Recently, I wrote about how Slack and its online communities are exploding. As Slack bot developers, at Standuply, we observe changes and follow Slack’s progress, especially what happens with the Slack communities around the world.

In our recent post Full List of 1000 Slack Communities, we analyzed all of the public Slack groups and drew insights about that state of Slack in 2017. The largest community in the world is a group for Kubernetes with 21k people. They’ve held that title until this week, though.

It turns out we could have underestimated the pace of how Slack communities are growing.

In the recent days KyberNetwork, a decentralized currency exchange platform, has become the world’s largest Slack community with over 32,000 members. Moreover, it happened just in 5 days 💥

On August 15, their community had around 4,000 people. But after the company announced its early adopting members would be able to take part in their upcoming Initial Coin Offering (ICO) via their Slack group, it started to grow insanely.

By August 20, the community had grown to over 25,000 people becoming the largest in the world. This news reached the media, and within a matter of hours the community had grown to 32,850 people. Now we know Slack can handle so many people within one team. Well done 👍

At that point, KyberNetwork decided to close the registration temporarily. But, the company plans to reopen the group in the near future.

David Markovich, founder of Online Geniuses, Internet Marketing Slack group with 8k members, shares his thoughts on such immediate success:

This is the biggest news with Slack communities since the launch of them. I’ve been building my Slack community for the past 2.5 years and no community came anywhere as close to what these guys accomplished.

We see more and more companies doing Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) these days. The total amount of money poured in has surpassed $1B in 2017. Whether you think it’s hype or not this story is not about that.

Slack is a perfect medium for building a community and maintaining a relationship with them. In the case of KyberNetwork, they are incentivizing that community with the opportunity to participate in the company’s growth through their ICO.

The question now is whether we will see Slack also become the platform for companies to build these supergroups to communicate with their users and customers. Will Slack be embraced or will this be done by another similar app? Time will tell.

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