Structure every partnership as a contract with deliverables on both sides, a fixed term, a reporting schedule and an exit, and pay in tokens only against delivered milestones. In our view, the second half of that sentence is where web3 partnerships usually break down. Arbitrum’s gaming programme set a useful bar: publishers seeking a grant had to put in at least 10% of it themselves.
Who decides this
The head of ecosystem or business development owns partnership strategy and is accountable for what each deal delivers. That means a named counterparty, a defined exchange of value, and a record of whether both sides did what they signed up to do. The CFO and counsel review terms before signature. The board or foundation council approves any deal that commits treasury tokens, because those commitments outlast the people who negotiated them.
What is each side actually exchanging?
Every partnership is an exchange of something measurable for something measurable, and the deal should name both. Announcements that describe a “strategic partnership” without saying what moves in each direction are marketing, not partnerships, and they create obligations nobody tracks.
Chain, exchange and protocol deals exchange different things. Each needs different terms.
| Deal type | What the project gives | What the project gets | Terms that matter most | Gap to watch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chain partnership | Deployment, users, volume, a launch on the chain | Grants, incentives, fee share, co-marketing, introductions | Milestones, token release schedule, reporting, exit | No commitment on the chain’s side beyond the grant |
| Exchange partnership | Fees, market-making arrangements, co-marketing | A listing, trading pairs, campaign placement, liquidity | Market-maker terms, campaign obligations, conduct rules | Commitments made verbally and never written down |
| Protocol partnership | Integration work, liquidity, shared users, sometimes tokens | Integration, revenue share, joint incentives | Revenue split, who maintains the integration, unwind | Integration abandoned after the announcement |
For each deal, write a one-page term sheet before anyone drafts the contract. It should list what each side delivers, by when, how it will be measured, and what happens if one side does not deliver. If the counterparty will not commit to that page, the partnership is not real yet.
In a chain partnership, ask for more than the grant. In our experience, the commitments that help a project most are often non-financial: introductions to wallets and exchanges already on the chain, a slot in the chain’s launch calendar, and a named contact on the ecosystem team. Put each of these in writing, with a date, as you would a payment.
How should the deal be paid: tokens, cash or revenue share?
Prefer revenue share or milestone-based payments, and use token grants only with tranches, caps and a return clause for unused amounts. The payment structure decides which partners a deal attracts.
Revenue share aligns both sides on usage. Sonic’s fee monetization programme is the clearest example of a chain partnership built this way: developers receive 90% of the network fees their apps generate, and validators the remaining 10%. The chain pays nothing until the app is used.
Token grants are simpler to announce but harder to manage. Their value moves after signature. Arbitrum’s gaming programme was worth about $215 million in ARB when approved and about $122 million by October 2024. A partner promised a token amount and a partner promised a dollar value will read the same contract very differently. Settle which one you mean before signature.
Build in a return clause. When Arbitrum’s 50 million ARB incentive programme ended in March 2024, about 736,000 claimed ARB were returned. The gaming programme’s proposal also required any unused ARB to go back to the DAO. Money that a partner cannot use well should come back to the treasury automatically, not by negotiation.
What should an exchange or protocol deal include beyond the headline?
An exchange or protocol deal should spell out every commitment that affects the token’s market, not only the headline event. For an exchange partnership, the headline is the listing. The terms that matter sit around it: market-making arrangements, campaign obligations, token amounts committed to promotions, and the conduct rules both sides must follow.
Write each of those down, with amounts and dates. If a market maker is part of the arrangement, its contract should be reviewed on its own terms, with the loan size, the duration, any options granted and the reporting it owes the project. Verbal assurances from a business development contact are not terms.
For a protocol partnership, the hard questions are about maintenance and unwind. Who keeps the integration working after an upgrade on either side? Who pays for the audit of shared code? If joint liquidity incentives are promised, who funds which share, over what period, and what happens if one side stops? A protocol partnership that answers these before launch is worth more than one with a larger announcement.
Treat every deal as part of the same market plan. A promotion budget on one exchange, a liquidity incentive on a protocol and a grant from a chain all draw on the same token supply and land in the same market.
How long should a partnership run, and how exclusive should it be?
Run partnerships for a fixed initial term of six to twelve months with an option to renew, and ask for exclusivity only where you pay for it. Long, open-ended deals outlive the reason they were signed.
Exclusivity is rarely worth what it costs. Electric Capital’s 2024 report finds that about one in three crypto developers work on more than one chain. A serious team will deploy where its users are. Paying for exclusivity buys a promise the partner may resent and the market will test.
Plan for exits as carefully as entries. In the March 2025 proposal to claw back unused funds from Arbitrum’s gaming programme, its authors pointed to the departure of a primary backer from Arbitrum among their reasons. Partners leave. The contract should say what happens to unvested tokens, shared liquidity and joint marketing commitments when they do.
How do you hold a partner to its deliverables?
Write reporting into the contract with a fixed cadence and a named person on each side, and tie the next tranche to the last report. A partnership without a reporting duty depends on goodwill, and goodwill fades fast after an announcement.
The Arbitrum gaming programme had the right terms on paper: a quarterly transparency report and a regular update cadence. In October 2024, The Block reported that public updates had fallen short of the promised cadence, a point the programme’s backers disputed, and that no transparency report had yet appeared. The lesson is that reporting terms need an owner and a consequence. If a report is late, the next payment waits.
Keep a single partnership register. For each deal, record the counterparty, what was promised in both directions, tokens committed and their release schedule, the reporting due dates and the exit terms. Review it monthly. It is the document the board will want when it asks what all these web3 partnerships actually cost.
Agree the announcement last. Once the terms are signed and the first deliverable is scheduled, the announcement can say what the partnership does. Announcing first and negotiating afterwards hands the counterparty the leverage, because pulling back from a public deal is costly for the side that announced it.
What goes wrong: five advisers, one blind spot each
The common failure is not one bad deal. It is several reasonable deals, each negotiated by a different adviser, that do not fit together.
A typical pattern looks like this. Business development signs a chain partnership with a token grant. A separate exchange deal includes market-making terms negotiated through a listing agent. A protocol partnership promises joint liquidity incentives. Counsel reviews each contract on its own. The tokenomics model was set months earlier and does not include any of these commitments. Each adviser did its job. Then the team finds that its partnership commitments unlock in the same quarter as its investor tokens, and nobody saw the combined effect.
The fix is a single owner for the full set of commitments. Every partnership should be checked against the token release schedule, the treasury plan and the other deals before signature, not after.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone treats partnerships as part of one launch plan, with a named owner for every part. Its partners introduce projects to exchanges, market makers and data platforms, review market-making and listing contracts, and stay involved through launch and post-launch support. Alcyone’s partnerships and launch work includes launching the first token project on a major Layer-1, with joint AMAs, co-branded campaigns and coordinated exchange integrations, which produced 5,000+ new token holders. Engagements begin with a thirty-minute call with a senior partner and a fixed-scope, fixed-fee assessment credited against further work. There is no obligation to use TrustSwap products.