The Data
Unearthing the data behind Web3 tool usage in ReFi communities.
By Greenpill Writers Guild | January 26th, 2026
Five years after the establishment of the first ReFi community and countless experiments with tools that could best support these groups, we present the first-ever research series on the challenges of web3 tooling for ReFi communities.
ReFi communities are groups of people using web3 tools to boost ecological and social impact, physically or digitally. Over the years, stewards of these associations have consistently voiced their challenges in using blockchain tools for administrative functions like onboarding and governance. These complaints have gotten regen entities like Greenpill Network, ReFi DAO, and Crypto Altruists to begin building specialised toolkits that meet the needs of these communities.
To identify the major tooling problems of these groups, we got 28 of them to fill our Web3 Tooling for ReFi Communities survey and interviewed nine. We hope the presented insights guide ReFi toolkit builders on the problems to optimise for.
ReFi Toolkits
A ReFi toolkit is a collection of web3 tools that aids a ReFi group in executing administrative responsibilities, core to generating and compounding its impact. These duties include: reporting projects’ outcomes and measuring their long-term impact; coordinating existing members to participate in the community’s decision making process; raising and allocating funds for high impact returns; and onboarding new members.
Because there’s no unified toolkit, ReFi communities experiment with broader web3 tools to form their toolstacks. More than 50% of respondents indicated that the following tools are in their toolboxes.
| Function | Tools |
|---|---|
| Onboarding | Rabby Wallet, Metamask, Browser wallets, Guild.xyz, Impact Miner, Proof Of Attendance Protocol (POAP), Unlock Protocol |
| Coordination and Governance | Charmverse, ENS, Gardens, Guild.xyz, POAP, Unlock Protocol, Snapshot |
| Fundraising and Capital Allocation | Giveth, Gitcoin Grants Stack, Safe, Web3 wallets |
| Impact Measurement and Evaluation | Impact Miner, Karma, POAP, Hypercerts |
NB: Gitcoin Grants Stack shutdown in late 2025.
We asked our 28 subjects to rate their toolstack’s effectiveness in supporting community needs on a scale of 1-10. Six people rated it below 5; 17 rated above 5, and the rest gave a 5-rating. When we probed further, 78% reported that their toolkits were difficult for team members to learn and use, 50% complained about a lack of integration, 71% lamented over the time usage consumption due to complexity, and 42.8% indicated that their members preferred the web2 alternatives.
Onboarding Tools
People expect simple, minimal onboarding processes when joining a new group. However, it is the opposite for ReFi communities. New members must first learn how to use a web3 wallet because major community activities like fundraising, governance, and contribution tracking require it. And learning how to use a wallet is daunting. Unfortunately, even non-wallet onboarding tools require a wallet connection to work.
7.1% of participants reported that onboarding tools were completely ineffective, 39.3% indicated moderate effectiveness, 32.1% were on the fence, and 21.4% found them very effective. We deduced from respondents' feedback that non-wallet onboarding tools were yet to abstract features like wallet connection and gas requirements, while wallets still required users to self-manage their seed phrases. These complexities cause tremendous friction for people unfamiliar with crypto – the major population seeking to join ReFi communities.
Coordination and Governance Tools
Coordination and governance for ReFi communities is all about entrenching members in the group’s decision-making process and organising together to execute initiatives. Usually, these activities are simple due to the close-knit, trustful nature of these associations and can be accomplished by word-of-mouth. However, when these communities try to improve their governance methods with web3 tools, it complicates the entire process for community members.
17.9% of participants indicated that coordination and governance tools support their communities’ needs very well, 67.9% claimed the tools were moderately useful, and 10.7% were neutral. They complained that the tools: are overly technical, demand a wallet address to work, require English proficiency, are too rigid for community governance models, and cannot work for communities with non-crypto populations.
Capital Formation and Allocation Tools
Respondents stressed that lots of tools in this category focus on funding distribution, while a handful innovated around fundraising. They emphasised that yield generating and grant discovery tools are more important than funding management apps.
Impact Measurement and Evaluation Tools
ReFi communities implement programs across different impact areas like education, environmental regeneration, and social coordination. Ideally, these tools should aid ReFi communities report project outcomes and measure their impact, regardless of project sector. Yet, existing tools cannot cater to these nuances. Because of this problem, 46.4% of respondents said they heavily use traditional impact measurement methods and tools. They largely complained that the tools demand a disproportionate amount of effort and time, which forces them to only report their impact when a grant round is around the corner.
Unsurprisingly, ReFi communities rely on web2 tools for operations their web3 counterparts are inefficient in and 64.3% of respondents affirmed the notion. 94.4% use them because of team familiarity, 44.4% adopt them for their integration with other tools, and 38.9% utilise them for functionalities their web3 alternatives lack. Additionally, web2 tools satisfies reliability and trustworthiness for 44.4%, makes onboarding easy for 66.7%, and lower cost for 61.1%.
Conclusion
Web3 tools create friction for ReFi communities – an indication of tooling ineffectiveness. Having uncovered the major causes of these tooling inefficiencies, we hope this analysis guides ReFi toolkit developers on what to build against. In the next article, we share how ReFi group leads navigate the clunkiness of web3 tools with their members.
The Web3 Tooling Series is a three-part series by CARBON Copy and Greenpill Network Writers Guild.
Part 2 will be published on February 2nd, 2026.