This is the 1985th original article of Vernacular Blockchain. Author: Terry. Produced by Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)
Web3 social networking is an old topic. Recently, friend.tech, a new Web3 social networking startup, has created quite a stir in the crypto community with its social fission and IP monetization tactics, and has also brought concepts such as Web3 social networking back into the spotlight.
In fact, as of now, the development practice of the entire Web3 social track is still in its early stages, including the definition of Web3 social. The crypto industry has been divided and there is no unified statement:
On the one hand, there are many projects named "Web3 Social", including not only single application projects such as content platforms, social platforms, and instant messaging, but also underlying infrastructure protocols such as social media protocols, asset data protocols, and decentralized social graphs.
On the other hand, all projects that hope to depict a feasible vision and future for Web3 social networking have not yet come up with products that are convincing enough for everyone, and each company’s exploration of "Web3 social networking" is still a blind man touching an elephant.
01 Mainstream Web3 social protocols
At present, the exploration of the "application layer" of Web3 social can be mainly divided into content platforms, social platforms, instant messaging, social tools and other tracks. We will observe the typical mainstream projects among them.
friend.tech: A new social network in Web3
The model of friend.tech is to tokenize an individual’s social influence. Fans or other users can purchase KOL’s shares and get the opportunity to chat with them privately. At the same time, their shares will increase as more people buy them, creating profit opportunities for holders.
The advantages of friend.tech lie in its good user experience and "quasi-Ponzi-style gameplay". The former is reflected in some details, such as new users only need to log in with a Google or Apple account and recharge the automatically generated wallet. Recently, friend.tech has also launched a web version, and users can use friend.tech in the browser.
The latter is more critical. Once this quasi-Ponzi scheme starts to work, it is easy to open up the situation and trigger FOMO emotions:
Early investors have an advantage and it also incentivizes new users to quickly join and purchase KOL shares. Since the share price will rise with the increase in participation, early participants will be incentivized to actively promote the platform, thereby helping the platform's user growth.
Lens Protocol: “Twitter for Web3”
The vision of Lens Protocol is very similar to "Web3 Twitter" - mainly based on new content created by users (posts, pictures, music, etc.), all social activities of a single address (Post, Follow, Comments, Mirrors, etc.) are recorded and minted as NFTs, and ownership is confirmed through content NFTization.
In addition, Lens Protocol has taken modularity into consideration from the very beginning and is positioned as a universal protocol that can be used as middleware to support any platform for access and use. Any other project that wants to do Web3 social networking can use the social graph of Lens Protocol and build products according to unified underlying standards.
Simply put, Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph built on the blockchain. It is biased towards the "acquaintance social networking" of social media functions (functions such as Twitter and Weibo), combined with the fan economy, and uses NFT to confirm the rights of creative content and social behavior, and finally forms a social graph:
That is, Lens focuses on the social interactions (Post, Follow, Collect, Repost) between creators and the community, allowing creators to have connections with the community, and forming small central social graphs around the creators.
CyberConnect: A social graph protocol for development
CyberConnect has built a decentralized social graph protocol in Web3. These social graph data include not only wallet addresses, related assets, and on-chain transaction activity data, but also off-chain data and connection data on social networking sites such as Twitter, as well as lists of wallets followed or followed.
Therefore, CyberConnect mainly provides infrastructure integration services for developers of different applications, allowing these applications to efficiently and quickly adopt CyberConnect's social graph data, or provide precise and targeted services for addresses with certain characteristics.
On the other hand, as the number and types of applications connected to the CyberConnect infrastructure increase (including applications in categories such as games, metaverse, NFT markets, content publishing, media, social applications, etc.), users can "roam" in multiple DApps with their asset data, identity, and social graph relationships.
BBS Network: Decentralized Forum
If friend.tech, Lens, etc. are products like Twitter, then BBS Network is a "Web3 version" of a public message board (forum), similar to Tieba and Reddit:
It consists of potentially countless forums. Users can not only freely create forums, decide the forum's theme, operation and management, etc., but also initiate or participate in any discussion, communicate with each other, express opinions, and create content.
In general, BBS Network has four roles: Developer, Operator, BBS owner, and User:
- Developers can build a front-end that better meets the user experience based on the underlying data;
- Operators provide data storage services;
- Forum owners can create forums (any user can create their own forum through BBS.market);
- Users create and react to content.
BBS Network stores all data on the blockchain, and each post is made into an NFT, which can be bought, sold, and collected by users. In this way, the ownership of the content is returned to the creator in the form of NFT, thereby completing the update of the traditional application revenue model.
In general, the current content mechanisms of friend.tech, Lens, etc. are actually not fundamentally different from traditional content platforms. The main difference is the addition of the Token model:
On the one hand, it can more directly transform creators’ influence and creativity on social media into a cash flow income;
On the other hand, by removing the constraints of traditional Internet "intermediary platforms", creators do not need to go through any centralized platform or be restricted and "exploited" by any centralized platform (of course, friend.tech also has commissions).
02 Telegram’s new attempt
Compared with the Web3 native social projects mentioned above, Telegram can be seen as another attempt in the opposite direction.
The blockchain world has always lacked real incremental users, which is a recognized pain point and difficulty. In addition to the top CEX/DEX, Web3 projects such as Brave, which has the highest traffic in the industry, are said to have tens of millions of daily active users, but they are probably difficult to compare with Telegram, the world's largest encrypted communication software with hundreds of millions of active users.
The Web3 social projects mentioned above, such as Lens and CyberConnect, are naturally not on the same order of magnitude. This feature of having a broad user base and being sufficiently open is also Telegram's biggest competitive advantage compared to many native Web3 projects.
At the same time, since launching the TON Token financing plan in 2018, Telegram has indeed been moving closer to crypto projects and blockchain.
Especially in recent times, Telegram is trying to make the triple jump from a communication protocol to a social platform and ultimately become a super application based on its broad user base.
For example, the recent Telegram robot has supported a separate track, and various new projects and imitations continue to emerge. Among them, the TON Foundation also launched the Telegram Apps application center in August this year, which integrates various applications in Telegram, from games, wallets to practical tools.
Thanks to the open source nature of the Telegram client, various SDKs and the official Bot API for developers, countless developers can create various service robots and compete with official applications. Users can easily find various service functions such as music, movies, books and games on Telegram.
TON Foundation Chairman Steve Yun and Telegram CIO John Hyman also delivered a speech at TOKEN2049 titled "Transforming Telegram into Web3 with Toncoin," stating that the goal is to integrate TON into existing Telegram applications and encourage projects to use small applications as a user layer to expand influence and adoption.
03 Where will Web3 social media break through?
In fact, if we go back to the roots, the essence of social interaction is the display of personal value, and with the support of blockchain, this value can be directly expressed in the form of money (Tokens) - users can financialize their social influence and directly obtain income in the form of Tokens, without the problem of third-party commissions such as platforms.
This is also the core reason why NFT has always had a deep connection with Web3 social media - with the help of the non-homogeneous characteristics of NFT, it is entirely possible to map unique creative content and put it on the chain, thereby using NFT as the basic carrier of Web3 social networking.
Just like the Lens mentioned above, it records all social activities of a single address (Post, Follow, Comments, Mirrors, etc.) and casts them into NFTs, confirms ownership through content NFTization, and the composability and non-negotiability of Lens functions are centered on NFTs, and the function is guaranteed by the properties of NFTs.
The underlying protocol can charge a fee for each NFT tweet, helping creators to directly profit from each view and forwarding, and tokenizing the content creator’s tips or users’ payments.
That’s why when Musk acquired Twitter, so many people expected him to use Dogecoin or other cryptocurrencies to realize the Web3ization of Twitter.
However, the path of "social financialization" has not yet been widely adopted. The reasons are many, including the difficulty in achieving both decentralization and user experience; the limitations on user base and size, and the inability to find an entry point for growth; and the lack of innovation in gameplay.
From this perspective, Telegram is currently one of the most promising breakthrough directions - the social scenarios between accounts in Telegram can essentially be inserted with financial functions, and of course Telegram is doing so:
- Unibot launches stablecoin exchange feature, which users can use by simply using the standard buy and sell options in the main menu;
- Launch of self-custodial wallet on Telegram;
- EthSign and TON have partnered to launch the EthSign bot, which supports signing contracts within Telegram;
- Crypto payment solution Wallet Pay allows users to pay Bitcoin, Tether and Toncoin to merchants within the Telegram interface;
- TON introduces encrypted messaging capabilities with end-to-end encryption, ensuring that only the sender and receiver can see the content of the message.
This also means socializing all financial scenarios (transfers, transactions, payments, etc.), realizing social + financial functional scenarios such as transfer transactions, capital flow, and asset custody. With the addition of 800 million users, there is huge room for imagination.
This is also the future direction of Web3 social networking with great potential for imagination - automating and tokenizing payment, reward, transaction and other settlement modules at the underlying protocol level, which will be a completely different new Web3 social landscape.
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