A stakeholder journey is a narrative walkthrough of a protocol from one user archetype's point of view, tracing that actor from first interaction through their full participation lifecycle. It is how the mechanism is tested against the real primary user, not just the obvious one, and the same journeys carry forward into the whitepaper.
Trace only the happy path and you have not tested anything. The useful journey follows the stressed case: what the LP does when yield collapses, what the voter does when an opposed proposal passes.
How it works
A stakeholder journey is a structured narrative that walks an entire protocol interaction from the point of view of a single user archetype, starting at first awareness and ending at the natural close of that user's participation. It is not a flow diagram or a transaction sequence; it captures motivation, decision points, onchain actions, economic outcomes, and the conditions under which the user keeps going or exits. A complete MDD contains one journey per meaningful participant class.
The method is deliberate. Name a concrete archetype, not a generic user but a yield-seeking institutional LP, a retail buyer of a yield-bearing stablecoin, a fee-paying builder, a governance voter with vested tokens, and walk that actor forward through time. At each step, identify what they know, what incentive they face, what action they take, and what the protocol returns. This surfaces the actual experience rather than the intended one.
Why it matters
The primary value is stress-testing the mechanism against the real primary user rather than the most visible one. Designs frequently optimize for the founder's mental model of who will use the protocol and in what order. Journeys force the harder question: what does this look like for the largest capital allocator, the least technical user, or the actor most critical to the flywheel who has been assumed rather than designed for? Gaps show up as narrative discontinuities, points where there is no clear answer for what the actor does next.
How we approach it
We treat journeys as reusable assets. A whitepaper written from stakeholder journeys reads better than one written from an engineering description, because investors and regulators read for the actor's experience first and the mechanism detail second. Journeys built for the MDD adapt directly into the whitepaper narrative, keeping the technical design and the public communication consistent.
See Tokenomics Whitepaper Services for how this applies in practice.
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