How Top 100 CoinMarketCap Projects
Scale Their Teams.

Since 2018, Astro Training has worked inside some of the most successful Web3 projects in existence — protocols and platforms that have reached the top 100 of CoinMarketCap rankings and sustained their position through multiple market cycles. The question we are asked most often is: what do these organisations do differently? After seven years of close observation, the patterns are clear.

They Invest in People Before They Need To

The most consistent differentiator between top-100 projects and those that plateau or collapse is when they start investing in their people. The projects that fracture under growth are the ones that treat people development as something to do later — once the technology is stable, once the token is launched, once the market recovers. The projects that scale successfully start investing in leadership, sales capability and team performance early, when they have the capacity to learn without urgency.

They Build Sales Capability, Not Just Community

Every Web3 project builds community. The top-100 projects also build commercial capability. They recognise that protocol adoption, enterprise partnerships and ecosystem deals require a different skill set from community growth. They invest in training their BD and sales teams in structured methodologies — Challenger Selling, SPIN, Value-Based Selling — rather than relying on enthusiasm and relationships alone.

They Create Genuine Leadership at Every Level

The most resilient Web3 organisations have leadership distributed throughout the organisation — not just concentrated in the founding team. They invest in developing the management capabilities of team leads, they build feedback cultures that allow performance to be addressed at every level and they create governance structures that distribute decision-making effectively. This means the organisation does not depend on any single individual for its continued functioning.

They Retain Talent Through Development

The top-100 projects we have worked with consistently invest more in retaining their best people than their competitors. They do this not primarily through token compensation — though that matters — but through genuine investment in the development, growth and wellbeing of their team. People stay in organisations where they are growing, where they receive meaningful feedback and where they feel genuinely supported by their leadership.

They Treat Coaching as Standard Practice

Executive coaching is standard practice in the most successful traditional companies in the world. In Web3, it is still rare. But the top-100 projects that we have worked with most closely have made coaching a normal part of their leadership operating model — not a remedial intervention but a proactive investment in the performance of their most critical people. The founders and senior executives who engage in regular coaching consistently make better decisions, navigate crises more effectively and build more sustainable organisations.