Web3.0 aspires to transform societies broadly, rather than merely financial systems.
— — Decentralized Society：Finding Web3’s Soul
In comparison with such scenarios as finance and game, “sociality” implies a demand concerning a broader spectrum of human activities and fundamental needs. While technology, space, body, memory, image and other elements are classified as “media” dimensions, this social meta-capital will also well nourish the Web3.0 world in reverse and jointly construct a new social system.
Anatomizing “Pig Flying in a Booming Draught”
SocialFi, that is, Social plus Finance, means socialized finance. A SocialFi project is generally high in financing scale and infinite in scalability for not only its integration of the logic of Web3.0(decentralization, anti-censorship), the logic of DeFi finance(investment, token, tokenFi, platform growth bonus) and the logic of sociality but also its incorporation of such relevant modules as NFT, Web3.0, various marketplaces, online tools as well as protocols.
Then how does “social”, the variable distinguishing SocialFi from other sectors, produce its unique value to catapult SocialFi into its booming draught?
According to Digital 2022, there are 5.31 billion mobile users worldwide, 4.95 billion Internet users, and 4.62 billion active social media users as of January 2022. Active social media users account for 58.4% of the global population, with an annual growth rate of 10.1%, higher than the 4% growth rate of Internet users and the 1.8% growth rate of mobile users. The 4.62 billion active users spend an average of 2h27min a day on social apps and open an average of 7.5 social apps per month. As a fundamental human need, social interaction helps people obtain information, conduct social interactions, realize cultural input and form social consensus. Catering to the social nature of human beings can bring a huge potential TA and user base to the platform.
In addition, the emergence of SocialFi could solve the previous problem of monetization of products, advertisements and services, and establish a creator economy with a production community. Through the creation of new assets such as personal token assets, creative content assets, membership rights, project tokens, etc, a social network can create more valuable resources. Individuals can also avail themselves of their speech or special identities(such as KOL and Whales status) to coordinate and obtain benefits in the network, and to freely exchange between social capital and economic returns to some extent. And tools, including minting , INO, platform commissions, royalties, reward voting or paid subscriptions, and repurchase, will then bring economic value and new commercial models to projects concerned.
As for the content, SocialFi also provides each node with an opportunity to realize individual sovereignty, which guarantees the freedom of public speech to a certain degree. Users can share and communicate and realize the assetization of value information in a traceable and verifiable environment, which is jointly maintained through open, distributed and shared underlying logic, thus transforming personal identity from a digital labor to a resident of a new public sphere. In addition, in terms of privacy, data attribution, and distribution of interests and assets, the logic of decentralized autonomy has also created a new value flow, and has derived numerous new crowdfunding business models.
More broadly, SocialFi ecosystem is essentially the construction of a new form of social interaction. In addition to mapping the real social network and restructuring the formerly solidified social division of labor, this imaginative social space further engenders the possibility of reconstructing the entire social consensus, communication logic and power relations.
From this perspective, in contrast to other sectors, SocialFi is more likely to get rid of the gimmick of “Pump’’ and genuinely adopt users’ value proposition. To promote healthy development of the whole ecosystem, we need such products to integrate social needs and economic incentives, implementing the original intention of Web3.0 to transform society while realizing personal and community influence. In this sense, its media attributes significantly conduce to the SocialFi sector’s evolvement into a “Blue Ocean”.
Participants Surfing Ups and Downs
As well acknowledged, competitors in a “Blue Ocean” are of a motley crew.
Riding on the ambitions of trend-setters, SocialFi’s ecosystem has formed by many different implementations: from social tokens (token distribution, content capitalization) to decentralized social platforms; from players focusing on vertical niche markets to featured projects that cut into the market through functionalities; from web3 portal tools to non-encryption native token issuance. Here you see greenhands who have just dived into the “Ocean” and veterans who have been surfing the ups and downs.
Existing socialfi products: https://mirror.xyz/jojonas1.eth/tRejExcZGdNXh-FKYn_39Euo-htO6iHqiydbsIO9tr4
We have selected three examples for analysis, so as to guide readers to understand the overall situation in detail from different aspects.
1. Modules contained:
(1) NFT and related tools, Web3 and related tools, various marketplaces, on-chain data tools and protocols, etc.;
(2)
[Status] Wallet, web3 browser, Dapp;
[Lens protocol] Protocol, NFT casting, on-chian data integration;
[BOOM] Dapp, protocol, NFT, data integration on Mirror chain;
2. Platform model; value provided:
(1) model of integrity and diversity;
(2)
[Status] With instant messaging as its core, Status integrates functions such as wallet, Dapp browser, Moments dynamic/ point-to-point encryption of information, and achieves forward secrecy through the “double ratchet” algorithm;
[Lens protocol] Lens combines all social activities of a single address, including posts, comments, followers, mirrors, and other content NFTs produced, minting them into profileNFT. Users fully control their own activity trajectory data/ turn the zero-sum game of web2.0 products competing for users into incremental cooperation;
[BOOM] Positioned as the Little Red Book(Xiaohongshu) in the crypto world, BOOM offers real-time recommendation of customized high-quality content through on-chain data integration/ space, whale update/real user interaction channel/assets/NFT;
3. User profile:
[Status] Crypto lovers;
[Lens protocol] posts, comments, follows, mirrors and other content NFT holders;
[BOOM] Crypto lovers/NFT holders;
4. Financing scaling, token and other economic mechanisms:
(1) The scale of financing is high and the comprehensive social platform is highly scalable;
(2)
[Status] raised $109 million in 2017; $SNT is the native token of status network, in ERC20 format. Currently $SNT can be used to purchase emoticon NFTs in the stickers store, and can also be used for spam filtering (cold message senders need to hold a certain amount of SNT to be received);
[Lens protocol] Created by the AAVE team, not yet clear;
[BOOM] During Q3 BOOM is about to start financing, and many domestic and foreign investors are currently approaching;
According to above examples, we can roughly get a glimpse of the general appearance of a SocialFi product from different perspectives such as project type, establishment time, usage scenarios, implementation mode, main functions, user portraits, and economic models.
In fact, whether it is a social platform, community platform, instant messaging, media platform or infrastructure, SocialFi has hewed out a variety of innovative ways to play. In addition to the common concept of token-incentivized open source collaboration activity, SocialFi can also aggregate funds through the voting mechanism and smart contracts of the investment community to find potential investment opportunities, or even split, curate or mortgage some NFT products. At the same time, there are many auxiliary tools landing.
Participants surfing the fluctuating waves in this “Blue Ocean” are constantly shaping the ecosystem of SocialFi from different dimensions. The high ground is gradually rising, and the leading projects in the industry enjoy a moment of glory, while still some participants have quietly withdrawn. However, in the general trend, with the outbreak of new applications in this sector, the social value and the possibility of its monetization have pushed up the market value of SocialFi all the way up.
https://coinmarketcap.com/view/social-money/
https://coinmarketcap.com/view/communications-social-media/
Journey of the New Order
In the traditional Internet era, UGC platforms such as Twitter and Weibo transferred the cost of information and content production to users, who, while obtaining massive content for free, bring considerable traffic to the website itself. However, the users themselves have become the “digital laborers” of these websites, contributing a lot of time and energy to the platform yet unable to obtain actual benefits for themselves.
SocialFi holds high the banner of individual rights and interests, striving to transform users from “laborers” to “masters”, “return data sovereignty to users”. It empowers each user’s creative content and social influence, and helps users realize personal value while sharing platform traffic and revenue. This is a logically coherent model structure that has already begun to execute, and is now making great strides forward.
Currently the SocialFi ecosystem is still in its infancy. While vanguards are exploring its future form and growing direction, they are faced with several problems: for instance, in terms of the current product ecosystem of SocialFi, has a consistent economic system been established? Are there still issues of benefit distribution and cooperation mechanisms in the new system? With the further development and expansion of SocialFi’s value ecosystem, is there any re-centralization of power? This series of questions is challenging practitioners who yearn for an entry into the SocialFi or those who have been diligently cultivating in this field. On the journey of building this new order, there are probably some short-term profit chasers, but more are pioneers, explorers and builders.
About BOOM
BOOM is a SocialFi platform connecting Web2.0 and Web3.0. Since it was launched in January, the early users have reached 100,000 and Boom has now become the most popular decentralized Crypto Lovers community in 2022.
Website | iOS APP | Android APP | Google Play APP | Twitter | Telegram | Medium
