Do you remember how people socialized before Facebook appeared in 2004?

According to unscientific statistics: there are about 7 billion people on Earth, the probability of two people meeting is 0.00487, and the probability of getting to know each other is only three in a billion. This means that 20 years ago, we had almost no chance of meeting someone from a different geographical location without going through a third party. However, with the advent of Facebook, people from different regions were connected through the internet, and social networks were born.

People transitioned from being able to communicate only through letters and face-to-face interactions to being able to meet a stranger across the ocean with just a tap on the screen, greatly shortening the distance between individuals. Thus, Facebook became a shining star in the revolutionary wave of the internet at the turn of the 21st century.

Currently, the crypto market is rapidly evolving, reminiscent of the internet wave of the past.

With the arrival of a new bull market, excellent projects are emerging in various sectors. If Facebook was born after the completion of internet infrastructure in 1999, then with the ongoing construction of the crypto world, the moment for Web3's Facebook is also approaching.

Exploring the Evolution of Web3 Social

Learning from past experiences is essential for making predictions and inferences about the future. In fact, before Lens, there was no dedicated product exploration for social attributes in the entire Web3 sector. As true OGs, Satoshi Nakamoto and his peers were accustomed to retro-style communities like forums and blogs. Although those forums were somewhat rudimentary, they had their own charm.

With the emergence of Discord, people began to think about what a decentralized social platform should look like. Discord's high degree of open-source nature represented an iterative innovation in internet socialization, and the rich customization permissions allowed people to taste the sweetness of decentralized communities. However, it still seemed to lack some elements of true Web3—specifically, the decentralization of community economic systems.

Thus, the SocialFi sector was born.

As the representative product of the first generation of SocialFi, Lens Protocol has attracted attention with its grand narrative and SocialFi concept, aiming to become the foundational data layer for on-chain social interactions. However, the task of perfecting on-chain infrastructure is enduring and labor-intensive. Due to the inability to find suitable ways to embed assets into the product, the 'earning' effect for users in the early stages of SocialFi was too weak, leading to difficulties in achieving long-term user retention.

By 2023, the second generation product Friend.tech became a phenomenon. This product centers on the assetization of social network influence, attempting a one-to-many networked social form, and the design of the Bonding Curve provided significant wealth effects for early participants. However, the bubble created by the continuous 'wealth generation' ultimately burst, primarily due to the relatively closed system lacking sufficient externality, leading to rapid user loss once the wealth effect diminished.

As we move into the third generation, new paradigm products like Farcaster and UXLINK are beginning to emerge. Taking Farcaster as an example, it has rapidly risen due to multiple innovations, gaining strong support from Vitalik Buterin and attracting capital interest. Farcaster optimizes user experience through its Frames feature, allowing developers to create interactive posts for their audiences. Users can engage in various activities, including minting NFTs, participating in games for rewards, and even purchasing goods in the client Warpcast.

At the same time, Farcaster believes that deep community participation outweighs superficial interaction data. Therefore, by encouraging long-form quality tweets and introducing $degen tipping features, these unique interaction modes allow them to maintain excellent community engagement, setting a new benchmark for decentralized socialization in terms of community culture and activation.

Challenges and Balance: The Attempt to Integrate Social and Financial Aspects

From Lens Protocol and Friend.tech, we find that balancing the enhancement of social functions and financial attributes is challenging and is the core of the success or failure of decentralized social platforms.

If one focuses on social functions while neglecting financial attributes, it would be better to create an ordinary Web2 social application. In Web2, social platform technology is more mature, the user base is larger, and trust is easier to cultivate, resulting in lower overall development and customer acquisition costs. Conversely, if one overly focuses on the earning effect while neglecting the user's social experience, the product itself lacks core competitiveness and sustainable development capabilities. When the bubble becomes too large, the system is prone to fall into a death spiral due to a lack of externality. In this light, it might be simpler and more straightforward to launch a meme coin or a dog coin to earn faster.

Just as DeFi has seen the emergence of ve(3,3) in its iterations, Web3 social also needs an economic model suited to its sector. This model should provide positive returns for platform parties, content creators/KOLs, and platform users within the social ecosystem. Specifically, creators should be rewarded for producing good content, and users should gain expected returns through deep participation in the ecosystem, keeping more users on the platform and improving user retention and loyalty. This, in turn, promotes user payment behavior within the platform and attracts capital involvement, forming a positive feedback loop.

Third-generation applications like Farcaster, through the introduction of tipping systems, community incentives, and rich interactive features, allow users to believe that by deeply participating in the community, posting quality content, and following KOL dynamics, they can reap direct or indirect rewards. This results in high user stickiness, encouraging users to voluntarily stay in the community, attracting other platform KOLs and capital, and continuing to invest in infrastructure and iteration, forming a positive growth flywheel.

In summary, finding the balance between Social and Fi in decentralized social platforms essentially involves introducing externality to create and sustain user expectations for returns.

AI: The Unexpected Empowerment of Web3 Social

In addition to improving past deficiencies, Web3 social platforms are actively exploring new growth points, with AI-driven initiatives being one of the main attempts. In the social domain, the application of AI technology is not limited to enhancing user experience; it also deeply participates in the construction and development of the social ecosystem. By combining technologies like machine learning and LLM, personalized content recommendations can be achieved, allowing users to discover content and communities that align more closely with their interests. Web2 giants like Twitter and Facebook have already mastered this, while domestic companies like ByteDance have taken AI recommendation algorithms to the extreme, creating globally popular products like Douyin and TikTok.

In Web3, another rising social star alongside Farcaster, UXLINK, has begun a new exploration and practice of AI empowerment. For example, applying AI technology to the creation, management, and maintenance of communities. UXLINK innovatively uses the AI GroupKit Bot (an AI DApp) to help individuals or project teams establish and manage their community UX Group. In the future, UXLINK will also provide AI assistant-related features, offering users information gaps through quick searches of online crypto information, thus providing a smoother social experience.

In the future, UXLINK can also leverage AI technology to optimize its incentive mechanisms, adjusting reward distribution based on user contributions and participation levels. This not only enhances user stickiness but also ensures the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of the economic model.

In summary, AI technology brings immense development potential to Web3 social platforms like UXLINK, enhancing user experience, promoting community interaction, and demonstrating value across multiple dimensions such as platform security and incentive mechanisms.

Hidden BOSS: The Reconstruction and Innovation of Trust

Although blockchain and decentralization aim to enhance trust, trust remains the biggest challenge for the broader application of blockchain technology. Due to skepticism and fear, new users are reluctant to engage. Developers face issues like fake wallets and hacking attacks, while scammers exploit decentralized social platforms to commit fraud that is difficult to trace, causing decentralized products to be plagued by trust issues. How can we reconstruct and innovate 'trust' to encourage new users to join and stay on the platform? Third-generation Web3 social products are actively exploring solutions.

Solution No. 1 -- Emphasizing the Concept of 'Acquaintance Social'

Anyone who has used social platforms knows that most of them have a "People You May Know" or similar feature, which links users to their 'acquaintances'. This not only helps cultivate trust but also aids the platform in achieving growth and viral expansion. When users receive invitations from acquaintances to join the platform, or when new users discover that many of their acquaintances are active on the platform, they naturally develop a certain level of trust and are willing to continue using the product. Additionally, by joining groups with acquaintances, users can expand their network and solidify their trust and activity on the platform. UXLINK, from its inception, has targeted the niche of acquaintance social. By introducing a bidirectional social graph and groups, it strengthens trust through promoting interactions and consensus among acquaintances. The six degrees of separation theory in social psychology suggests that any two people in the world can be connected through at most five intermediaries. Therefore, promoting acquaintance socialization to build trust from point to surface will become UXLINK's winning strategy for achieving user growth and viral expansion.

Solution No. 2 -- The Old Adage of 'Product Strength'

Building a complete social ecosystem and an active community atmosphere is very helpful for gaining new users' trust. After all, sincerity is always the killer skill. When users join a social platform, what they see is a vibrant, content-rich community, a well-developed social ecosystem, an excellent interactive interface, and a smooth user experience. When product strength is in place, trust cultivation becomes a natural process. For example, when Farcaster formulates its user growth strategy, it not only focuses on incentivizing 'old users to bring in new ones' but also strives to enhance platform content quality, community activity, and user experience. When users are invited to Farcaster, they are attracted by an experience close to Web2 social software, high-quality tweets, and the presence of quality KOLs, successfully establishing trust for new users.

Learning from Others: The Ecological Construction Strategies of Farcaster and UXLINK

Farcaster

Farcaster adopts an open protocol and developer-friendly strategy, allowing new applications or services to be freely built based on its underlying protocol. The core idea of this openness is to encourage innovation and diversity, enriching the ecosystem's application scenarios through granting developers freedom, from content sharing and online interaction to on-chain gaming, thus attracting a broader user base. The main effect of this strategy is the rapid expansion and innovation of the ecosystem, as well as the richness of user experience. Through the Frames feature and diverse front-end applications, Farcaster ensures that its social ecosystem provides the experience of traditional social platforms while allowing users to try innovative features based on the advantages of decentralized technology, thus attracting users to stay on its social platform. For example, flagship client Warpcast ensures user convenience, and the aggregation tool Yup supports multi-platform posting. In this way, Farcaster not only increases the diversity of social interactions but also enhances user participation, exploring new models for Web3 social. Meanwhile, Farcaster encourages active contributions from all participants through community participation incentive mechanisms, ensuring the ecosystem's vitality and sustainable development.

In the Farcaster ecosystem, multiple front-end applications and services have emerged around the core protocol, playing different roles in the ecosystem.

• Warpcast: The flagship client of the Farcaster ecosystem, with an interface and experience similar to Twitter, providing a more secure social environment and richer interactive features based on decentralization.

• Searchcaster: The search engine of the Farcaster ecosystem, enabling users to easily discover and connect with content or other users of interest.

• Yup: A social aggregation tool that supports users in cross-platform publishing and sharing content, providing a more convenient social media operation solution, enhancing user stickiness and promoting Farcaster's outreach.

• Jam and Alphacaster: Introduced new models of social finance and community governance, exploring new boundaries for Web3 social.

Another key innovation of Farcaster is the "Frames" feature: it allows developers to embed interactive mini-programs within users' social content. This innovation not only increases the diversity of social interactions but also brings users a new social experience. Through Frames, users can directly participate in activities such as games, voting, NFT minting, and e-commerce shopping within the information flow, greatly enriching the interactivity and fun of social content.

UXLINK

The ecological construction strategy of UXLINK revolves around building a decentralized, user-driven social platform.

By integrating user-friendly DApps and an innovative dual-token economic model, UXLINK aims to lower the entry barriers for users while ensuring the security of user assets. This strategy focuses on building a bridge of trust between technology and users to promote the healthy development of its ecosystem. By integrating DApps related to user asset storage and trading, users are first made to believe that storing and trading assets within the UXLINK ecosystem is secure.

At the same time, these DApps aim to enable UXLINK to facilitate the crucial function of 'payments'. Just like WeChat Pay, which seamlessly integrates a series of functions such as food delivery, transportation, and express delivery into the WeChat ecosystem. Therefore, successfully implementing this key function of payments is essential for breaking through the ceiling of traditional social ecosystems.

• UX Wallet: A wallet enhanced by MPC and future account abstraction technology, providing users with social recovery of private keys and automatic execution features, balancing security and usability.

• UX DID/Profile: Utilizing zero-knowledge proof technology, users can create SBTs based on real-world connections and verify them through social applications like Telegram and WhatsApp, protecting privacy while allowing users to inherit and use their autonomous identity and off-chain social relationships.

• UX Social DEX: A social trading platform for crypto assets, including but not limited to token swaps, IDOs, and lending platforms.

Additionally, similar to Farcaster, UXLINK adopts an open ecosystem and developer support model, ensuring technological innovation and ecological diversity, while its hybrid scalable architecture provides solid infrastructure support for the ecosystem. UXLINK's strategy emphasizes promoting sustainable development of the ecosystem and active community participation. By incentivizing early users and community governance, UXLINK not only ensures fairness and growth incentives within the community but also fosters technological innovation and application diversity through open interfaces and infrastructure development.

At the protocol layer, UXLINK retains open interfaces for the ecosystem's externality, allowing developers to efficiently manage user social identities and relationship data services through APIs and ABIs.

At the infrastructure layer, UXLINK employs a hybrid scalable architecture (EVM + IPFS + cloud), compatible with 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.

On the asset side, UXLINK adopts an innovative dual-token economic model, including $UXUY (utility token) and $UXLINK (governance token), to balance economic incentives and long-term governance within the ecosystem. This relatively classic token economic model design follows the principles of the ve(3,3) model, aiming to maximize returns based on fairness for both the overall ecosystem and its participants. This economic model is designed to incentivize active participation and contributions from users. Although it may not have the powerful wealth effects of Friend.tech, it is more conducive to the long-term sustainable development of the system and community-driven governance, achieving overall maximization of benefits.

As an incentive token for community and ecosystem development, the utility token $UXUY is primarily used to reward early users who create social networks and contribute to the ecosystem, ensuring fairness and incentivized growth within the community. UXLINK incentivizes early active users based on the quantity of assets rather than price, maintaining a relatively calm approach to bubble creation.

From Crypto Adoption to Mass Adoption -- The Importance of Ecological Construction is Self-Evident.

Although Farcaster and UXLINK have differences in their ecological construction strategies, they embody a common philosophy: in the Web3 era, the success of social applications relies not only on their technological advantages or the scale of their user base but also on their ability to build an open, diverse, and continuously innovative ecosystem. Only through ongoing ecological innovation and community collaboration, introducing positive externalities to the system, and creating a positive growth flywheel can the long-term success of decentralized social forms be truly realized.

Conclusion

The theory of innovation diffusion in communication studies suggests that the adoption of an innovation depends on five main stages: awareness, interest, evaluation, implementation, and adoption. Today, Web3 has emerged from its primitive jungle and has reached the 'implementation' stage, although this means that this innovation is still only being adopted by a small range of users worldwide.

However, it can be anticipated that under the materialist view of history, the transition from Crypto Adoption to Mass Adoption is an inevitable reality. Just like a group of challengers arriving at the last locked door, whoever can find the password first will claim the treasure.