Does anyone still remember how people socialized before Facebook came along in 2004?
According to unscientific statistics: There are about 7 billion people on the earth. The probability of two people meeting is 0.00487, and the probability of knowing each other is only three billionths. This means that 20 years ago we had almost no chance of getting to know a person in a different geographical location without going through a third party. However, the advent of Facebook connected people from all regions into a network through the Internet, and social networks were born.
From the time when people could only communicate through letters and face-to-face, they can now get to know a stranger across the ocean by tapping the screen at will, which has greatly shortened the distance between people. As a result, Facebook has become a shining star in the revolutionary Internet wave at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
Currently, the encryption market is in full swing with updates and iterations, much like the Internet wave back then.
With the arrival of a new round of bull market, excellent projects in various tracks are also emerging one after another. If Facebook came into being after the completion of the Internet infrastructure in 1999, then with the continuous construction of the encryption world, the Facebook moment of Web3 is about to come.
A look at the evolutionary history of Web3 social networking
It is extremely necessary for us to draw lessons from the past and look at the future from the past to make predictions and deductions. In fact, before Lens, there was no product exploration specifically focusing on social attributes in the entire Web3 track. As true OGs, Satoshi Nakamoto and his group of veterans are still accustomed to the retro-style community of forums and blogs. Although the forums are somewhat crude, they still have a unique flavor.
With the emergence of Discord, people began to truly think about what a decentralized social platform should look like. The ultra-high open source attribute of Discord is nothing more than an iterative innovation of Internet social networking. The rich enough custom permissions allow people to taste the sweetness of decentralized communities, but this seems to be still a little short of the real Web3—— For the decentralization of social economic systems.
The Socialfi track was born.
As a representative product of the first generation of Socialfi, Lens Procotol has attracted much attention for its extremely grand narrative and SocialFi concept, aiming to become the basic data layer for social on-chain. However, the task of improving the on-chain infrastructure has been long-lasting, consuming materials and labor, and due to the failure to find a suitable way to embed assets in the product, in the early days of SocialFis development, the making money effect of users in the agreement was too weak, resulting in it not being able to last long Achieve user retention.
Time comes to 2023, and the second generation of Friend.tech has become a phenomenon-level hit. This product is centered on the capitalization of social network influence and attempts a one-to-many network-like social form, and the design of Bonding Curve has brought a large enough wealth effect to early participants. However, the bubble generated by the continuous wealth creation eventually burst. Ultimately, it is because the relatively closed system lacks sufficient externalities, which leads to the rapid loss of users after the wealth effect weakens.
In the third generation, new paradigm products represented by Farcaster and UXLINK began to emerge. Just take Farcaster as an example. It has risen rapidly with a number of innovations. It has not only received the full support of Buterin, but also gained the favor of capital. Farcaster optimizes the user experience through the Frames feature, allowing developers to create interactive posts for their audience. Users can participate in more forms of activities, including minting NFTs, participating in games to receive rewards, and even purchasing goods in the client Warpcast.
At the same time, Farcaster believes in deep community engagement over superficial engagement data. Therefore, by encouraging long-form high-quality tweets and enabling features such as $degen rewards, these unique interactive models enable them to maintain excellent community activity and set a new benchmark for decentralized social networking in terms of community culture and activation.
Challenges and balance: attempts to integrate Social and Fi
From Lens Procotol and Friend.tech, we found that the balance between strengthening social functions and enhancing financial attributes is difficult to grasp, and it is also the core of the success or failure of decentralized social platforms.
If you focus on social functions and ignore financial attributes, it would be better to make an ordinary Web2 social application. Because the social platform technology in Web2 is more mature, the user base is larger, and trust is easier to cultivate, the overall development cost and customer acquisition cost will be lower. On the contrary, if you focus too much on the money-making effect and ignore the users social experience, then the product itself will not have the core competitiveness and sustainable development capabilities. When the bubble is too big, the system will easily fall into a death spiral due to lack of externalities. From this point of view, it is simpler and cruder than sending a Dogecoin or Meme to make money faster.
Just like the emergence of ve(3, 3) in DeFi iterations, Web3 social networking also needs an economic model suitable for its own track. This model should provide positive benefits to the platform, content creators/KOL, and platform users in the social ecosystem. Specifically, creators can be rewarded for creating good content, and users can gain expected benefits through in-depth participation in the ecosystem, keeping more users on the platform and improving the platforms user retention rate and loyalty. Furthermore, it promotes users’ payment behavior within the platform and attracts capital to join, forming a positive flywheel.
Third-generation applications such as Farcaster, through the introduction of reward systems, community incentives and rich interactive functions, make users believe that they can reap direct or indirect benefits by deeply participating in the community, publishing high-quality content, tracking KOL dynamics and other behaviors. Therefore, high user stickiness is achieved, allowing users to spontaneously stay in the community, attracting KOLs and capital from other platforms to join, and then continuing to invest in infrastructure and iteration, forming a positive growth flywheel.
In a word, finding the balance between Social and Fi, a decentralized social platform, is essentially to introduce externalities to create and sustain revenue expectations for users.
AI: Unexpected social empowerment of Web3
In addition to improving past shortcomings, Web3 social platforms are also actively exploring new growth points, and AI drive is one of the main attempts. In the social field, the application of AI technology is not limited to improving user experience. It is also deeply involved in the construction and development of the social ecosystem behind the scenes. By combining machine learning, LLM and other technologies, personalized content recommendations can be achieved, allowing users to discover content and communities that are more relevant to their interests. Web2 giants such as Twitter and Facebook have already used it to their full potential, and domestic ByteDance has taken the AI recommendation algorithm to its extreme, creating viral products such as Douyin and TikTok that are popular around the world.
In Web3, another new social star, UXLINK, currently keeping pace with Farcaster, has launched a new exploration and practice of AI empowerment. For example, apply AI technology to the functions of creating, managing, and maintaining communities. UXLINK pioneered the use of AI GroupKit Bot (an AI DApp) to help individuals or project parties establish and manage their community UX Group. In the future, UXLINK will also provide functions related to AI assistants, providing users with information gaps by quickly searching for online encrypted information, so that users can have a smoother social experience.
In the future, UXLINK can also use AI technology to optimize its incentive mechanism and adjust reward distribution based on user contributions and participation. This not only enhances user stickiness, but also ensures the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of the economic model.
In short, AI technology brings huge development potential to Web3 social platforms such as UXLINK. It can not only improve user experience and promote community interaction, but also demonstrate value in multiple dimensions such as platform security and incentive mechanisms.
Hidden BOSS: Reconstruction and Innovation of Trust
Although blockchain and decentralization aim to improve trust, trust remains the biggest challenge to wider adoption of blockchain technology. New users are reluctant to get involved due to suspicion and fear. Developers are attacked by fake wallets and hackers, and scammers commit fraud through decentralized social platforms, making it difficult to trace and other issues, making decentralized products always troubled by trust issues. If trust is reconstructed and innovated, new users will be willing to join and stay in this platform? The third generation of Web3 social products is actively exploring ways to break the game.
Way to break the situation no.1 -- Emphasis on the concept of acquaintance socialization
Anyone who has used social platforms knows that most social platforms will have a people you may know or similar function. By linking users with their acquaintances, it not only helps to cultivate trust, but also It helps the platform achieve growth and fission. Because when a user receives an invitation from an acquaintance to enter the platform, or a new user enters this new environment and discovers that they have many acquaintances active on the platform, they will naturally develop a certain amount of trust in the platform and be willing to continue using the product. At the same time, through functions such as joining groups with acquaintances, you can broaden your network of relationships and become acquaintances with more people, consolidating trust and activity in the platform. UXLINK, from the beginning of its design, targeted the segment of social networking with acquaintances. Introduce two-way social graphs and groups to strengthen trust by promoting interaction and consensus building among acquaintances. The six degrees of separation theory in social psychology states that any two people in the world can be connected through up to five people. It can be seen that promoting social interaction with acquaintances and building trust from point to point will become UXLINK’s magic weapon to achieve user growth and fission.
The way to break the situation no.2 -- the clichéd product power
Building a complete social ecosystem and active community atmosphere is very helpful to gain the trust of new users. After all, sincerity is always a must-win. When users join a social platform, what they will see is an active, in-depth and contentful community, a complete social ecology, an excellent interactive interface, and a smooth user experience. The products Once the strength is in place, the cultivation of trust will be a matter of course. For example, when formulating its user growth strategy, Farcaster not only focuses on motivating the old and new invitation model, but also focuses on improving the platforms content quality, community activity and user experience. When users were invited to Farcaster, they were attracted by the experience close to Web2 social software, high-quality tweets, and the presence of high-quality KOLs, and the trust of new users was successfully established.
A Stone From Another Mountain: About Farcaster and UXLINK’s Ecological Construction Strategy
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 concept of this openness is to encourage innovation and diversity, and by giving developers freedom to enrich ecological application scenarios, from content sharing, online interaction to on-chain games, etc., thereby attracting a wider user group. 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 function and diversified front-end applications, while ensuring that the Farcaster social ecosystem has the experience of traditional social platform functions, it also allows users to try innovative functions based on the advantages of decentralized technology, thereby attracting users from Stay on your own social platforms.
For example, the flagship client Warpcast ensures user convenience, and the aggregation tool Yup supports simultaneous posting on multiple platforms, etc. In this way, Frcaster not only increases the diversity of social interactions, but also improves user participation and explores new models for Web3 social interaction. At the same time, Farcaster encourages the active contributions of all participants through the incentive mechanism of community participation. Community members participate in ecological development decision-making, ensuring the active and sustainable development of the ecosystem.
In the Farcaster ecosystem, a variety of front-end applications and services have emerged around Farcasters core protocols, playing different roles in the ecosystem.
Warpcast: The flagship client of the Farcaster ecosystem. The interface and experience are similar to Twitter, providing a more secure social environment and richer interactive functions on a decentralized basis.
Searchcaster: Farcaster ecological search engine enables users to easily discover and connect with content of interest or other users.
Yup: A social aggregation tool that supports users to publish and share content across platforms, providing users with a more convenient social media operation solution, which not only enhances user stickiness but also promotes Farcaster breaking out of the circle.
Jam and Alphacaster: Introducing new models of social finance and community governance, exploring new boundaries of Web3 social.
Another key innovation in 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 a new social experience to users. Through Frames, users can participate in activities such as games, voting, NFT minting, and e-commerce shopping directly in the information flow, which greatly enriches the interactivity and fun of social content.
UXLINK
UXLINKs ecological construction strategy 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 barrier for users while protecting the security of user assets. This strategy focuses on building a bridge of trust with users through technology to promote the healthy development of its own ecology. By integrating DApps related to user asset storage and transactions, users can first be convinced that it is safe to store and trade assets in the UXLINK ecosystem.
At the same time, these DApps aim to open up the key function of payment for UXLINK. Just like WeChat Pay, it is logical to integrate a series of functions such as takeout, travel, and express delivery into the WeChat ecosystem. Therefore, only by running through the key function of payment can we have the opportunity to break through the ceiling of the traditional social ecology.
UX Wallet: A wallet enhanced with MPC and future account abstraction technology, providing users with social recovery and automatic execution of private keys, balancing security and ease of use.
UX DID/Profile: Using zero-knowledge proof technology, users can create SBT based on real-world connections and verify it through social applications such as Telegram, WhatsApp, etc., while protecting privacy and allowing users to inherit and use their own independent identities and off-chain social interactions. relation
UX Social DEX: Provides a social trading platform for crypto assets, including but not limited to token exchange, IDO and lending platforms.
In addition, similar to Farcaster, the adoption of an open ecosystem and developer support model ensures technological innovation and ecological diversification, while the hybrid scalable architecture provides good infrastructure support for the ecosystem. The UXLINK strategy focuses on promoting ecological sustainability and active community participation. By incentivizing early users and community governance, UXLINK not only ensures community fairness and growth incentives, but also promotes technological innovation and application diversification through open interfaces and infrastructure construction.
In the protocol layer, UXLink retains open interfaces for ecological externalities, including services that developers can efficiently manage user social identities and relationship data through APIs and ABIs.
In the infrastructure layer, UXLINK adopts a hybrid scalable architecture (EVM + IPFS + cloud), adapts to EVM chains such as Ethereum main network, Arbitrum L2 chain, BNB chain, Polygon and Base Chain, and integrates decentralized storage and The centralized data indexing service retains ecological scalability from the beginning of infrastructure construction.
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. The design of this relatively classic token economic model follows the concept of the ve(3, 3) model, aiming to pursue the overall ecosystem and ecological participants to obtain the maximum return based on fairness. This economic model is designed to motivate users to actively participate and contribute. Although it does not have the strong wealth effect of Friend.tech, it is more conducive to long-term system sustainability and community-driven governance to maximize overall benefits.
As an incentive token for community and ecological development, the utility token $UXUY is mainly used to reward early users who created social networks to contribute to the ecology, thus ensuring fair and incentivized growth of the community. UXLINK uses asset quantity rather than price to incentivize early active users, and is relatively gentle in creating bubbles.
From Crypto Adoption to Mass Adoption -- the importance of ecological construction is self-evident.
Although there are similarities and differences in ecological construction strategies between Farcaster and UXLink, they both embody a common concept: in the Web3 era, the success of social applications not only depends on their technical advantages or the size of their user base, but also on whether they can build an open, A diverse and continuously innovative ecosystem. Only through continuous ecological innovation and community cooperation, introducing positive externalities into the system and creating a positive growth flywheel, can the long-term success of the decentralized social form be truly realized.
Conclusion
The innovation diffusion theory in communication proposes that whether an innovation is adopted by everyone depends on 5 main stages: awareness, interest, measurement, implementation and adoption. Today, Web3 has walked out of the primitive jungle and entered the implementation stage, although this means that the innovation of Web3 is currently only accepted on a small scale around the world.
But what can be expected is that under historical materialism, Crypto Adoption to Mass Adoption is inevitable in reality. Just like a group of challengers coming to the last locked door, whoever can find the password first will win the treasure.
