From Quests to Habits: Behavior Design in Web3 Portals

The problem with most Web3 “engagement” design is that it doesn’t outlast the dopamine hit.

If you’ve used a crypto portal recently, you’ve seen the pattern. A dashboard with a token balance, maybe a leaderboard, then a set of “quests.” Connect a wallet. Deposit $10. Tweet something. Congratulations, here are your points.

The trouble is that quests are events, not habits. They drive spikes of activity, but the spike falls off as soon as the quest ends. The portal doesn’t change how people behave in the long run.

When I was working on Plume’s portal, I learned the difference firsthand. Early experiments leaned into quests. They worked—for a week. Wallet numbers jumped, transactions spiked. But a month later, engagement was back to baseline. It’s the same problem games face: if there’s no deeper loop, the player churns.

Why Gamification Is Shallow

Gamification assumes users need extrinsic motivation to interact with your product. But in finance, extrinsic motivation is already there: people want to grow their money. If you’re adding quests on top of that, you’re compensating for something missing in the core loop.

What was missing, I realized, was narrative.

People don’t come back to portals to collect badges. They come back if they feel like part of a story. A $100 user might tell themselves: “I’m building a portfolio.” A million-dollar allocator might say: “I’m stress-testing a new asset class.” The job of design is to reinforce those narratives and give them progressive steps that make the story real.

Narrative + Progressive Disclosure

Narrative creates the why. Progressive disclosure creates the how.

A good portal doesn’t show every chart and metric upfront. That overwhelms beginners and makes experts suspicious. Instead, it tells a story in layers.

First layer: the simple headline—“Your portfolio grew 5% this month.”

Second layer: the breakdown—“Here’s where that growth came from.”

Third layer: the evidence—“Here’s the onchain proof.”

Each layer rewards curiosity. Beginners can stop at the first. Experts can keep going. Both feel respected. Both feel they’re advancing in their story.

When you design this way, repeat engagement isn’t about chasing rewards. It’s about progressing in a narrative that feels meaningful. That’s how habits form.

From Events to Loops

The real shift is moving from event-driven design to loop-driven design.

A quest is an event: it ends when you complete it. A habit is a loop: it repeats because the reward reinforces the behavior.

For example:

• Quest mindset: “Stake $100 and earn 50 points.”

• Habit mindset: “Each week you check your vault, you see your portfolio performance. Each month you can trace it back to real-world assets. Each quarter you see how your allocations compare to peers.”

The second creates a loop: check → learn → adjust → check again. Over time, that’s how users turn from dabblers into long-term participants.

What Behavior Design Means for Web3

Crypto has a churn problem. Users arrive in waves—airdrop farmers, yield chasers, hype cycles—and then leave. If we want to build ecosystems that grow steadily instead of in spikes, we have to design for habits.

That doesn’t mean abandoning gamification entirely. Quests are fine as onboarding rituals. But they should be doorways, not destinations. The real work of design is in building loops that users want to repeat because they’re aligned with their own narratives.

The irony is that this isn’t new. Traditional finance has been doing it for decades. Your bank app doesn’t gamify deposits—it shows you progress toward saving goals. Robinhood doesn’t ask you to complete a “quest” to buy a stock—it shows you a portfolio curve you want to check again tomorrow.

The opportunity for Web3 portals is to do this better, because onchain we can show not just numbers, but provenance. Not just balances, but the story behind them. If we pair that with behavior design, we can turn fleeting quests into lasting habits.

The Goal

The goal isn’t to make crypto “fun.” The goal is to make crypto sticky.

When users form habits around checking a portal, they don’t just return—they invest, they learn, they trust. That’s what makes ecosystems durable.

Quests can bring them in. Narrative and progressive disclosure keep them there.

If we get that right, we won’t need to trick people into engaging. They’ll do it naturally, because it feels like part of who they are.