New Trends in the Web3 Social Track: Shifting Towards Grouping and Scenization

Written by: echo_z, Chain Teahouse

The SocialFi wave is somewhat like a mirage, presenting a beautiful picture but lacking a solid user base. From the early Steemit building its own social public chain, to Rally launching social tokens, and then to the popular Monaco releasing NFTs last year, the efforts in Web3 social products have never ceased, yet they have not found a true PMF.

However, with the upgrade of infrastructure and changes in market trends, the forms of social products have been continuously evolving. Reviewing the recent new products in the social track, two overall directions of change in the industry can be identified:

First is the trend of tribalization, which builds a series of ecological products based on the same underlying social graph, where product functions vary but all share the same set of social relationships. Users can utilize the social data they have accumulated across any product within the ecosystem, similar to chatting with WeChat friends on Douyin, fully reflecting the openness of Web3 data.

Second is the trend of contextualization, where products often combine with specific use cases like NFTs, existing as functional complement tools for these scenarios, showcasing the composability of Web3 applications.

The first change will create an application landscape entirely different from Web2, while the second direction indicates that social products are beginning to trend towards practical functionality. Overall, the "Lego block" phenomenon is becoming increasingly evident, with fewer attempts to create a comprehensive social application with a single product.

This article focuses on products that enable user social interactions, thus excluding infrastructure products like credential verification and DID.

1. Trend of Tribalization: Underlying Graphs and Ecological Products

Building a universal social graph for other projects to develop upon—this seems to be a consensus if one wants to create a platform-type social product. In this field, several projects are already building ecosystems, and this section will introduce representative projects such as Lens, RSS3, CyberConnect, and Farcaster.

1.1 Lens Protocol

The core design of Lens is to build a social graph based on NFTs, where each user establishes their own Profile NFT. When following others, they also receive a Follow NFT, with each NFT having a unique number that records the order of creation/following.

Since these NFTs can be transferred or traded, Lens breaks the limitation of treating social relationships merely as "data" and instead encapsulates them as "assets." This opens up the possibility of using NFTs for various community gating, reward standards, etc., such as limiting incentives to only the first 100 followers. Once these NFTs can generate revenue, it could potentially create a trading market for social NFTs.

Interestingly, because the Lens team adopted a scarcity marketing strategy for Profile NFTs, only a portion of early users could obtain them, and only those who received this NFT could gain followers. A trading market for Profile NFTs has already formed, with a floor price of 0.014E. Although the price is not high, it validates the potential trading value of social NFTs.

Trading interface for Lens Profile NFTs on OpenSea

Another major advantage of Lens is that the original team from Aave possesses significant influence, and they are actively building the ecosystem through events like Hackathons. A number of native projects have already emerged based on Lens. On the Lens official website, some officially recommended projects can be seen.

Source: https://lens.xyz/#apps

Among them, Lensfrens is created by the Lens team and serves as a simple front-end for adding friends; Lenster is similar to Facebook, allowing users to add friends, browse friend updates, join community discussions, etc., and is currently a relatively complete product; Phaver is akin to a mobile version of Facebook; Alps Finance is a posting community centered around DeFi topics, also integrating trading and transfer functions. In addition to the aforementioned products, there are popular link-sharing communities, video subscription platforms, video distribution platforms, etc., all based on Lens social information as native projects.

Most of these ecological projects have relatively minor functional entry points, yet together they create a strong sense of community. For example, after users follow others through Lensfrens, they can view friend updates on Lenster and migrate to the mobile version Phaver. The front ends differ, but the friend relationships remain consistent, which indeed marks a significant experiential difference for social ecological projects compared to Web2 social applications.

1.2 CyberConnect

CyberConnect is a decentralized social graph protocol that is similar to Lens in constructing underlying social relationships. However, the difference lies in that Lens's architecture is based on NFTs for relationship building, while CyberConnect consolidates social relationships in the form of a database, with social data stored via the middleware Ceramic. Additionally, CyberConnect is deployed on both ETH and Solana, creating two distinct social graphs, while Lens has chosen to deploy solely on Polygon.

CyberConnect has developed front-end applications for social relationships, allowing users to follow others and view their NFTs, POAPs, Galaxy credentials, Mirror articles, etc.

CyberConnect follow and user activity interface

CyberConnect is also collaborating with several third-party projects. However, unlike Lens, whose ecological projects are all new projects native to the Lens protocol and exclusive in adopting social relationships, CyberConnect mostly collaborates with other projects, providing social relationships as a functional complement.

Source: https://cyberconnect.me/

The above image shows some of the ecological projects listed on the CyberConnect official website, among which Light.so and Hello World are native projects based on CyberConnect, presenting social relationships and user dynamics in different styles.

Left: Light.so, Right: Hello World

Other projects are generally independent third-party products that leverage CyberConnect's social relationships. A typical example is Unipass, which utilizes both CyberConnect and RSS3 social relationships. In this scenario, both CyberConnect and RSS3 function similarly to an open API, allowing third-party projects to read users' social relationships. Compared to Lens, CyberConnect may find it more challenging to establish its own "tribal" ecosystem, but it offers greater flexibility for third-party project integration.

Unipass interface

1.3 RSS3

RSS3 aims to be an open information aggregator, achieving efficient and decentralized Web3 information distribution. The current information sources are based on all dynamic behaviors of user addresses on-chain, making it very much like an on-chain social circle.

Unlike Lens and CyberConnect, which focus on underlying graphs, RSS3 encapsulates products that can be used on the consumer side. Currently available products include Web3 Pass (https://cheers.bio/), where users can edit their personal profile pages, choose which dynamic information to display, and generate their own domain RNS; and Revery, which is an aggregation page based on user address dynamics. After following other users, one can see the dynamics of the followed objects, very similar to Twitter dynamics, except that the dynamics include all on-chain behaviors that the followed objects allow to be public, including posting on Mirror, purchasing NFTs, receiving airdrops, etc.

Source: https://revery.so/

However, since the on-chain dynamics captured by RSS3 have wide-ranging uses, RSS3 has also become a data provider for some third-party applications. In the introduction of RSS3's ecological projects, it can be seen that the collaboration methods are mostly based on RSS3 providing user profile data.

Source: https://docs.rss3.io/docs/guide/ecosystem

1.4 Farcaster

The Farcaster team is low-key, with only 2 tweets on Twitter, and the product has been in internal testing. However, it recently announced a $30 million funding round and began to promote itself publicly. The two co-founders, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both hail from Coinbase and are likely to have considerable influence in the industry.

Farcaster is an underlying social registry that any client can use to build social products. The core of the protocol is divided into two parts: first, a name registration system established on Ethereum, currently running on Rinkeby, where users can register a unique username with an Ethereum address and associate it with a content hosting URL. Only by possessing the address's private key can users update the content hosting address, meaning that the rights to associate relevant content are in the user's hands. The second part is the hosting aspect, where users can choose self-hosting or rely on third-party hosting, achieving varying degrees of decentralization.

Source: https://www.farcaster.xyz/docs/the-basics

One of the co-founders, Dan Romero, included a screenshot of the product front end in the funding announcement article, which also resembles Twitter but with a simpler and more straightforward interface.

Source: https://danromero.org/farcaster/

Around Farcaster, there are also some native projects, including Instacaster, which stores all images appearing on products; Searchcaster, which searches posts; CastRSS, which serves as a dedicated RSS feed stream; and Configcaster, a tool that helps users pre-approve sensitive data when connecting wallets to other websites.

Since the product is not open for use, there is not much information available, but the $30 million funding reserve still makes this project worth tracking.

2. Trend of Contextualization: Transaction Communication, Project Collaboration, Data Analysis

If the projects in the previous section were still trying to build social networks from scratch, the projects in this section more clearly showcase the tool-like nature of social products. New products with practical functionality have emerged in transaction communication, project collaboration, and data analysis.

2.1 Communication Products that Facilitate Transactions

The network effect of Web2 communication products is too strong; it is challenging to compete with established social communication products like Telegram by directly creating a decentralized or even end-to-end encrypted product. Recently emerging Web3 communication products have begun to closely integrate with existing scenarios like NFTs, meeting specific communication needs that have crossed the barriers of network effects, achieving experiences that are difficult to realize in Web2.

Atem Network and Swapchat are communication products based on NFT exchanges.

Atem focuses more on identity-based instant group chats, where users can find popular NFTs and enter group chats under those NFTs. Notably, Atem performs real-time verification of whether a user's wallet holds the NFT; if they do, they can enter channels exclusive to holders; otherwise, they can only access public channels.

Atem's NFT interface and group chat interface

Swapchat also has a group chat for a specific NFT, but only one public group, with the product focusing more on point-to-point communication. Swapchat itself is an extension integrated into OpenSea, allowing users to initiate chats with holders when they see a desired NFT on OpenSea. Of course, the holder must also have the Swapchat extension installed to receive messages, which still requires a strong network effect.

Swapchat integration on OpenSea

2.2 Collaboration Products Based on Credentials

In the latest Gitcoin social project, a batch of workplace social network products has emerged, including Metajam, Fuse Pass, and CryptoIn. Web3 new product information is scattered, and such websites can aggregate project information and connect people with projects, indicating that there will be market demand in the workplace social track; Web3 can also fully utilize on-chain credentials, making information more symmetrical between project parties and applicants, presenting advantages over Web2 workplace products.

Fuse Pass utilizes NFT badges, on-chain and off-chain credentials to provide professional proof in the workplace, helping to enhance transparency in the project recruitment process; CryptoIn leverages multiple product functionalities from RSS3, Arweave, Mask Network, etc., to assist in project financing and talent recruitment. Currently, it seems that neither of these two products has a publicly available version, while Metajam has already gained some operational traction.

Metajam is similar to Web3's Product Hunt, where project parties can showcase their product models to attract talent and potential financing; individual users can create their resume proofs, discover projects, and apply for jobs; investors can also filter projects or assist in promotion.

Source: https://www.metajam.studio/

When using it, users need to connect with their wallet address, can leave comments under each project, and Metajam will synchronize CyberConnect's social relationships. The personal resume section is still relatively rudimentary; users can select their areas of interest and skill tags, but there is a lack of integration for users' on-chain credentials.

2.3 Embedded Data Analysis

On-chain data analysis has never been a new concept, but data analysis platforms like Nansen require users to have a certain level of analytical ability. Lightweight analytical assistance tools may be more welcomed by the public.

Blocktracker is a straightforward analytical plugin that displays the NFT historical yield, wallet balance, and other information of a Twitter account associated with an on-chain address on the Twitter interface, providing more interesting economic proof for the statements of prominent users.

Borrowing a tweet from Vitalik

3. Conclusion

From the above two trends, emerging Web3 products either form network effects by banding together with other applications or closely align with specific use cases to create functional complements, no longer attempting to completely replace Web2 applications with a single product as in the past.

In Web2 social products, the underlying social relationships and upper-level experiences are bound together, while in Web3, these two elements are separated. This is the most interesting aspect and will inevitably create a completely different product landscape. The biggest barrier for social products lies in the cost of user migration, but in Web3, as long as users are on the same social graph protocol, there is no migration cost. Perhaps in the future, social product tribes will form around several social graphs, and applications within the ecosystem will become creative products like games, where old products cannot rest easy, and smaller products always have opportunities for development.