Messari: An In-Depth Analysis of the Four Major Decentralized Social Graph Protocols in the DeSoc Track

Original Title: "DeSoc on the Cutting Edge: An In-Depth Analysis of Four Decentralized Social Protocols"

Written by: Dustin Teander, Messari

Translated by: BlockTurbo

Traditional social products are often seen as fully packaged content and communication applications. However, their core is primarily identity products. They provide the foundational connection between a person's digital persona and their data, content, and social relationships. The connection between people and content is the basis of digital communication; however, it is monopolized, manipulated, and monetized through a few closed platforms built on a sugar-coated shell.

Decentralized Social (DeSoc) protocols are reconstructing digital identity to be owned and managed by users. With DeSoc, users can freely communicate and build applications in a trustful manner without manipulation or censorship for profit. Before this, DeSoc networks need to achieve a minimum level of network scale and overcome the current centralized platform paradigm.

In the traditional social space, many platforms are nearly flawless in competition because external parties cannot access their rich personal and content data (social graphs). While platforms can reap enormous profits from this, restricting access to social graphs poses three core issues for creators and related businesses:

• Disconnected creator monetization ------ Apart from social media, creators are often forced to use tools like email lists, blogs, and other partners to fully monetize their content. Although the entire creator economy grew from about $14 billion in 2021 to over $100 billion in 2022, creators' income is limited due to increased user friction from having to switch across tools and platforms.
• Disproportionate platform value share ------ While social platforms primarily earned over $230 billion from advertising, content creators only earned about $6.5 billion in revenue share. For example, on YouTube, which has the most generous revenue sharing, nearly 98% of creators cannot reach the poverty line in the U.S. solely from ad revenue sharing.
• Centralized creator income distribution ------ Because social algorithms are optimized for predictable outcomes, only top creators with predictable appeal can capture the vast majority of ad revenue. Without access to social graph data, there are no subsequent business model innovations to support the mid-tier creators.

Given the significant income imbalance between platforms and creators, there is a huge incentive in the market to leverage technology to bridge the gap. With an open social graph that anyone can build upon, DeSoc in the Web3 era poses a tangible threat to existing social platforms, as these platforms' competitive moat comes from their closed architecture.

DeSoc Architecture

DeSoc protocols, like traditional social protocols, provide the core link between personal account profiles and digital content. Account profiles are typically NFTs, and published content, whether posts, videos, or comments, is associated with core accounts on-chain or off-chain. Since all account and content relationships (social graphs) are open and readable by developers, anyone can build front-end applications and features on top of the social graph. This breaks the technical stack of traditional platforms and significantly expands the potential for innovation.

Just as increasing the surface area of contact between two chemicals leads to faster and richer reactions, increasing the surface area between developers and technology exponentially increases the potential for new applications and features.

With the increase in development, many projects have launched to address issues beyond the core social graph. They are building various aspects of consumer applications, from developer infrastructure like video transcoding to functionalities like messaging and search.

Although still in the early stages, these projects are largely composable and are rapidly becoming viable consumer application infrastructures.

The personal account and content relationships in the social layer are at the core of any consumer application today. Typically, this layer of infrastructure benefits from shared standards. However, the core social graph protocols, each with different design standards and trade-offs, are in the early stages of building user bases and integrations. Therefore, upward investment in front-end and application infrastructure is challenging.

However, a deep understanding of the design trade-offs between scalability, developer experience, and decentralization in social graph protocols can uncover advantages.

Social Graph Protocols

The four most prominent social graph protocols are Lens, CyberConnect, Farcaster, and DeSo. Each defines its own core framework for creating accounts, following other accounts, and publishing content. These four protocols are at different stages of maturity and have unique designs and trade-offs.

Lens

Protocol Design

Currently in a closed release phase, Lens is designed based on smart contracts and built on Polygon. Each Lens profile issues a ProfileNFT, and each follower of the profile issues a FollowerNFT to represent the connection. Besides the basic personal account and subsequent content, other core concepts of Lens include:

• Publications ------ Posts published by the profile are stored in the user's ProfileNFT, with a URI pointing to metadata stored in off-chain solutions like IPFS. To save gas, publications only become NFTs once they are "collected."
• Collecting ------ Users can "collect" another user's posts, which will be minted as NFTs in their wallets. Collecting is a way for creators to directly monetize their content and also a way for users to build stronger relationships with other profiles. It introduces a new monetization avenue for those seeking to discover and share valuable content.
• Mirrors ------ Mirrors are re-shared publications. Since they are not true publications, they cannot be directly collected. However, if the original content is collected by other users, those who forward valuable content can earn a share of the revenue. Additionally, Mirrors create a new form of advertising technology where users can incentivize others, thus enhancing their content.
• Modules ------ Modules are smart contracts executed upon triggers from events like new follows or collections. Developers can customize Lens's functionality within modules and use them to build new features, including monetization. For example, a follow module might require payment or subscription to follow a profile. Modules drive scalability and functional potential, as developers have a framework to add almost any functionality to Lens while keeping the social graph standardized and thus composable.
• Built-in Governance ------ FollowNFTs are effective badges indicating that a user is part of a community. Understanding this potential, Lens has built additional logic into FollowNFTs for voting delegation and other purposes. Users can collectively form a social DAO, which can own its profile and be managed by its FollowNFT holders. Moreover, DAO owners can program special voting and governance rules directly into FollowNFTs.

Integration

The front end primarily interacts with Lens contracts through the Lens API. The Lens team indexes all Lens contracts, such as ProfileNFT and FollowNFT. It then stores the formatted data in a Postgres database. The data is accessible via a standardized Lens API, improving performance and accelerating front-end developers' onboarding time.

Since Lens is built on a general-purpose blockchain's smart contracts, it requires another network to handle high-throughput functionalities like content management and messaging. For messaging, Lens recently partnered with the messaging storage and encryption network XMTP. It is used to securely send DMs to other personal accounts in the Lens API.

Application developers determine the content storage for images, videos, and general metadata, typically opting for IPFS and Arweave. However, controlling content access, and thus controlling scarcity, requires a key management network for encrypting and decrypting content, such as the Lit protocol.

The Lit protocol is used at the developer level to encode rules for accessing content. For example, users can token-gate posts, allowing only holders of a subscription NFT or other tokens to view the post. Lens recently embedded token-gated posts using the Lit protocol into the Lens API, making it easier for developers to build content scarcity into their applications.

Pros and Cons

The core advantages of Lens and other smart contract-based social graph protocols are composability and scalability. Developers can freely implement Lens extensions that interface with any other smart contract protocol. Additionally, it is easier to deploy other protocols that interact with Lens, such as reputation-gated DeFi or DAO tools. The design surface area of smart contract social graphs like Lens is a major advantage compared to traditional social platforms and web-based crypto social graphs.

However, one downside is the limited and generic recommendation engine in the Lens API (which currently provides basic content feeds and may see improvements). If the API lacks robust recommendation capabilities, social feed projects must build their own indexers and then develop their own recommendation algorithms to suggest new content to users. As the front end matures and seeks competitive advantages, they will almost certainly explore launching their own indexing and recommendation algorithms. Moreover, this trend will extract value from Lens, as front ends with strong indexing and algorithm capabilities will have little incentive to pay taxes or write data back to Lens contracts.

Currently, Lens is only deployed on Polygon, which limits Lens's user base and scalability to the base chain (a drawback of all smart contract systems). However, nothing prevents Lens from launching new chains in the future and aggregating social graph data in its indexing process, publicly exposing cross-chain social graphs through its API, similar to what CyberConnect is doing today.

CyberConnect

Protocol Design

CyberConnect is a closed-launch multi-chain social graph protocol that has recently gained over 20,000 account profiles. As a smart contract-based social graph, CyberConnect is similar to Lens, using NFTs to represent profiles and followers. However, they differ in content representation and API methods.

CyberConnect's core features include:

• Account NFT ------ Each personal account profile (ccProfile) is a non-transferable NFT. Once created on one chain, the account name is retained on other chains. The account NFT serves as the central relationship point for all user content and subscribers. Additionally, this NFT collects any funds from collected content or subscribers.
• Subscription NFT ------ After following a profile, a subscription NFT is minted to the user's address, representing the connection between the user and the newly followed profile NFT. Moreover, account owners can set rules, such as requiring token ownership or a small payment before issuing the subscription NFT.
• Essence NFT ------ Content generated by accounts is represented as Essence NFTs, following the OpenSea metadata standard. They can be any digital object the user desires, such as posts, blogs, videos, or certificates indicating social status. Similar to Lens, other users can collect Essence NFTs for free or for a fee, depending on how developers configure the middleware managing Essence NFT functionality.
• Middleware ------ Developers can configure rules called during events like publishing accounts, subscription NFTs, or collecting Essence NFTs. Similar to Lens Modules, CyberConnect Middleware allows users to customize how they want to monetize content and shape user experiences.
• Multichain ------ CyberConnect is currently deployed on Ethereum, Binance Chain, and Polygon, where users can create accounts and content. New accounts, subscribers, content, and various on-chain activities are indexed across all chains and then aggregated by CyberConnect in its API.
• Off-chain Data ------ Data from data storage networks like IPFS and Arweave is indexed and stored alongside other off-chain data sources like Rarible, Twitter, and Foundation. By associating on-chain and off-chain data, CyberConnect can build a comprehensive user view.
• Interest Graph Engine ------ CyberConnect first aggregates cross-chain indexed data into a relational database, then aggregates it into a graph-based database (Neo4j). From the graph database, CyberConnect exposes the data through its API. Additionally, CyberConnect has built recommendation models that can suggest profiles to follow, content feeds, etc. Developers can access these models from the API, significantly reducing initial application development costs.

Integration

The CyberConnect API is the primary tool that allows developers to leverage CyberConnect profiles and content in their applications. The API interfaces with a graph database that aggregates the CyberConnect social graph from across chains. CyberConnect also provides a recommendation engine that offers profile and content feed suggestions. Similar to Lens, standardized data and recommendation algorithms accelerate the time-to-market for new front-end applications.

Like Lens, CyberConnect interfaces with the Lit Protocol, providing developers with access control and content scarcity tools. To further enhance privacy, CyberConnect is exploring features like zero-knowledge proofs to provide user social graphs to downstream applications without revealing the exact details of the social graph data.

CyberConnect profiles and content reside on general-purpose blockchains, making high-throughput messaging a function that cannot be executed locally. Therefore, CyberConnect plans to announce integration with messaging protocols to provide secure end-to-end encrypted communication for its users.

Pros and Cons

CyberConnect's core advantage is its multi-chain deployment and data indexing pipeline. The aggregation of cross-chain and off-chain data sources allows CyberConnect to build a richer social graph than competing protocols. Since CyberConnect uses a graph database instead of a relational database to store its data, it expands the capabilities of its recommendation engine, considering that graph-based algorithms are natively available.

While CyberConnect's Essence NFTs are promoted as allowing developers to issue credentials and use them as social posts, the protocol lacks native support for forwarding content and commenting on content. Although application developers can add this functionality themselves, it becomes slightly more challenging compared to protocols like Lens or Farcaster, which have more social determinism.

Similar to Lens, if CyberConnect's recommendation engine fails to meet application-specific needs, the social graph protocol may lose value capture to front ends with their own data storage and processing scales. However, given the various cross-chain and off-chain inputs, recreating the CyberConnect indexing process may be more challenging, making it valuable as part of the SDK for application developers.

Farcaster

Protocol Design

Unlike the smart contract-based networks Lens and CyberConnect, Farcaster is a web-based social graph currently in an invite-only testnet phase. Its profile IDs are stored within the Farcaster contracts on Ethereum, but the social graph is stored in a separate Farcaster hub network. Each hub in the peer-to-peer network broadcasts updates to each other, such as a new message (referred to as a Cast in Farcaster). Broadcast updates, known as incremental writes, are initiated by new user operations that add new nodes or connections to the social graph. There are six possible defined incremental writes in the Farcaster protocol:

• Cast ------ Messages sent by users. Casts can be simple text posts or comments, or they can reference metadata stored elsewhere, such as IPFS for larger messages like images or videos.
• Reaction ------ Likes, retweets, and other types of simple messages from other users.
• Amps ------ Instead of traditional "follows," Farcaster uses Amps to give initiating users more exposure to another user's content for a period (think of it as temporary following). Currently, it is limited to 3 months and 100 Amps.
• Verifications ------ Proof of ownership, which is a bi-directional signed message linking a Farcaster wallet to another (e.g., an Ethereum wallet). They allow users to import NFTs and other assets into Farcaster without transferring tokens.
• User Data ------ Standard metadata about users, such as bios, profile pictures, etc.
• Signers ------ Users authorize key pairs to sign increments. It is a special type of increment initially set to allow users to create other messages.

Users can purchase a "fname," a human-readable name for use in Farcaster, represented by an NFT on the Ethereum mainnet. While similar to ENS names in implementation, fnames have additional properties such as recoverability and lower minting costs. These features make them more suitable for social applications.

By extension, fnames also provide a viable business model, as the revenue from initial sales and re-registrations of fnames can serve as profits or incentives for operating the Hub. The namespace registration business model has historically been one of the few successful on-chain models, as ENS was second only to OpenSea in on-chain revenue last year.

Integration

The front end (client) integrates directly into the Farcaster Hub network by running its own Hub or indirectly through third-party APIs that have indexed the network. Given that the application is currently in a testnet, only Farcaster-sponsored company Merkle Manufacturing is running Hubs, but the goal is to open Hubs in the first half of 2023. Therefore, front-end network access is currently through the Farcaster API. The API is currently very simple, with only a chronological content endpoint and no dynamic recommendation engine. Given that Farcaster is hiring data engineers to build search and content recommendations, a more robust API may be in development.

Since Farcaster is web-based and in the early stages of development, there are no other third-party real-time integrations. Although Farcaster's messages are open and it currently lacks encryption-native features and digital scarcity elements, it can be speculated that Farcaster or application developers will integrate to enable such features in the future.

Pros and Cons

Along with its favorable simple design, Farcaster can benefit in the long term by capturing value as a web-based social graph rather than a smart contract social graph. Hubs in the network will gain access to new messages first, making them the first participants in that information. In a world where headlines can move markets and high-frequency bots dominate trading, having first access to information is a high-margin position that someone might pay to exploit. Therefore, if Farcaster shifts to a token-based model related to network participation, the token could gain marginal value from that social MEV.

So far, the biggest challenge facing Farcaster and general web-based social graph protocols is information inflation. The volume of messages (data) sent by users can become so large that the cost of running nodes and a P2P network becomes difficult to manage for decentralization. Farcaster has chosen to limit the amount of messages users can send to the network by deleting old messages.

While trimming preserves the network's scalability, it does limit its value capture, as hubs can only retain about a year's worth of data value for each user. If the best recommendation algorithms ultimately support the most used applications, and the best algorithms benefit from the largest datasets, then the cost of data storage will simply shift to the application level. Applications with indexed and stored historical data at scale may form a competitive advantage.

DeSo

Protocol Design

After launching the controversial product under the name BitClout in March 2021, DeSo continues to advance its unique Layer 1 chain designed specifically for social applications. This chain is currently a hybrid proof-of-work chain based on Bitcoin's algorithm, thus lacking features like smart contracts. However, in the first half of 2023, DeSo will undergo a hard fork to migrate the network to a proof-of-stake design.

To customize the chain for social applications, DeSo has abandoned the general-purpose chain and instead defined core transaction patterns specific to social applications. Standard social activities, such as posts and profile updates, as well as NFT transaction types, are defined at the network level. Additionally, DeSo defines financial transactions that support standard token exchanges, as well as creator tokens and a social tipping feature called Diamonds.

Diamonds serve as a tipping mechanism for content creators. The more diamonds a user receives as tips, the more DeSo tokens they earn. Creator coins are automatically allocated to accounts and can be purchased in exchange for DESO tokens. As an account becomes popular, people will want to hold (buy) that creator's coins, leading to price increases for existing holders.

All content on DeSo is stored on-chain, except for original images and videos, which are stored with centralized providers like Google Cloud or decentralized providers like IPFS. Through this design, the state of the chain continuously grows, limiting its long-term decentralization potential.

Pros and Cons

DeSo's main advantage is also its disadvantage. As the network expands to accommodate different social applications, its maintenance difficulty grows exponentially. As new posts and transactions continuously expand the state, DeSo nodes will eventually struggle to afford the cost of storing all this data. Therefore, while DeSo will be able to scale according to its design decisions in the medium term, one day the choice will be either a decentralized network with productive low-cost nodes or a more centralized chain with extremely high costs per node.

Another major downside of DeSo is the limited design space provided to application developers. Without general-purpose smart contracts, it is nearly impossible to build novel crypto-native features. Instead, applications are forced to use deterministic features coded by the DeSo team, such as creator coins and tipping features. However, with the upcoming hard fork, DeSo is introducing access control and associations, which indeed expands the design possibilities for applications.

Appeal of Social Graphs

Among the four major social graph protocols, Lens has the greatest appeal. Its development momentum is partly due to the heavily promoted ETHGlobal hackathon, which attracted numerous developers and projects. In turn, users are drawn to the products built, resulting in over 100,000 Lens profile accounts, with approximately 24,000 active accounts monthly.

Farcaster and CyberConnect are both in earlier stages during their launches, resulting in less overall appeal compared to Lens. Although DeSo is the longest-active protocol and the only one not in a closed release, it has about 5,500 active posting users, 75% fewer than Lens. Additionally, due to DeSo's low costs and open access for everyone, its content is more dominated by bots.

While Lens dominates the market, no social graph protocol has seen truly attractive, differentiated products built on top of it. Therefore, early user metrics do not reflect the target market for the next "killer" application.

At this early stage (under 1 million users), protocol design is more important. The design potential of new business models does not merely mean the initial user numbers of the first-generation applications. That is to say, the features and product direction of first-generation applications do indeed predict how the front end may ultimately package functionalities and attempt to compete in an open-source, open-data environment.

Front-End Applications

The application layer combines all functionalities exposed in the social graph layer into familiar user experiences. While each application largely uses the same underlying components, their use cases vary and are typically divided into three broad categories:

• Entertainment Applications ------ Social feeds, video sharing, and other applications primarily used for connection and entertainment.
• Workplace Apps ------ Group and DAO tools focused on coordinating tasks. Traditional examples include Slack and Discord, as well as task management applications like Asana and Trello. Although not yet connected to DeSoc, crypto applications like Console, Dework, and Wonder will be crypto-native examples.
• Free Applications ------ Adjacent applications providing services like NFT trading typically integrate profiles in some limited way, as profiles are not core to the product or service.

While entertainment applications like social feeds are considered the core use case for social applications, workplace applications are responsible for creating a vast amount of content daily. In large companies, millions of PowerPoint slides and memos are produced solely for communication with others within the organization. This form of content creation is then shared via email or Slack rather than traditional social media channels.

As DAOs shift work from a closed paradigm to an open one, the stereotypical role of content creators will significantly expand to include more tangible and useful things rather than just entertainment content creation. Given the demands of business content creation (i.e., financial aspects and certification), there is strong support for crypto tracks over traditional social media tracks, making this untapped pool of content creators a huge growth opportunity for DeSoc.

Currently, most front-end applications built on decentralized social graph protocols are entertainment-focused. Many of these applications are primarily social source applications concentrated within the Lens ecosystem.

Lenster

The top three Lens applications by post count ------ Lenster, Phaver, and Orb ------ are all social subscription protocols. Lenster is a web-based Twitter-like application with the most weekly posters, exceeding 35,000. Since its launch, Lenster has accounted for approximately 30-50% of all weekly posts on Lens, as well as over 90% of browser-based Lens posts. In the past four weeks, Lenster's weekly posts have grown by 44%, surpassing Phaver's 7% growth, which is the second-largest front end.

Phaver

Phaver is a mobile application built on Lens with all standard social features. Its main purpose is to introduce unique gamification features to incentivize future activities and reward users. Each user can "stake" tokens on posts they believe will attract attention from others. If the post performs well, users will receive additional tokens as a reward. Additionally, users can post their content in "premium channels." After sacrificing some points, content publishers will be able to earn extra points for each user who stakes on their posts afterward.

This incentive mechanism rewards both top content creators and top curators (stakers). Moreover, it can help prevent spam, as paid posts incur costs. However, staking on posts is currently free, leading to skewed incentives favoring frequent posting until costs are introduced. Consequently, Phaver has nearly 40% of posts dedicated to Lens, but only 9% come from comments and retweets as secondary engagement.

Orb

Orb is an iOS mobile application based on Lens and is one of the fastest-growing Lens front ends, growing over X% since its release last month. In addition to content feeds, Orb offers video, podcast, music, and chat features as part of its recently released content. Furthermore, Orb integrates Wav3s, a growth tool that allows users to boost their content by incentivizing others to share it within their networks. By adopting tools like Wav3s, it is part of a broader Web3 Growth Stack, enabling Orb and other applications to rapidly incentivize user adoption and engagement in ways traditional platforms cannot.

CyberConnect

While CyberConnect does not have as strong an application ecosystem as other social graph protocols, it has gained decent traction with its uniquely positioned Link3 product. Link3 serves as both a global social identity similar to Linktree and an event product. It allows users to host webinars and issue NFTs (W3ST) to attendees, indicating their attendance, as well as conduct local raffles for attendees. CyberConnect's 2023 summit was hosted entirely on the Link3 platform by figures like Kyle Samani.

Since its launch, the platform has minted over 1.1 million NFT attendance certificates, and by December, the number of unique NFTs issued weekly and the number of unique collectors have been at or near historical highs.

Farcaster

Given that the network is in the early stages of development, the vast majority of activity is driven by Farcaster's own client, a recently released Twitter-like mobile application available on the App Store. While the network and its application usage account for about 10% of active posters on Lens, it has a highly engaged user base. Nearly half of the active posters have been posting for over three months, with nearly 75% of posters having posted for a month or longer.

So far, Farcaster's applications have driven most of the network's usage (mainly due to Hubs still being closed), but recently, several new clients have joined, such as Purple, Omilos, and Discove. Each client offers a similar social feed-style platform with marginal improvements, such as curated feeds for various topics. However, there are also alpha-stage projects like Pixel Pool, aiming to move away from Twitter-like products and offer video on top of Farcaster.

Once Hubs open, the number of front ends and the diversity of their functionalities may increase.

DeSo

While DeSo has a range of applications, from blogging applications to fundraising applications, over 75% of network posts come from three social applications:

• Desofy ------ A mobile social media application and the most prolific DeSo application. This application is supported by the DeSo Foundation and allows users to earn through diamond tips and NFT sales.
• Diamond ------ A web-based social feed product supported by the DeSo team. Its features encompass all monetization aspects of DeSo, enabling users to post short and long-form content on the site, in addition to images and videos.
• DeSocialWorld ------ A multilingual social feed aimed at a global audience. It also showcases most of DeSo's features, including content and monetization.

Currently, given DeSo's deterministic design, the feature sets of applications are quite similar. However, with the upcoming hard fork, DeSo will introduce access groups to build more customized functionalities.

However, one issue is the lack of independent projects built on DeSo. Given that DeSo is one of the only social graph protocols open to all users, most usage occurs through DeSo-sponsored applications, with independent builds yielding little effect.

Competitive Dynamics

Since any application can display users' posts, friends, and the overall social graph, users can freely choose any front end to engage with their networks. However, this user mobility brings fierce competition to the front-end layer that traditional social applications do not face. This competition arises from the network effect advantages retained by the social graph layer, while the front end lacks strong moats to retain users.

Front ends can establish competitive moats in two ways: through token models like Phaver or by building advanced recommendation algorithms in their own indexing processes.

While token models and loyalty programs can drive user adoption and retention, traditionally successful moats are scale-driven. In a world where airdrops and token models depress costs in industries like DeFi, front ends that can scale to support customized data collection, indexing, and recommendation functionalities may be more sustainable. Additionally, since front ends possess richer information about user interactions with products (time spent on pages, scrolling behavior, etc.), the user data used to build recommendation engines will become richer over time.

Over a longer time horizon, the increased data collection and scale at the front end may pose competitive risks to the social graph layer. If the front end can scale beyond all competitors, the incentive to write data back to the social graph will significantly diminish, thereby reducing the potential value capture of the social graph protocol.

Aggregation

While most front ends are specific to particular social graphs, nothing prevents front ends from aggregating content across multiple social graph protocols for users. An early example of this style is Yup, which spans Lens, Farcaster, Mirror, and even Twitter.

In Web2 businesses, aggregators often represent the primary business model identified by Ben Thompson. However, a key distinction between Web2 aggregators and crypto aggregators is the accessibility of the underlying data. Popular aggregators like Google, Facebook, and others aggregate information that is difficult but not impossible for individual users or small companies to collect.

In cryptocurrency, the convenience of aggregation is too low, given its open data and social graphs, to become a sustainable moat. While having customer relationships is beneficial, maintaining these relationships in the face of a series of airdrops and other incentive strategies is challenging. However, if aggregators manage to reach the scale at which they index and process data (rather than merely reading), then the aggregation business model may once again triumph over other adverse competitive dynamics.

Conclusion

Money, as an incentive force driving human movement, concentrates energy into less centralized areas, much like physical forces. When the incentive forces of a platform cannot balance the $230 billion with nearly $6 billion for creators, a significant incentive force will attract developers to create balancing technologies and entice creators to adopt them.

The open architecture of DeSoc allows anyone to build applications on top of the social graph. With no major network effect barriers, the feasibility of new social applications and business models is greatly expanded ------ for both traditional creators of entertainment applications and knowledge worker creators.

However, front-end applications need to build crypto-native features that provide compelling value to users (i.e., beyond traditional social in the crypto space). Given the current state of applications and application infrastructure, DeSoc may require some time to complete the functional experimentation phase before becoming the foundation of people's online identities.