How ZK Cloud's Sasha Builds Engaged Communities Around Deep Tech

Building a community around deep tech is one of the hardest briefs in Web3. Most people do not understand zero knowledge proofs. Most people do not need to. But they do need to trust the project, feel seen, and have a reason to stick around.

In Episode 3 of Behind the Community, aartoo's Aaron sat down with Sasha, community and content lead at ZK Cloud, to talk about how you build genuine engagement around a technically complex product, why airdrop-only strategies are a dead end, the growing case for founder marketing, and the core skills every new community manager should be developing right now.

Sasha also brought some real talk about the current job market in Web3 and crypto marketing, and her own non-linear path into a lead community role at one of the most interesting ZK infrastructure projects building today.

Table of contents

1. Who is Sasha and what is ZK Cloud?
2. Where is ZK technology in the adoption cycle?
3. Sasha's path into Web3 community management
4. How to keep a community engaged when things go quiet
5. Why airdrop-only strategies fail
6. Founder marketing: authentic presence beats polished performance
7. Where community ideas really come from
8. Skills every new community manager should develop
9. Frequently asked questions

Who is Sasha and what is ZK Cloud?

Sasha is the community and content lead at ZK Cloud, a zero knowledge proof infrastructure provider that has generated over 1.2 million ZK proofs for Ethereum mainnet and supports Starknet across both testnet and mainnet phases.

ZK Cloud focuses on generating ZK proofs at scale. For those unfamiliar, zero knowledge proofs allow a transaction to be verified as final without revealing the underlying data, enabling privacy-preserving computation on public blockchains. ZK Cloud has been generating proofs for Ethereum mainnet since April 2025 and supported Starknet through both of its testnet phases.

Sasha came into the role through a recruiter earlier in 2025 and describes the fit with the ZK Cloud team as immediately natural. What started as a content and community manager position evolved quickly into a lead role once her broader strategic contribution became clear.

"At some point it just became like, okay, I'm fully enthusiastic right now."

Sasha, Community and Content Lead at ZK Cloud

Where is ZK technology in the adoption cycle?

ZK proofs have moved from academic exercises to real infrastructure. Proving systems are faster, tooling is significantly stronger, and institutional demand for privacy-preserving, compliance-friendly infrastructure is accelerating. 2025 has delivered on what the space has been promising since at least 2016.

Sasha made a point that stuck: the hype around ZK is not overblown, it is underblown. The reason is that institutional adoption is the next major wave for crypto and institutions need auditability, compliance, privacy, and verifiability. ZK technology addresses all four.

Applications now extend well beyond crypto. ZK-based systems are being explored in AI, healthcare, finance, and identity verification. Google has integrated ZK-based systems for privacy-preserving identity. The a16z State of Crypto 2025 report highlights the same trend. And the SEC chairman confirmed in 2025 that zero knowledge proofs are appearing in regulatory conversations.

For community managers at ZK projects, this is context worth knowing cold. Members will ask about it and being able to speak confidently about where the technology sits in the real world is a significant credibility signal.

Sasha's path into Web3 community management

Sasha's route to a lead community role at ZK Cloud went through ambassador programmes, a marketing agency, brand identity work, and a stretch of interviews across several Layer 1 and DeFi projects before landing the right fit. Her advice to anyone currently job hunting: every step you take contributes, even when the timeline feels slow.

Sasha was transparent about the current job market in a way that is genuinely useful for anyone at the start of their Web3 career. The competition is intense, not just in crypto marketing but across tech broadly. It took her time, multiple interviews, and patience before ZK Cloud came along.

What made the difference was not credentials but fit. The initial call with the ZK Cloud team felt natural. They approached community similarly. The vision aligned. That kind of connection is worth waiting for.

Aaron reinforced the point with a broader observation: the current era makes it easier than ever to develop new skills independently. GEO (generative engine optimisation, the equivalent of SEO for AI-powered search) is something he has been teaching himself entirely through AI tools. Nikita Bier posted his way into one of the most prominent product roles in tech. The gatekeepers matter less than they used to.

The path in is still the same though: start somewhere, show your value, grow into more responsibility.

How to keep a community engaged when things go quiet

Keeping a community active during slow periods comes down to four things: recognition, access, meaningful involvement, and physical rewards. Each one addresses a different reason people drift away, and together they create the sense of ownership that turns passive members into genuine contributors.

Sasha broke this down clearly and practically:

1. Recognition -- Publicly highlight contributions. Give out roles, badges, acknowledgements. The people who stayed through the early days are doing something heroic and they deserve to know it.
2. Access -- Give long-term members early product access, private channels, beta test phases. Make the community feel like insiders, because they are.
3. Meaningful involvement -- Invite community members to help shape the community itself or the product. When someone's idea gets implemented, they feel ownership. That is one of the strongest retention mechanisms available.
4. Merch rewards -- Physical items, even simple ones, create real-world connection and loyalty. A t-shirt someone wears to a conference is marketing, retention, and a signal of belonging all at once.

aartoo's role performance widget supports this directly. You can track who is active, spot members who are going quiet before they fully disengage, and identify the people who deserve recognition before they stop showing up.

Why airdrop-only strategies fail

Farming-oriented communities deliver inflated member counts and near-zero real engagement. The day the airdrop distributes, people either leave angry they did not get enough or leave happy and move straight to the next one. Either way, they are gone. The projects that build lasting communities are the ones that give people a genuine reason to stay from day one.

Aaron put it plainly: he regularly speaks with projects sitting on 700,000 Discord members and 60 messages per week. The numbers look impressive until you check the join dates. Most of those members arrived in the weeks before the airdrop and have not been seen since.

This does not mean airdrops are always wrong. Hyperliquid is a strong example of a TGE that worked because the product justified the reward. But that is the exception. For most projects, the airdrop-as-growth-strategy creates a hollow community that is expensive to maintain and impossible to build on.

The alternative is slower and harder. Build recognition systems. Create genuine insiders. Run competitions with product access or merch on the line rather than just tokens. These things attract people who care about the project, and those are the people who show up long after the TGE.

Founder marketing: authentic presence beats polished performance

Founder marketing works when it is honest and consistent, not when it is polished. Communities do not expect founders to be perfect. They expect them to be present, visible, and genuine. When that happens, trust builds quickly and naturally. The anonymous founding team era was a trust problem that Web3 is still recovering from.

Sasha noted that ZK Cloud is actively considering founder marketing as part of their long-term strategy, though not rushing into it. Her framing of how it works best was sharp: the founder sets the vision and tone, and the community manager translates that into daily engagement, long-term relationships, and project trust.

Aaron added a practical dimension from his own experience. Going to a new bridge or protocol for the first time carries inherent risk. Seeing a founder who is publicly visible and personally accountable removes a meaningful amount of that anxiety. Palmer Luckey is a well-known example outside Web3 of a founder whose personal brand is inseparable from the credibility of their products.

The shift away from anonymous founding teams has been significant for the space. Trust is easier to build when there is a face behind the project.

Where community ideas really come from

The best structure for community programmes is a team-set framework with community-driven details. The team defines the goals, KPIs, and timing. The community fills in the ideas, the content, and the improvements. The most active contributors consistently notice things the internal team cannot see from the inside.

Sasha described building ZK Cloud's ambassador programme from scratch: the team structured the roles and onboarded candidates, but within weeks the most active ambassadors were suggesting improvements, proposing content formats, and offering skills the team had not thought to ask for. Several of those ideas were incorporated directly.

This mirrors what Aaron built aartoo to do. aartoo reads every message in a community, meaning nothing gets lost in the scroll. The diamonds in the rough that a small team would miss by manually reading thousands of messages get surfaced automatically. When a community member raises something worth acting on, aartoo finds it.

Benchmarking against other communities was Sasha's third recommended skill for new community managers, and it reflects how aartoo was built: through documenting over 300 campaigns from other projects, mapping what worked in which community types, and training those patterns into the product.

Skills every new community manager should develop

Four core competencies set strong community managers apart: deep product knowledge, a willingness to experiment, active benchmarking of other communities, and genuine listening. These are not soft skills in the pejorative sense. They are the technical foundation of effective community work.

Sasha's breakdown was concise and practical:

1. Understand the product -- You cannot build a community around something you do not understand yourself. Deep dive into what makes your product valuable before you try to explain it to anyone else.
2. Experiment without fear -- Try new engagement methods. Run campaigns. Some will fail. That is part of the job and part of the learning. The community managers who never try anything new also never find what works.
3. Benchmark actively -- Watch other communities. Identify what works elsewhere and adapt it to fit your community's specific culture and product. Not everything transfers, but the observation habit builds pattern recognition.
4. Listen and cultivate culture -- The community itself will tell you what it needs if you are paying attention. Cultivating the right atmosphere is not a one-time task. It is ongoing and it determines everything else.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Sasha from ZK Cloud?

Sasha is the community and content lead at ZK Cloud. She came to the role through ambassador programmes, agency work, and a stretch of interviews across Layer 1 and DeFi projects before joining ZK Cloud in early 2025. She describes it as her first serious lead community role where she has been able to build strategy and see the bigger picture.

What does ZK Cloud do?

ZK Cloud generates zero knowledge proofs for Ethereum mainnet and Starknet. It has produced over 1.2 million ZK proofs for Ethereum and supported Starknet through both of its testnet phases. ZK Cloud focuses on making ZK proof generation fast, scalable, and accessible to builders.

Is ZK technology actually mainstream now?

Yes, in a meaningful sense. Proving systems are significantly faster than they were two years ago, tooling has matured, and real products are shipping. Institutional demand for privacy-preserving, compliance-friendly infrastructure is growing. The SEC has referenced ZK proofs in regulatory conversations and Google has integrated ZK-based systems for identity.

Why do airdrop-only community strategies fail?

Airdrop-focused communities attract members who are there for the reward, not the project. Once the airdrop distributes, those members leave, either angry about the size of their reward or happy and immediately on to the next opportunity. The result is inflated member counts and near-zero genuine engagement.

Does founder marketing work in Web3?

Yes, when it is authentic and consistent. Communities do not expect founders to be perfect but they do expect them to be visible and honest. Founder presence reduces the trust barrier for new users and gives the community a face to attach to the project's vision. The anonymous founding team era created significant trust problems that the space is still working through.

What is Behind the Community?

Behind the Community is aartoo's interview series exploring how the world's best online communities are built and managed. Episode 3 features Sasha from ZK Cloud discussing community engagement, ZK technology adoption, and the skills that set great community managers apart.

Wrapping up

Sasha's episode lands at an interesting moment. ZK technology is finally delivering on what it promised for years. The tooling works. The institutional demand is real. And the community challenge is the same one that every technically complex project faces: how do you make people care about something they do not fully understand yet?

Sasha's answer is not to simplify the technology. It is to build genuine relationships around it, recognise the people who show up early, give them real ownership, and let the founder's authentic presence set the tone that the community manager then sustains every day.

The airdrop farming trap is worth naming every time it comes up. It is still catching projects out. The alternative is slower but the communities that come out the other side are ones worth having.