Much has been written about the need for decentralized social media platforms. Online dating is an adjacent area where Web3 advantages could be equally impactful.

If you have browsed online looking for homes in the U.S., you have probably noticed that the same listings appear in every major app or website. This is due to the MLS services (Multiple Listings Services) used by sales agents to share home listings between each other and with online services using a common data standard.

Now compare this experience with finding a dating partner online: you often have to create multiple profiles, one for each major dating app (Match.com, Bumble, OkCupid, Tinder). This is especially true if you are not in a prime dating age or a member of the LGBTQ community. So why can't we just create a single dating profile and be connected to the entire dating pool?

In selling homes or finding a dating partner, users will benefit from connecting to the largest possible pool. Agents facilitating these transactions directly benefit from finding the highest bid for the house, but current dating apps are paid for providing access to their users. Their success depends on network effects; hence, their business models are more similar to social networks, and they see no reason for sharing user profiles with their competitors.

Web3 can fix this apparent misalignment of incentives between users and service providers: it could reward providers for services that users find valuable, for example, helping them in creating profiles, looking for potential matches, messaging their matches, and filtering spam, while preventing rent-seeking behavior by letting users to own their profile data, and to be discovered by all possible matches in the dating pool. 

Web3 infrastructure and rich economic models could motivate app developers to:

• Onboard users, e.g., by paying them royalties on future user payments, even in other apps.

• Prevent spam, for example, by having to stake a minimum amount of tokens to be considered a valid profile.

• Prioritize incoming connections from the most-interested suitors, e.g., by staking tokens to compete for the limited number of inbound links to each person.

• Status signaling, for example, by pooling resources in liquidity pools to bring in users in certain areas/demographics. 

Innovation in online dating is currently stagnated due to each app having to deal with the difficulty and cost of gathering a critical mass of users in physical clusters. Immediately tapping into a large number of users in the dating pool would fix this most crucial hurdle in creating new dating apps, unleashing innovations in this area: the unbundling of online dating services into individual components (user acquisition, match recommendation, information verification) will create an interconnected and composable ecosystem of specialized service providers and enhance the quality of user experience. 

Nonetheless, there remain several significant challenges in creating an ecosystem of dating profiles and apps using Web3:

• Privacy: centralized dating apps have complete control of their front end and are hence able to expose hosted user data only to a limited subset of users. Meanwhile, the open nature of most blockchain protocols and decentralized storage solutions pose a significant challenge in keeping user dating profile data private.

On the other hand, privacy is a complicated issue when it comes to online dating: users want some of their information, e.g., profile images and dating preferences, to be seen by potential matches, but even for centralized dating apps, there is no perfect way to prevent other actors (employers, co-workers, governments, etc.) from accessing this information. For example, there are reports of certain governments hiring undercover agents who create bona fide profiles on LGBTQ dating apps to identify members of these communities in their jurisdiction.

One straightforward solution is to fully inform users of these privacy challenges and offer them two clearly-delineated ways to share their data: a fully-public path suitable for sharing basic profile information (possibly including non-identifiable images) and the option to privately share specific data, such as identifiable profile images, in an encrypted peer-to-peer manner. This method would be similar to sharing options offered by more privacy-sensitive dating apps, such as Grindr. Another option is to use advanced cryptographic methods, such as threshold cryptography, to give decryption access to particular users for publicly encrypted files.

• Scalability: any economic incentive system designed for global Web 3 dating and running on a blockchain would need to support tens of thousands of on-chain transactions per minute. Such transaction capacity is on-par with blockchain gaming and has only recently been made available via technologies such as rollups (Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum) and app chains (Avalanche, Cosmos, Oasis).

• Off-chain interactions: current on-chain transactions in standard blockchains are cost-prohibitive when it comes to storing even short text messages (e.g., 200 characters) on the blockchain. One notable exception is the DeSo blockchain which is built to support large-scale text storage and indexing on chain. Sufficiently decentralized off-chain messaging and file hosting solutions are needed to maintain fault tolerance and decentralization, at least for non-text data. Protocols like IPFS and Arweave provide decentralized storage solutions, and peer-to-peer messaging protocols like The Matrix offer a solution for real-time peer-to-peer messaging.

• Claim verification: for many users, the ideal dating experience includes a certain level of assurance of others' claims regarding gender, age, education, or location. Zero-knowledge (zk) proofs and decentralized identity ("soulbound" tokens) are upcoming technologies that would make this verification possible while maintaining user privacy.

There are a number of Web3 initiatives in the dating space. Some are from established (Bumble, Tinder coin) players, who add Web3 features, such as NFTs or metaverse aspects, to their Web2 ecosystems; others are Web3 native:

• Truyou: is building a tokenized dating platform on the Algorand blockchain. Financial incentives include "Match Pledging [which] allows for value to be attributed to the once mindless action of 'Swiping.' This reinforces deliberate Matching, further bolstering the quality of interaction within the TruYou platform".

• Datingverse: is creating a metaverse designed solely for dating, utilizing fungible and non-fungible tokens to reward creators. 

• DatingDao: an experiment in Web3 dating. Seems to be currently non-operational.

• Mad Realities: an interactive dating show where the community decides what happens to players using NFTs that allow users to vote on governance and cast members.

In addition to these dating-centric projects, the following projects provide solutions in the adjacent space of decentralized social media and identity:

• DeSo: Decentralized Social in the next evolution of BitCloud. It is a layer 1 blockchain using modified Bitcoin nodes customized for storing and indexing large amounts of text data. Users can log in using their Metamask-compatible wallets into social apps, which store their profile and post data on-chain.

• Disco: is a decentralized identity solution that allows users to own their profile information. They currently support signing profiles using Ethereum/Metamask wallet but plan to expand this capability to other chains.

• Session messenger: Session is a fully open-source decentralized messenger that supports completely private, secure, and anonymous communications. Session provides one-on-one (direct message, or ‘DM’), group chats, and voice calls. Session utilizes the decentralized Oxen Service Node Network to store and route messages. This means that, unlike P2P messaging applications, users can message other Session users when they are offline.

• Lens protocol: is a composable and decentralized social graph on the Polygon network. It uses NFTs to store links to posts (whose contents are stored off-chain) and track likes and followers.

• Farcaster: is a sufficiently decentralized social network. It is an open protocol that can support many clients, just like email. It uses the blockchain mainly as the registry where users point to the client URL they use for communication.

It is hard to imagine the future of online dating to be isolated clusters of user profiles in a handful of closed-off systems. We believe Web3 has achieved the level of maturity needed to support dating applications, and the time is right to give users and developers what they desire.