision-maker for the network.
So this distinction really affects how we communicate.
If CKBA simply treated the Nervos Network X account as its own corporate megaphone, using it to push our campaigns, opinions, priorities, and messaging every day, we would gradually reinforce the impression that CKBA is Nervos and that the network is effectively controlled by, or dependent on, one organization. That isn’t the relationship we want CKBA to have with CKB in the long run (and no entity has ever had it, to add), so we’re trying to reflect that institutional separation in how we communicate.
Of course, as with anything in life, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. This is a very long-term view, and it comes at a price. In the short term, we could almost certainly squeeze more impressions out of some of these accounts by treating every large audience as another CKBA distribution channel, but I think getting the institutional identity right is more important.
On the website: completely agree.
Nervos.org is effectively the front door to CKB, and it hasn’t kept pace with how much the ecosystem and the story around CKB have evolved.
We’ve already started work on improving this. I won’t reveal much at the moment besides that you can expect to see more significant overhauls in the near future.
Question 2
What is holding CKB back from broader visibility, and what concrete steps is the Content & Communications team taking to address it?
Stefan:
I think one of CKB’s biggest problems historically has been that the technology is often much easier to appreciate once you already understand it than it is to explain to someone encountering it for the first time.
CKB has a lot of technically interesting ideas, including the Cell model, RISC-V, flexibility/crypto-agility, Fiber, its approach to state and verification, etc., but none of these are necessarily as “sexy” or easy to sell as “wE cAn do sO mUch tPs” or whatever.
We have a small diehard community of people that “get it,” and growing that community has been the hard part. We could get “broader visibility” for a brief stint by throwing money at the problem, but that doesn’t solve anything in the long term unless we sharpen our positioning and find better ways to make our core value propositions more palatable to the broader non-technical audience.
In any case, a few concrete things we’re working on re; broadening visibility:
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Sharper positioning: Rather than trying to explain everything about CKB at once, we’re running more concentrated campaigns around quantum readiness or crypto agility and Fiber. I believe the crypto agility angle is one of the strongest narratives we can dominate, as the quantum threat to blockchains is easily understandable by everyone.
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A much stronger Knowledge Base and SEO strategy: We’re rebuilding the KB around topic clusters, internal linking, search demand, and clearer pathways from general educational content into CKB-specific material. The goal is to make Nervos.org a resource people discover even when they weren’t initially searching for CKB.
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Better distribution outside our existing audience: We’re putting more thought into Reddit, LinkedIn, search, AI-search visibility, developer communities, and other channels where the people we want to reach already spend their time.
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Closer coordination with builders. Comms can only tell compelling stories if we understand what is being built, why it matters, and where the ecosystem is heading. Improving the information flow between CKB builders and Comms is an ongoing priority.
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More deliberate content for different audiences. A developer, a researcher, a user, and a retail investor should not all be getting the same explanation of CKB. We’re trying to become much better at matching the message and format to the audience.
Question 3
What challenges has CKBA faced in getting established, and how has the team handled them? Could its goals change, how prepared is it to adapt, and is it responsible for overseeing the Foundation’s dissolution?
Stefan:
I’ll answer this exclusively from a Comms perspective.
The main challenge for us has been communicating CKBA’s mission, vision, and institutional role clearly to the community.
As I mentioned in one of my other answers, we think of CKBA as something much closer to the Linux Foundation than to a typical crypto foundation.
CKBA should not define its success by how much of the CKB ecosystem it directly manages. It should define success by how effectively the ecosystem can maintain its protocols, govern shared resources, support contributors, create sustainable livelihoods, and resolve disputes without becoming dependent on CKBA itself.
Over time, CKBA should become progressively more reliable as an institution while becoming progressively less indispensable as an operator.
Communicating that model is not always easy, especially in an industry where people are used to foundations behaving almost like companies: setting the roadmap, driving every major initiative, coordinating most ecosystem activity, and acting as the obvious central point of responsibility.
CKBA was never intended to function that way.
So one of our ongoing challenges in Comms is helping people understand that a degree of institutional restraint is deliberate, not a lack of ambition or involvement. The long-term objective is not to make CKBA the center of the CKB ecosystem, but to help create an ecosystem that is strong enough not to need one.
Question 4
What do you view as the current critical narratives for blockchain technology? Do you expect those to change or remain much the same as the space evolves?
Stefan:
I’ve been in crypto for almost 9 years now and seen my fair share of different narratives come and go and I don’t expect this to change anytime soon. 99% of the narratives this industry has experimented with were complete BS, motivated by shortermism and max extraction. The remaining 1% is why I’m here after all this time.
Personally, I’m sensing a revived appreciation for the original cypherpunk ideals. ZCash is making privacy cool again - which I love. Vitalik is pushing Ethereum, in my humble opinion, in the right direction (focusing on a verification-centric architecture, bringing it conceptually closer to CKB ;)), ZK tech is gaining traction all over and has the potential (God I hope so) to make KYC demode.
Question 5
What components/capabilities of CKB do you believe are undervalued that deserve more recognition?
Stefan:
Our flexibility is INSANELY undervalued.
The fact that CKB can adopt new cryptographic schemes at the application layer, including post-quantum signature schemes, without needing to wait for a protocol-wide hard fork or soft fork is a much bigger deal than I think most people realize.
Honestly, I sometimes think even my colleagues at CKBA underestimate how important this could become. They get it, but I don’t think they grasp the magnitude. I don’t know, maybe I’m the crazy one.. 
If quantum computing takes another major step forward and the industry suddenly has to accelerate migration away from today’s signature schemes, most chains will be dealing with protocol changes, governance debates, upgrade coordination, wallet migrations, and all the operational risk that comes with that.
CKB is structurally much better prepared for that kind of transition. We barely have to do anything, we’re all set up.
I think that capability is massively underappreciated today.
Question 6
What metrics tell you whether content is reaching its target audience, and how do they influence its length, style, and technical depth?
Stefan:
Yes, absolutely. The exact metrics depend on the channel and the goal.
For social content, we look at things like reach, engagement, click-throughs, follower growth, etc.
For Knowledge Base content, we care much more about organic search traffic, rankings for the queries we’re targeting, click-through rates from search, time on page, and whether readers continue deeper into the site. A big part of the strategy there is to attract people through useful, topic-specific content and then convert some of that attention into interest in CKB-specific content.
And all of those signals influence how we write.
We have target audiences in mind for every piece of content, and we don’t necessarily optimize everything purely for engagement. Sometimes a highly technical article read by 500 of the right people is significantly more valuable to us than a post seen by 10,000 general crypto users.
We’re also trying to calibrate both the writing and our expectations around who we’re targeting. Technical long-form pieces will naturally reach fewer people, but those readers are more likely to include developers, researchers, industry experts, and other highly relevant people. That kind of content helps us establish CKB as a credible and authoritative project in areas where we have something meaningful to contribute.
Shorter, punchier social content serves a different purpose. It targets a broader audience, gets people interested in an idea, and ideally pulls some of them further down the funnel to learn more about CKB and eventually become users, developers, contributors, or simply people who follow and advocate for the project. 
Question 7
What roles do LLM’s play in the CKBA’s reach and how is it being managed?
Stefan:
They play a two-fold role. First, we obviously use them regularly to remain competitive with a small team. I think that’s just common sense and a must these days.
The second thing is - LLMs changed the user/search behavior significantly. People “google” things less and less, and rely on their AI tools like ChatGPT/Claude to find info.
Re; how that’s being managed - we’re deploying certain strategies to increase the citation rate for CKB on LLMs for the specific queries we’re aiming to dominate.
Question 8
Who has the authority to stop, reduce, or change course if narratives do not work for CKB in general for the CKBA comms team?
Stefan:
I do. As the leader of the Comms team I obviously work closely with other CKBA team leaders and board members and consult with them on narrative direction regularly, but in principle the Comms team is responsible for handling these types of issues.
Question 9
Will CKBA comms be democratised at a later date when more community joins the board?
Stefan:
I’d distinguish governance from day-to-day execution. As CKBA’s membership and board become more representative of the broader ecosystem, that should naturally bring broader input and accountability around the Association’s priorities, including communications. But I don’t think effective comms can be run by committee. The actual strategy and execution still need to be owned by a professional team with clear responsibilities.
Question 10
What is the biggest challenge for reach and what socials do you believe are key to expand the reach in?
Stefan:
Twitter/X is remains king when it comes to crypto. There’s hardly any other platform that compares, except maybe YouTube. I’ve noticed that crypto youtubers are often the point of entry for many newcomers to our industry.
Regarding challenges for reach - there’s more than I can count tbh. For starters, the main problem used to be breaking out of the crypto bubble but with all the algo changes on X, it’s becoming hard to even reach broader crypto audiences at this point.
Tbh, this is too broad of a question to answer succinctly here. All I can say is that we’re adapting to the changing environment and doing our best to get the most eyeballs on CKB as we can in any way we can. It’s a day to day struggle for us at the comms team.
Question 11
How many are on the team?
Stefan:
As of now, the comms team consists of six people.
Question 12
Are there more narratives the CKBA comms team will add other than Quantum Resistance and payment channels? Community stuff? Hackathons?
Stefan:
We’ll definitely dedicate more time on showcasing Neon’s good work with the CKBuilders initiative. There are over 100 builders currently experimenting with CKB, and I think the community needs to know that. And we got that during one of the most brutal bear markets in crypto history. I can’t even imagine what happens when the tides turn.
Question 13
Which blockchain technologies do you expect to become important in the coming years, and how can CKB contribute and remain relevant?
Stefan:
This is obviously hard to predict, but if I had to make one big technological bet, it would be that blockchains become increasingly verification-centric rather than computation-centric.
Vitalik actually published a great piece on this yesterday about what he calls the “cryptographic world computer.” His basic argument is that advances in things like ZK proofs, recursive STARKs, formal verification and other cryptographic techniques are changing what a blockchain actually needs to do. Instead of every node reproducing every computation, more work can happen elsewhere and the blockchain can focus on efficiently verifying that the result is correct.
Tannr, who previously worked on CKB, replied with a line that basically sums up my view: “don’t replicate globally what need not be replicated globally.”
What makes this particularly interesting from a CKB perspective is that this is very close to the philosophy CKB was designed around from the beginning.
CKB explicitly separates state generation from state verification. Computation can happen off-chain, while CKB acts as the verification and settlement layer for the resulting state. The Cell Model makes that state explicit and composable, while RISC-V gives the verification layer an unusually general execution environment.
I think modern cryptography makes that architecture much more powerful than it may have appeared when CKB was originally designed. ZK proofs, new signature schemes, post-quantum cryptography and whatever comes after them can all become increasingly important parts of how these systems work. CKB’s decision not to hard-code cryptographic primitives into the protocol means it has a lot of room to evolve along with that technology.
So I think CKB has a genuinely interesting architectural position if the industry continues moving in this direction.
Question 14
Do the CKBA comms team attend any crypto conferences or meet-ups in person or as a team?
Stefan:
We don’t have any conference plans at the moment, but I definitely hope that changes in the near future.
The market seems to be gradually picking up again and there’s a bit more energy returning to the industry, so I think it would be valuable for us to attend some of the larger events, especially the ones that attract builders, researchers, infrastructure teams, and new entrants, rather than just the same BD circles rotating from conference to conference.
Question 15
Have CKBA been taking on new staff and adding to the team? I recently saw a few posts to be filled on job searches
Stefan:
Yes. We’re filling multiple roles across the Association. A new Senior Writer with over 20 years of experience just joined the Comms team today.
Thanks again to everyone who submitted questions and took part in the AMA.
