Since the release of Friendtech last year, the development of social track projects has been accelerating. We firmly believe that in the coming months, we will see many groundbreaking social applications being released.
While we are excited about this progress, we also want to introduce these projects to everyone who is interested in the social track. Don’t miss out on today’s article.
SocialFi: What is it?
SocialFi refers to connecting encrypted users through social protocols, often accompanied by financial incentives and speculative behavior.
Current SocialFi projects can be broadly categorized as follows:
Financial-driven
Utility-driven
Infrastructure
Financial-driven:
Friendtech is a social trading protocol that allows creators to monetize their content and earn fee splits. It serves as a key example of viral propagation through mechanisms such as points, bond curves, and referral mechanisms.
Fantasy on Blast adopts a similar concept but introduces gamification elements through cards and tournaments. Both protocols have been very successful in the early stages, generating more revenue than most protocols. However, they also face some trade-offs such as rapidly increasing entry barriers as user numbers grow, excessive emphasis on airdrops to recoup initial capital, and the sustainability of incentives. While this strategy is beneficial for project launches, its long-term growth sustainability remains to be seen.
Utility-driven:
Protocols driven by utility typically offer enhanced playability with low user participation thresholds and minimal initial investment requirements. Apart from crypto-related use cases like paid chats and authentication, we are more excited about protocols challenging traditional platforms.
Infomon aims to decentralize algorithms through a gamified experience where users can train their personalized algorithms by feeding tweets to an AI pet. It provides better content for each user, boosts the influence of individual creators, and reduces noise.
Combining traditional social elements with on-chain data presented in the form of a social feed, 0xppl is redefining “social” for crypto natives. It enhances the readability and recognizability of on-chain operations in a way that was previously unachievable.
Infrastructure:
Social networks like Farcaster and Lens have laid the groundwork for this field’s development. Farcaster’s Frames caused a stir in the crypto Twitter sphere when launched in February this year, and since then, we have seen enhancements in use cases and builders within the ecosystem.
With the increasing number of social networks, interoperability becomes crucial. Developers can achieve this goal using Tako’s SDK, which remains neutral towards social networks and provides content curation/monetization APIs. Jamfrens is utilizing Tako to build protocols.
In conclusion, we believe the key factors for future social protocols will be sustainable incentive measures, robust utility, and interoperability. We are eagerly anticipating the future of crypto social and will continue to monitor and invest in this track!