The Experience
Understanding the nature of the relationship between ReFi communities and Web3 tools.
By Greenpill Writers Guild | February 2nd, 2026
For crypto natives, web3 tools are easy to use. So, what does it feel like when non-crypto people use these tools to boost ecological and social impact? We got stewards from ten ReFi communities to answer the question through their experiences. We hope these stories inform organisations currently building ReFi toolkits on features to avoid.
Key Experiences
- The most significant onboarding barrier is the mandatory use of a crypto wallet by various web3 tools.
- Popular web3 governance platforms like Gardens are often bypassed due to user discomfort.
- Communities rely on Telegram, Whatsapp, and Discord for smooth governance processes.
- Despite the decentralisation narrative, many communities rely on a core group to make final decisions based on community feedback.
- Stewards copy-paste data across multiple donation platforms to satisfy donation requirements.
Onboarding
What’s the community onboarding experience like?
Amio, the lead at Greenpill Nigeria informed us that onboarding doesn’t happen instantly. “We usually do multiple one-on-one sessions to achieve successful onboarding. So far, we have been using Atlantis P2P Impact Miner because you don't even need to connect a wallet initially, and it has made the onboarding process easier.” Mortech, Greenpill Kenya’s admin, remarked. “We conduct workshops to educate the locals on how to use web3 wallets. To breach the language barrier and carry everyone along, a team member would translate alongside the main speaker to Sheng; Kenya’s street language.
Green Sofa’s steward Swift came with a different perspective. “We onboard people into our community without forcing on-chain tools on them. One time, we were considering using a PGF platform to fund local builders in our community. When we discussed it, we realised it actually made things very difficult for them. If a builder can’t manage a standard crypto wallet securely and smoothly, how can we introduce a complex PGF platform to them?,” Swift quizzed rhetorically. “For this platform, they would need to: connect their wallet; fill out forms in a specific format; pay gas fees; ensure they are on the right chain; and use a centralized exchange – just to get started. It is absurd!”
Swift further justified Green Sofa’s approach. “Despite the fact that coordinating the builders on how to use the PGF platform would have taken 80% of our time, it wouldn’t have served our primary objective which was to discuss the problem the builders are solving, the solution they’re providing, and what they can do with the funding they’ll get”.
What works for Greenpill Brasil is integrating onboarding into all community programs and Luisa, their advisor, gave an instance. “The Regen Rio round was a 3-month long program we did to educate the 21 local communities that participated on three key web3 tools: Gitcoin for Quadratic Funding rounds, Karma for impact reporting, and Sarafu Network for commitment pooling. To successfully onboard the round participants, we split the round funding into three tranches – one for each tool. When we taught them to use Karma GAP, the milestone to claim their funding for that tranche was to report their updates on Karma.”
“Onboarding this way motivated the grantees to learn by doing,” Luisa noted excitedly. “The groups that successfully learnt how to use the last tool, Sarafu, had the option to off-ramp their final funds. Instead, they collectively voted to keep it in the pool for the next Gitcoin round; they chose to stay on-chain and keep the resources in the community pool. This was a very powerful indicator that our approach worked,” she concluded with a sigh of victory.
Has the experience been fun?
For Mortech, it hasn’t. He complained bitterly that the wallet requirement feature of every web3 tool made onboarding extremely difficult. “Whether it’s showing people how to connect a wallet to mint a POAP, how to download that POAP, or how to build an on-chain identity, it all comes back to the wallet.” He sighed that people can’t even have fun playing with these tools without first learning how to use a wallet. “Because of this wallet problem, our primary focus during onboarding is always twofold. We first show them how to download a wallet app and set it up. More importantly, we teach them how to use the wallet on a recurring basis.”
“For us, the biggest hurdle is fear,” Lumina – Greenpill Phangan’s lead, spoke to us. “When people see a wallet address field in registration forms for events, they get scared. They don't know us yet and don't want to share that data on a platform they’ve never used. We have to walk them through it one-on-one.”
“We recently wanted to use POAPs for a swap and sell circular economy event, but we struggled with it because in Côte d'Ivoire, many people see crypto as something bad,” Abraham, steward at Greenpill Côte d'Ivoire, shared their struggles. “When you tell people to download a specific app or a wallet to get a digital badge, they find it boring or too technical. We even had an activation booth at the event; ready to help people, but they weren’t interested,” Sidick, co-steward, chimed in.
Coordination and Governance
How does governance happen in the community?
Heenal from Greenpill Ontario said they used Snapshot for anything involving treasury resources or major strategic changes, and CharmVerse proposals for mid-risk decision-making.
“Our coordination happens in a dedicated Discord channel where we discuss proposals,” Swift explained to us. “We listen to the community feedback and if there is an objection to the proposal, we continue the discussion until we find a resolution.”
“Most decisions start with a poll in our telegram group,” Lumina reported. “If the poll is tied or people are confused, we jump on Google Meet to discuss the pros and cons until we reach a consensus.”
Is governance decentralised?
Any Green Sofa member can comment on proposals, but the final decision rests with the three core stewards. “We have a private channel within the Dev Guild Discord for just leads where we run polls on decisions for the community,” Matt informed us. Will, lead at KingFisher Media, said they rely on ten core members to make decisions that align with the group’s community feedback.
Is it efficient?
“We’ve been using CharmVerse. And to be blunt, it’s not that great anymore,” Heenal complained bitterly. “It was a good step up from what we had before, but development seems to have stalled. It’s clunky, slow, and occasionally loses information.”
“In Nigeria, we use Google Docs and Sheets more than CharmVerse because there is a significant knowledge gap for our members,” Amio said.
“We have a Gardens set up where we've staked some tokens, but to be honest, we don't use it much for governance. Most members aren't comfortable with the whole wallet connection process yet,” Sidick said.
“Because of our members’ discomfort around Gardens, we discuss everything in the chapter’s WhatsApp group and hold decision-voting there. This was a temporary governance band-aid, but it is becoming more permanent. Our members don't want to go through the stress of connecting a wallet to Gardens just to vote when they can just say yes or no on a platform they use every day,” Abraham concluded.
Capital Formation and Allocation
What does funding distribution look like?
“All our programs have dedicated treasury wallets for funding,” Will T briefed us. “We distribute funding in our Learn for Impact program wallet to learners when they complete their courses while assets in our Pathways for LatAm and Pathways for Global Adoption wallets sponsor gas fees for graduates when they are ready to start building in Web3. Managing our programs’ monies separately makes it impossible to spend assets for one program on another program.”
“Because local builders often struggle with crypto, we off-ramp to Taiwanese Dollars (TWD) and distribute to contributors or local organizations,” Swift explained. “One time, we allocated funding to a project, but the builder gave us a centralized exchange address on the wrong chain,” he laughed. “The funds got stuck, they had to raise support tickets, and they lost money on fees. While this local currency approach is beneficial for our members, Green Sofa as a legal, operating entity has to deal with the 5% VAT that comes with donations and sponsorships.”
How are contributors rewarded?
Heenal informed us that Greenpill Ontario uses a hybrid billing model. “A team member might work 30 hours which is worth $3,000 at a $100/hr market rate, but only bill the DAO treasury for $1,200. The remaining 18 hours are recorded as in-kind contributions.”
Greenpill Cote D’Ivoire rewards are usually social in nature; barbecue for cleanup actions, crypto for technical projects. The Greenpill Dev Guild uses a task difficulty tier system to determine rewards for contributors.
Thoughts on fundraising?
Matt and Amio, Greenpill Dev Guild and Greenpill Nigeria leads respectively, asserted that communities should integrate DeFi yield mechanisms into their capital allocation strategies to grow their treasury.
“To survive into the future, we need to cook DeFi yields into our purse,” Matt said. “Instead of just chasing grants, we should plug our treasuries into yield-generating protocols, and perpetually stream that yield to contributors via Superfluid or Gardens.”
“I’m not a ReGen Maxi in the moral sense of it. I believe in being flexible – DeGen’ing in a ReGen way,” Amio said about the moral regen nature of avoiding all things DeFi. “We can use DeFi strategies to grow our capital so we have more to spend on the environment. If we can donate our yield rather than our principal, our capital becomes future-proof.”
Impact Measurement and Evaluation
How is impact reported?
“We use our Karma profile as our landing page because it lists all our programs that have received funding,” Will T shared. “We are viewing Karma as our source of truth for everything we are building going forward because it is where the active tracking happens.”
“We use Giveth for providing project updates, Karma for financial accountability, and Hypercert to visualise the impact we have created. This helps international donors see our progress,” Swift told us. “For local builders, we sit down for a chitchat to understand their updates, struggles, and what they need next – since they don’t know how to use these tools.”
“For cleanups, we use VeChain apps like EcoBag,” Lumina explained. “It allows locals to earn small rewards for sustainable actions. It’s not life-changing money, but it’s a great bonus for doing something they were going to do anyway. We also report on Karma and I copy-paste whatever I did there into Giveth updates as well,” Lumina shared. “Whenever something significant happens, I try to go back to Karma GAP straight away so I don't forget to log it.”
“Currently, we are using Karma to provide regular quarterly updates and EcoSats – which is built on Hypercerts – to help manage the chapter itself,” Mortech shared.
Is it effective?
“My main issue is that impact reporting takes a lot of time and we have a small, unpaid team,” Mortech complained. “In the last quarter, we hosted 3-4 major events, including workshops and a side event at ETH Safari in Kilifi, where we organized a beach cleanup. Gathering all that data and all those activities onto a single platform is a massive manual task.”
“With impact reporting, I don’t know which platform will survive in the long run, so I spend too much time fulfilling their specific formatting requirements,” Swift explained. “If I can make the process fast and easy – maybe 60-70% perfect for each platform, it will serve my objective and allow me to save time for more valuable tasks. I love Karma but it tries to provide too many functionalities and does none well enough.”
“Karma is great for tracking milestones, but it’s difficult to use on a mobile phone or tablet,” Lumina lamented. “It doesn't work right unless you're on a desktop. This alone says a lot about how usable these tools are, in regions where people primarily use mobile devices to access the internet.”
Tooling Ideologies
What works: All-in-one tools or specific tools?
“Many web3 tools are buggy and ineffective, because they try to do too many things at once,” Heenal ranted. “Even CharmVerse suffers this problem; because they try to be everything for everyone, they can't do any single thing perfectly. Look at Safe; it doesn’t try to do too much. It is very focused on one thing: secure treasury management. Developers should focus on building tools that can do one thing exceptionally well and can easily plug into other tools – rather than trying to build the everything solution,” He concluded.
“It really depends,” Luisa said to us. “Our core team can experiment with multiple tools to find what actually works for the long term – but imagine forcing people to learn five or six different tools just for onboarding; it will be overwhelming. Currently, people only have to learn how to use a wallet to use other tools, and you can see how stressful it is. All that matters is that tools for outreach and onboarding should be simpler and friendlier to use than it is.”
Web2 vs Web3: Does it matter?
For Will T, communities should stick strictly to web3 tools. “If you buy into the Web3 narrative, why aren't you using a Web3 tool? Use Huddle01 instead of Zoom and replace Luma with Unlock Protocol. As a web3 maxi, this is what you should be preferencing.”
For Lumina, she moved from a web3-only mindset to using what works – whether web2 or web3. “Initially, I liked the idea of having an on-chain interface for everything, but I quickly realized that I couldn't deal with the noise. Although we use few web3 tools, members’ needs for constant support is a bit overwhelming. Imagine the sheer volume of complaints I would be receiving from members if every tool we used was on-chain,” she laughed.
“When we experimented with Fileverse, we just couldn't justify the pain of managing it. So, we cancelled our subscriptions. We didn't find the Web3 version of everything to be particularly respectful of our time or our budget.”
Conclusion
Using Web3 tools to advance ecological and social impact is the collective vision for ReFi communities. However, their shared experiences are showing that members struggle because they lack the domain knowledge required to use these apps. “Although we liked what we liked, we had to lean back into what works for everyone,” Lumina explained, summarising why ReFi communities were replacing web3 tools with their effective non-web3 alternatives. We hope that ReFi toolkit makers build with these struggles in mind.
This article represents the opinion of the author(s) and does not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of CARBON Copy.