From Empty Chain to 40 Building Teams — Ecosystem & Business Development for a Layer-2 Network
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services-
- Web3 Business & Ecosystem Development
- BD & Strategic Partnership Development
Engagement Duration-
10 Months
Ecosystem Growth-
40+ quality projects actively building, with the majority having reached live deployment
The Challenges-
- Every chain offered developers the same thing.
- Money-first ecosystem development selects for the wrong projects
- The team could not provide heavy ongoing support.Survival, not acquisition, is the real metric — and it is slow.
Strategy We Build-
- Workstream One — Positioning & the Anchor Strategy (Months 1–3)
- Workstream Two — The Grants & Support Programme, Redesigned (Months 2–7)
- Workstream Three — Strategic Partnerships (Months 4–10).
Result We Make-
- 10 months in, Stratos was no longer a beautifully engineered ghost town. It was an ecosystem — and, more importantly, one its own team could keep growing.
- Ecosystem Growth
– Grew from a handful of stalling early grants to 40+ quality projects actively building**, with the majority having reached live deployment2. The survival rate of funded projects — the metric that mattered — came in well above the ecosystem-grant norm, a direct result of the milestone-and-support model replacing the lump-sum model
3. 2 anchor projects demonstrably changed inbound: developer interest accelerated measurably once category-defining teams had committed4. Strategic Partnerships– Secured the core infrastructure integrations (oracle, bridge, wallet, liquidity, tooling) that made entire application categories viable on the chain– Each partnership selected for compounding effect — reducing friction for every project already in the ecosystem and lowering the barrier for the next5. Process & Sustainability– Delivered a documented, repeatable ecosystem-development playbook — grant criteria, milestone structure, support model, and partnership-evaluation framework — that the internal team .6 . continued running after the engagement– The support model was deliberately engineered to operate without a large internal DevRel team, matching Stratos’s actual bandwidth7. Strategic Outcome– Stratos’s ecosystem narrative shifted from “promising new chain with no apps” to “chain with real, surviving projects and the infrastructure to support more” — a narrative the team reported was material in subsequent fundraising and partnership conversations.
Result We Make-
Ecosystem & BD Engagements at Mtrench
Every ecosystem engagement we take on begins with a question most teams skip in their rush to distribute grants: *what would make a great builder choose to stay here, not just arrive?* The answer is almost never the grant.
From there we identify the anchor projects whose presence legitimises the chain, redesign grant programmes around milestones and support rather than lump-sum subsidy, and run founder-to-founder partnership BD for compounding effect. We do not take custody of grant budgets; we design how they are deployed. And we build the process so your own team can run it after we leave — because an ecosystem that depends on an external agency to grow is not an ecosystem you actually own.
If you have built strong infrastructure but cannot get developers to build on it — or you are handing out grants and watching projects quietly leave — we would like to understand your technical advantages before proposing anything.
Anchor projects that legitimise the chain. Grants that fund survival, not farming. Partnerships that compound.