Messari, an encryption data and research institution, recently released Messari Theses 2024. In this report, Messari summarizes the top ten investment trends in 2024. In addition to DePIN and AI, the report also highlights optimism for several emerging narratives, including DeSoc and DeSci. (Although this is a new direction that Messari predicted at the end of 2022, it has not fully taken off in 2023.) These narratives focus on connecting the ideas of Web3 with the real-world social and technological fields. BlockBeats has compiled the DeSoc and DeSci competition. Noteworthy agreements and projects in Taoism.
Related Reading:Messari’s 2024 investment forecast: pessimistic about ETH, optimistic about the new narrative of AI, DePIN, and DeSci》
DeSoc
In 2022, DeSoc (decentralized social networking) is also a track that Messari is optimistic about, and its value growth space is traceable. On the one hand, considering the practical scenarios of Web3, decentralized social networking has always been a very convincing application scenario. The DeSoc protocol connects personal account information as NFT with digital content. All account and content relationships (social graphs) are open and readable by developers. Anyone can build front-end applications based on social graphs to achieve a variety of Function. This breaks the technology stack of traditional platforms. The revolutionary impact of censorship resistance and composability on traditional social platforms will continue.
On the other hand, in May 22, Vitalik Buterin introduced the concept of SBT (soul-bound token) in his co-authored paper Decentralized Society: Searching for the Soul of Web3. SBT is considered to be the link between Web3 and DeSoc The basic building block in (decentralized society). In Vitaliks vision, DeSoc is a bottom-up community that aims to promote Web3 towards hyper-financialization and create a more inclusive, democratic and decentralized society. system.
The DeSoc track is still in its early stages of development, but some protocols and projects are rapidly evolving into viable consumer application infrastructure. BlockBeats has compiled the four most popular social graph protocols and front-end applications built on top of them.
Source: Messari
Lens（Hey、Phaver、 Orb）
Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph protocol built on Polygon, with NFT as the core element. Users hold their own profile NFTs (Profile NFTs) through wallets to publish content and confirm rights. These contents will be stored in Arweave and IPFS. Wait for the decentralized storage infrastructure to be built, and update the content link to the users graph NFT. At the same time, all social behaviors and relationships of users are stored on the Polygon chain in the form of NFTs, and interactions and connections between different graph NFTs are achieved through a series of fixed modules.
Lens Protocol will migrate and upgrade to the V2 mainnet in November. The V2 upgrade will increase Lens speed by at least 2 times while providing a more scalable system. Due to the adoption of an open decentralized underlying architecture, in addition to applications developed by the project itself, Lens Protocol also has other third-party applications, as well as several compatible decentralized social technology stacks, which are very popular. Apps include Hey, Phaver and Orb.
Hey.xyz
Hey.xyz (formerly Lenster) is a decentralized, permissionless social media application and Twitter-like client created during the March 2022 Lens hackathon. Users can connect to other users graph NFTs on Hey.xyz, or join various communities for interaction such as commenting, co-creation, and governance. Ordinary users can browse the content dynamics on Hey.xyz at will, but if they want to interact with it, they need to hold the graph NFT.
Phaver
Phaver is a mobile app built on Lens with all the standard social features. Phaver’s “Web2.5” mobile application, launched in May 2022 during the mainnet launch of the Lens protocol, allows anyone to register using a familiar Web2 login, and gradually guides users to join Web3 without the need for a wallet. As of September 2023, Phavers app has received over 250,000 downloads and accounts for the majority of Lens Protocol mobile app posts.
When Lens users post in Phaver, they can decide whether to broadcast it on-chain to Lens, or only post on Phaver. Lens posts reach an audience outside of Phaver in all other Lens applications and reside on-chain, and are immutable, while Phaver posts allow editing and deletion. In both cases, users are rewarded with points for the points their posts earn on Phaver. Likewise, if the account is linked on Phaver, any posts made on other Lens clients will appear in Phaver and accrue points.
On October 5, Phaver completed US$7 million in financing with participation from Polygon Ventures, Nomad Capital and others. The new funds will be used to expand the size of the team as well as product development and other partnerships.
Orb
Orb is a community-focused Web3 social application with chat and community functionality. The chat feature allows users to connect and communicate with friends, while the community feature allows users to join groups of like-minded people. Launched as a side project during Graph Day in San Francisco in June 2022, Orb began as a professional network (the web3 version of LinkedIn) powered by on-chain credentials and quickly gained traction among Lens users. Orbs omniities feature is built on the ERC-6551 standard, which allows each NFT to have its own ERC-4337 smart contract wallet, capable of holding other NFTs and tokens, expanding the concept of digital ownership.
Orb ended closed beta in December 2022. Completed $2.3 million in financing on September 21, 2023. This round of financing was led by ArkStream Capital, Superscrypt, Founders, Inc., Foresight Ventures, Aave Companies, Aave Companies and Lens Protocol founder Stani Kulechov and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal Participate in investment.
Farcaster（Warpcast、Yup、Alphacaster）
Farcaster is a web-based social graph founded in Silicon Valley by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both of whom previously held senior positions at Coinbase. Users can connect their wallet addresses on Farcaster to display their NFTs, or use NFTs as proof of past actions. Client applications can even be built on top of it to broadcast messages on the Farcaster network, as well as read messages from any user. Vitalik Buterin is a heavy user of Farcaster. He often posts updates in Farcaster, and his active frequency far exceeds his posting frequency on Twitter.
In July 2022, Farcaster completed a $30 million seed round of financing led by A16z. On October 12 this year, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero announced that after three years of development, Farcaster has now achieved 100% license-free use. Now, any user with an internet connection and Ethereum is free to register and use Farcaster without relying on any other person or organization.
Most of Farcasters ecological components are off-chain applications, while the on-chain part only includes DID (FID account, ENS) and storage signature contracts, which can reduce development costs and the threshold for user interaction to a certain extent.
Warpcast
The official client of Farcaster is Wrapcast. Its overall usage habits are similar to Twitter. It adds some Web3-related hashtags and hotspot data tracking on the chain. For example, users can choose to connect their accounts with commonly used Ethereum addresses, and their friends You can see the users recent NFT transactions and mint records.
Yup
Yup is a social content aggregator that can associate Lens, Twitter, Farcaster, and bluesky into an APP. Users can publish content to multiple associated platforms at once, and can also receive social push messages from multiple associated platforms. Yup had raised a total of $3.5 million in a round of funding led by Distributed Global in October 2021.
On November 17, Yup’s mobile version was launched on the APP Store.
Alphacaster
Alphacaster is a DAO community voting governance tool, which is divided into two categories: DAOs and NFTs. Communities are classified according to user wallet asset categories, and only those who hold designated assets can speak in the corresponding community.
Deso（Desofy、Diamond、DeSocialWorld）
DeSo is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for building and scaling decentralized social media applications, aiming to decentralize social media and scale storage-intensive applications to billions of users. DeSo aims to provide an open source platform so that creators on the DeSo platform can benefit from decentralized social media, own their own content and profit from it. The way the economy works is that both the creators and users of the platform benefit together, creating a win-win situation for every user.
DeSo announced the completion of US$200 million in financing in September 2021. This financing was completed through the sale of DESO Token, with participation from a16z, Sequoia Capital, Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. DeSo announced its integration with MetaMask in September 2022, allowing MetaMask users to seamlessly create decentralized social identities. In February this year, DeSo launched the cross-chain trading service MegaSwap, which supports token exchange between different blockchains and allows users to store tokens in self-hosted wallets.
Desofy
Desofy is the first decentralized social media mobile application built on the DeSo blockchain. Desofy gives creators the opportunity to receive rewards directly from users in the form of diamonds (social tips). Users can send “diamonds” or any amount of dollars to creators to have their work evaluated. The entire process does not involve any middlemen, ultimately helping creators obtain the true value of their work.
Every user on Desofy has a dedicated “Creator Coin” in their profile that anyone can buy and sell. The price of these coins can fluctuate up and down based on the number of people buying and selling the coins. Therefore, creators who create high-quality content can own more valuable coins, which is another way for them to increase their value and generate more revenue. Desofy enables creators to build communities using social tokens. By using social tokens, users can interact more with their followers and set up advanced features such as one-on-one personal chats, early access to music, and more.
Diamond
Focused on empowering users with data ownership and monetization in the blogging space, Diamond App provides native blogging capabilities that allow creators to build, grow, and monetize their audiences. By storing all content on-chain, Diamond App enables permissionless and decentralized blogging, attracting more than 130,000 monthly active users. The platform supports the minting of NFTs, social tipping systems, creator coins, and building active communities, providing creators with the opportunity to earn income through various applications in the DeSo ecosystem.
DeSci
DeSci stands for Decentralized Science and is an action to use Web3 (including NFT, smart contracts, DAO) to achieve fair and equitable funding, creation, review, storage and dissemination of scientific knowledge by establishing public infrastructure. DeSci encourages scientists to share their research openly and receive credit, while allowing anyone to easily access and contribute to their research.
DeSci is recognized by the scientific research community because it can provide practical application value, including solving the challenges of raising research funds, eliminating the intermediary relationship between researchers and reviewers, and realizing the goal of truly opening science to the world.
Trust in scientific institutions is probably at an all-time low, and the system is riddled with bureaucratic inefficiencies, inadequate data methods, and poor incentives (peer-reviewed papers lead to tenure). But as mentioned above, the incentive mechanism of cryptocurrency is meaningful, and the emergence of DeSci is gradually changing the traditional scientific research dilemma.
Some time ago, DeSci caused a small wave of craze. Former Binance CEO CZ said on social platforms that he had been reading about biotechnology and thinking about how to use encryption technology to accelerate research funding there. As we all know, the encryption circle has been researching longevity for a long time, and DeSci perfectly meets the research needs in this field.
According to Messari report data, 50% of DeSci projects were established in the past year. BlockBeats has compiled the following projects worthy of attention in the DeSci ecosystem.
ResearchHub
ResearchHub is an encrypted scientific research platform co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and others, aiming to change the traditional scientific research journal publishing model. Users earn ResearchCoin (RSC) by posting content to ResearchHub, with the number of RSC received proportional to how valuable other members of the community consider the content to be.
Users can earn RSC rewards in the following ways: share PDFs of research papers (provided no copyright is infringed), comment on and discuss scientific research, conduct peer reviews on scientific papers, receive RSC rewards from other users, and develop open source features.
ResearchCoin (RSC) currently has a market value of US$32.15 million. In June this year, ResearchHub completed a US$5 million Series A financing, led by Open Source Software Capital, with participation from Boost VC, Bob Young of RedHat, Guillermo Rauch of Vercel, Amjad Masad of Replit, etc. cast.
Molecule
Molecule is a decentralized biotech research fundraising platform inspired by the citizen science movement and the idea of openness in drug development. Its original ideas came from the patient community and is designed to help advance and fund early-stage drug development. It currently has approximately 40 scientists. Find financial support for their projects on the platform.
Molecule is built on Ethereum and includes two main systems: Molecule Discovery and Molecule Finance. These systems create an active ecosystem for decentralized modular drug development. Molecule uses a combination of smart contracts and legal contracts to form intellectual property NFTs (IP-NFTs). This new mechanism allows anyone to share the ownership of research projects and their future results, such as intellectual property rights, royalties, data, etc.
Molecule goes beyond the basic functionality of its own website and has built a complete and vast ecosystem that enables patient collectives and drug development DAOs to maintain, manage and interact with real-world intellectual property.
VitaDAO
VitaDAO is a biotechnology DAO for decentralized drug development and community management initiated by Molecule and is a leader in research and development in the field of longevity. As the worlds first biotechnology DAO, VitaDAOs main goal is to promote the progress of longevity research and extend human lifespan and health span.
VitaDAO is governed by community members holding VITA tokens and focuses on funding early-stage longevity research projects. It has funded more than 20 research projects, totaling more than $6 million, covering age-related disease research and the exploration of new treatments.
Its native token VITA rose 48% on the 30th, with a market value of US$83.29 million. VITA holders participate in VitaDAOs decision-making process, including project funding selection, fund management and governance activities.
GenomesDAO
GenomesDAO is a biotech decentralized autonomous organization focused on monetizing genomic data, incorporating the concept of decentralized finance (DeFi) to ensure the security, privacy and auditability of genomic data. It also provides researchers with access to high-quality genomic data sets to help them understand the causes of disease and develop new drugs.
Users can pay for whole-genome sequencing services using its native token, GENE tokens, and serve as an incentive to perform queries using their encrypted DNA data vault. Currently, the market value of GenomesDAO is only US$6.038 million.
The goal of GenomesDAO is to promote the development of genomics research and the innovation of new drugs while protecting personal privacy. By purchasing an NFT from GenomesDAO, users receive a genome sequencing kit. The information is sent back to the GenomesDAO team and stored securely. In the future, DAOs could sell this anonymous information to improve drug discovery and other healthcare efforts.
