Today we use social media applications such as WeChat, Discord, Twitter, and Facebook to transcend spatial/temporal limits and communicate with others, thereby minimizing the time needed for communication or social interaction. However, such centralized social media platforms own important data such as our personal information and ownership. Meanwhile, content producers and users are just another data set. As they seek profits, these platforms would sell our privacy or delete/block our content. Decentralized social media platforms, on the other hand, run on public blockchains. To a large extent, anyone can run nodes, access the backend, create applications, and manage feeds no matter where he is. In terms of profits, this model is fair and appealing to both community members and content creators. Unlike their centralized peers that take most profits away from creators, decentralized platforms directly distribute tips they received from users to content creators.
Web 3.0 differs from Web 2.0 in that the core demands in Web 3.0 start from social media groups and trading. The digital assets we hold reflect our choice of communities, transaction preferences, and asset status. As a growing number of people start buying cryptos, finding like-minded communities in a secure, easy, and efficient manner has become an increasingly urgent demand. In addition, existing tools used for on-chain data analysis focus on the needs of project teams with tech support, and the market lacks a set of easy-to-use and powerful on-chain tools designed for ordinary individuals.
1) Bchat’s solution
2) Relation One’s solution
DeSo, the decentralized Twitter-like products, features the functions of traditional social media platforms such as creating profiles and publishing information. In addition, it also offers blockchain-native features such as social tokens, tips, and NFT transactions. With DeSo, every creator gets a token that anyone can freely buy and sell on the platform, allowing them to innovatively monetize their content and build deeper connections with fans. Nader Al-Naji, the founder of the project, disclosed that he used to be the anonymous founder of the decentralized social network BitClout.
DeSo has the following features:
1) On-chain profile: All profiles are stored on-chain and solely controlled by users’ private keys, making their identity portable between all apps in the DeSo ecosystem;
2) Social NFTs: NFTs minted on DeSo are associated with the artist’s profile and can be shown off on the buyer’s profile, enhancing provenance while making them inherently social and more valuable.
3) Social Tokens: Every profile created on DeSo can have a social token attached to it. Social tokens on DeSo earn cash flows from NFT sales.
4）Tips for social: DeSo allows users to give “Diamonds” to posts rather than just “likes”;
5) Posts: All posts and replies are stored and indexed directly on-chain, meaning that your content is portable across all apps in the DeSo ecosystem.
DeSo’s app ecosystem is taking shape:
Over 200 DApps have been built on the DeSo blockchain:
DeSo covers more than 1.6 million wallets:
On September 21, 2021, DeSo raised $200 million from institutional investors that include a16z, Sequoia Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Pantera Capital, Arrington Capital, Blockchain.com Ventures, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
Built on Polygon, Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph launched by the AAVE team. It features all the regular social media functions we are familiar with. For example, you can edit your profile, publish information, and comment on/mirror (forward) posts. On Lens, such functional interactions are enabled by NFTs, which means that users fully own all the content published by their accounts and can control such content as they see fit.
The most prominent feature of Lens Protocol is that it has turned the functions of Publication, Comment, and Mirror into NFTs. It features three types of modules (Follow Modules, Collect Modules, and Reference Modules) that allow users to follow, collect, and comment/mirror. Moreover, Lens is also tokenized with three layers via NFTs. Lens also performs the three-layer tokenization processing for NFTs. Upgradable contracts are the core entry point for most interactions in the Lens Protocol. Almost all interactions are compatible with ERC721 NFT contracts, which are minted when the configuration file is created.
Lens Protocol is backed by the AAVE team. The project is powered by sufficient funding as there has not been any news of fundraising by Lens. This February, the beta version of Lens Protocol was introduced to test new functions, and users can join Lens to receive airdropped tokens. At the moment, the test has ended.
We can think of NFTychat as the Web 3.0 version of Discord. The project requires no username or password, and users can start chatting for free simply by connecting their wallets with the platform.
Users can also build new communities themselves but have to go through a review process. On NFTychat, you can enter specific group chats via certain settings or proofs. For instance, users can switch their language settings to Chinese and bind their account to an ENS domain name to enter the Chinese channel. Moreover, users with a wallet that contains over 1 ETH can access the whale channel.
The project announced that it had raised $1 million on March 29, 2022 in a fundraising round led by Archetype, with involvement from Coinbase Ventures, as well as angel investors that include Fernando Martinelli, CEO of Balancer Labs, and Tim Beiko, a core developer of Ethereum. Backed by a strong lineup of institutional investors, NFTychat is a promising project.
In recent years, as the crypto community becomes increasingly active, decentralized social media platforms have gained momentum and attracted much attention. In particular, since many decentralized social media platforms have also tapped into NFTs and tokens, a growing number of crypto users are now keeping track of the field, and institutional investors are also making a push into this category. The advantages of decentralized social media platforms, compared to their centralized peers, are reflected by the social value of users in terms of their social network, data, and assets. Such decentralized platforms can maximize the social value and social relations of each user while enabling security protection such as ensured privacy, data security, and limited data access by platforms. As such, when assessing a decentralized social media platform, we should first consider whether the project integrates social values with decentralization.
However, decentralized social media platforms have not replaced their centralized counterparts for obvious reasons: 1) Decentralized social media platforms tend to be poorly made and are no match for their centralized rivals in terms of product quality; 2) With a small user base, decentralized social media platforms cannot fully meet the demand for communication and social interaction; 3) They are rendered redundant by their centralized competitors, which already meet most of the existing user demands; and users see no need to switch to another platform if there’s no new demand; 4) The flawed economic models and information storage methods of decentralized social media platforms make them powerless in the face of privacy and ownership issues, just like their centralized peers.
Of course, these problems are also evidence that the Web 3.0 Social Media Platforms remain in its infancy, and that there is vast space for growth and profits. The frequent fundraising activities show that institutional investors have noticed this opportunity and are very confident in the future of the field.
*No financial advice
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