Despite CyberConnect, Lens, and Farcaster's first-generation social products aiming to improve on-chain social infrastructure, they ended in failure after a long period and significant costs. The second-generation product, Friend.tech, centered around the assetization of social network influence, achieved success thanks to its efficient price discovery mechanism. However, Friend.tech's success and failure both stemmed from assetization, as users who bought keys at high points faced substantial losses, and delays in the airdrop plan and updates to new versions led to a gradual loss of users.

If the third generation will iterate in any form, perhaps the SocialFi product UXLink, which focuses on off-chain social assets in the form of RWS (Real World Social), can provide some reference for the entire SocialFi market.

UXLink Product Layer Analysis

The Woes of SocialFi: The Path of Three Generations of Products

Before delving into the UXLink product, let’s first review the first two generations of SocialFi products represented by Lens Protocol and Friend.tech.

The narrative of the first-generation SocialFi products was overly grand. Lens Protocol was designed from the outset to become the foundational data layer for on-chain social interactions, but it did not effectively integrate assets into the product. Without a proven SocialFi scenario, users could not generate strong expectations for returns within the protocol, leading to user attrition due to the poor "Fi" attributes.

In contrast, the second-generation Friend.tech chose a one-to-many networked social form, and the design of the Bonding Curve created significant wealth effects for early participants. However, due to an overemphasis on the "Fi" attributes, it created a large bubble, and the system was relatively closed with insufficient externality, resulting in rapid user loss once the wealth effects diminished.

In the latest third generation, UXLink targeted the niche of acquaintance-based social interactions from the beginning and designed a dual-token model on the asset side. The product architecture is more complex, divided into basic application layer, protocol service layer, and infrastructure layer, which support and complement each other while leaving sufficient interfaces for external protocol integration. In the acquaintance social scenario, UXLink has created a social ecosystem that includes traffic entry, social asset trading, and infrastructure. Let’s break down the UXLink product framework from top to bottom.

UXLink Basic Application Layer

The application layer primarily provides basic product services such as growth fission and group functions for ecological applications. This layer utilizes MPC-TSS wallet account services and group-based EOA account services to lower the entry threshold for users and protect the security of user assets. The main products currently include the following three sections:

• UX Wallet & DID: A MPC-based AA enhanced wallet that users can create through Telegram, capable of executing social recovery and custody while balancing security and low entry thresholds. When creating a wallet, zk technology is automatically used to create an SBT based on real-world connections for users, allowing them to inherit and use their autonomous identity and off-chain social relationships while protecting their privacy;

• UX Group: Groups in UXLink are the basic units of the social network, managed by AI to empower group resources and data;

• UX Social Dex: Users can trade crypto assets directly based on the AA wallet, with IDO and lending platforms to be launched subsequently.

Protocol Service Layer and Infrastructure Layer: Expanding Externality Scenarios

In the protocol layer, UXLink reserves open interfaces for the ecosystem's externality, allowing developers to efficiently manage user social identities and relationship data services through APIs and ABIs. This seamless integration ensures dynamic and combinable on-chain social applications.

In the infrastructure layer, UXLink adopts a hybrid scalable architecture (EVM + IPFS + Cloud), including EVM chains such as Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum L2 chain, BNB chain, Polygon, and Base Chain, integrating decentralized storage and centralized data indexing services, preserving the ecosystem's scalability from the outset of infrastructure construction.

Regarding interface expansion, those familiar with Web2 marketing SaaS platforms will understand UXLink's ambition and the cleverness of its layout—user data's value is equally important compared to the number of users. With the intervention of external interface applications, the measurement of user value is no longer limited to a single dimension of a single application; each application scenario represents a new value dimension.

The so-called externality is key to breaking the social death spiral.

Asset Layer

Lessons from the Past: Understanding "Fi"

SocialFi = Social + Fi; any Web3 product cannot do without assets. The first two generations of SocialFi products faced extreme situations due to an imbalance in their grasp of "Fi." The first-generation SocialFi product Lens focused too much on the infrastructure layer, NFT-izing all social behaviors, which limited users' profit potential. Coupled with the long delay in airdrop expectations, users' limited funds and attention shifted to other products with higher return expectations, resulting in dismal product usage data.

The second-generation SocialFi product Friend.tech, on the other hand, was overly aggressive in its "Fi" design. Although the Bonding Curve design attracted a large amount of capital and users in a short time, it also created a significant bubble. As early participants took profits and exited, along with trading wear and tear, long-term users generally faced losses in ETH terms. Similarly, with the prolonged delay in airdrop expectations, most users chose to cut their losses and leave.

Learning from the experiences of the two previous flagship products, UXLink adopts a more balanced dual-token model on the asset side, decoupling governance and utility into two tokens: $UXUY and $UXLink.

Utility Token $UXUY

$UXUY is the incentive token for community and ecological development. The earlier users create social networks to contribute to the ecosystem, the more $UXUY they receive. This approach ensures fairness and incentivizes growth within the community.

$UXUY uses a diminishing logic similar to Bitcoin in quantity, employing a calculation formula closely tied to Bitcoin's mining logic. Key variables affecting token reduction include time, the number of connections per node, and the total number of users in the UXLink network. Over time and as the UXLink network expands, the amount of UXUY users receive will decrease exponentially. Therefore, users entering the UXLink network later will receive less $UXUY, emphasizing the scarcity and value of early participation.

$UXUY can be used to pay on-chain gas fees within the entire ecosystem, covering transactions, transfers, and social network interactions, and is subject to UXLink's token burn mechanism.

UXLink incentivizes early participation based on the quantity of assets rather than price, creating a more moderate bubble. While it may not have the powerful wealth effects of Friend.tech, it ensures the healthy and sustainable development of the entire system.

Governance Token $UXLINK

$UXLINK is primarily used for project governance and capturing real revenue from the UXLink ecosystem to distribute to community users. The token supply and distribution are as follows:

Notably, in the 65% community allocation, 40% is allocated to users, while all other ecological contributors and partners account for 25%.

The release of $UXLINK is closely related to community members and ecological contributors. According to the $UXUY generation formula, the potential supply reaches its maximum when the user count hits 30 million. Of course, when the user count reaches 30 million, the network can operate stably without further incentives.

Conclusion

In terms of product cycles, Web3 moves at the pace of a day, while Web2 moves at the pace of a year. If the launch of Friend.tech brought about the Twitter moment for the SocialFi track, then UXLink, starting from acquaintance-based social interactions and achieving a more balanced approach, represents the third-generation SocialFi product that opens the WeChat moment.

Since its launch, UXLink has achieved excellent data growth in both user quality and quantity. Currently, it has reached a total of 4.6 million users, over 80,000 groups, with a total coverage of 6.55 million people; in terms of quality, after launching the web3 wallet feature in February this year, over 978,000 new wallets were created and connected to UXLink within a month, with an average of over $70 in assets held per wallet, and a remarkable new registration/UV ratio of 42%.

The SocialFi product model based on off-chain real-world social networks has been validated in practice. With such a vast user base and a complete infrastructure and application layer, we can expect the UXLink ecosystem to explode in a bull market, igniting a new wave of SocialFi.