Author: @iamsixsix_eth | @RealResearchDAO
The hot topics shift constantly in the crypto industry. From DeFi to NFT, to GameFi, we’ve witnessed many once hot topics in their respective time. However, SocialFi seems to have not captured much attention. But in fact, the topic of SocialFi, despite not having a blast, has never cooled down. Nowadays, the concept of SocialFi has gradually attracted more attention along with the acquisition of Twitter with Elon Musk (social media can quickly accelerate the landing of Web3, which is why Musk bought Twitter.) In fact, the reason why SocialFi remains lively is largely related to the nature of it being a traffic hub.
Play-to-Own, a new concept derived from GameFi, is now applied to SocialFi: Social (read, sing, write, etc,)-to-Earn. So, why should you care about SocialFi?
1. Social networking has always been the most important part of the development of the industry, which is shown in the form of DID. DID in a narrow sense is a decentralized personal identity authentication system. In a broad sense, DID is a variety of application products developed based on identity authentication. As more and more projects begin to be presented to the market in the form of platforms or multi-functional aggregation, their demand for different functions is gradually increasing. Compared with independent re-development, choosing mature DID tools in the market to access, participate in the operation of the project as a component is being valued by more and more developer teams.
2.SocialFi is a natural gathering place for traffic: after several years of development, the crypto industry is gradually retreating from the advantages of the blue ocean. In addition, the Matthew effect has become more and more obvious in the past two years. Exchanges or other projects want to seek incremental growth in the industry. Costs are rising exponentially. If an organization wants to conduct volume, then Web2 will become the biggest virgin land compared to the web3 industry. At first, the main idea of the industry was to connect Web2 and Web3 users through games and achieve conversion. However, after many experiments by different institutions, the road to bridge the game users is long and difficult, and it is difficult to truly shoulder the high expectations placed on it.
In contrast, the SocialFi project, as a natural traffic gathering hub, has solved the problem of traffic collection itself. The only task left in front of the Web3 enterprises is conversion. This is also what the blockchain-adapted platform needs to think about: the major users of the platform's governance rights are the Business users (influencers, guilds), and to drive these users into the market, it is necessary to first gather the retail users.
Coupled with Musk's acquisition of Twitter and the big move to Web3, it is no surprise that we are expected to see a mega exchange, a launchpad, and an NFT Marketplace being built based on Twitter's huge user pool in the future. And Musk's move will set a role model for other companies in the industry. In the future, it is certain that there will be more and more SocialFi or Web2+Web3 fusion.
Therefore, I tentatively conducted a survey of seven SocialFi projects that are still in maturity, and also for self-studying,
1.Phi
Official website: https://philand.xyz/
The metaverse social network that visualizes on-chain identity has won three awards of ENS, IPFS and Covalent at this year's global hackathon, won the grant of Uniswap on September 21, and officially stated that it has received support and funding from the well-known blockchain project Lens Protocol. It can be said that it is a Web3 project that has a huge potential. Phi’s mainnet is expected to be launched in November.
At present, there are 16,000 followers on Twitter and about 10,000 people in Discord, which are still relatively small. Players can use their own ENS domain names to generate their own metaverse plots. There are already more detailed airdrop guides online: https://mirror.xyz /0xF2eE2c1FF9A392c23C11664D12A5C656794B7081/m4gTLyA5y_-mLLuNvMXPlK6WIWTUA8v1pKWzD8lAu24
Reason for recommendation: Phi has won multiple big prizes, and has not issued tokens yet. Try to engage with it more and expect a potential return in the future.
2.Gather Town
Official website: https://twitter.com/gather_town
Gather Town is a metaverse office that uses a platform to combine a 2D game-like interface with video chat. Users can host various conferences, events, recruiting and more on Gather Town. It has raised $50 million in funding including Sequoia Capital over the past two years. Justin Sun also participated in events in Gather Town before.
As a metaverse product with a deep background and rich traffic, it may be infused with Crypto in the future and become a phenomenal project.
3.WebX
Official website: https://webx.cool/ with 12,000 followers on Twitter
WebX is a decentralized social network that empowers users to grow themselves. Relying on Twitter, it uses traditional social media methods to gain more crypto-native users, thereby promoting the healthy development of the entire ecosystem.
WebX is a browser extension. After installation, it will be embedded on your Twitter, allowing you to publish NFTs, Airdrop and other tasks at any time. At the same time, users can also participate in NFT tasks published by others and obtain NFT as rewards. At the same time, WebX will launch a game system in the future that is similar to Steam. Users can get SBT by holding the corresponding tokens, and they can get additional token rewards by bringing Web2 users into Web3.
The project is currently in the development phase, but the above model deserves attention.
4.Lifeform
Official website: https://www.lifeform.cc/
Lifeform is a decentralized digital identity solution provider that received seed round investment from Binance Labs. It is also a visual DID protocol of the same type as Ready Player Me and Genies.
Lifeform focuses on the development of visual DID integration solutions. Its core products include 3D hyper-realistic virtual human editors, visual DID protocols, secure smart contract suites, native decentralized identity SaaS system services, and an underlying engine of metaverse for Web3 cross-application development.
Not long ago, Lifeform launched the Public Mint campaign with a price of 1 BUSD. Until now, Lifeform AVATAR has 30,000+ Owners, and its official website has received 1.4 million visits.
More and more people are beginning to understand that the best way to guide web3 is to start directly from social media, and Lifeform, as an important member of Binance's social strategy, may gain higher weight in the Binance ecosystem in the future.
Based on the advocacy of Live-to-Earn, Lifeform is developing related functions to earn rewards through live streaming,
At present, Lifeform has confirmed that it will issue tokens, with a total supply of 1 billion, and its token LFT will bear the payment of the daily consumption of the project ecology and the reward of Live-to-Earn.
5.Lens Protocol
Official website: https://www.lens.xyz/
Lens is an open source, composable, decentralized social media underlying protocol (they call themselves Social Graph) built on Polygon, with general social media features such as profile editing, commenting, retweeting, etc. The difference is that Lens Protocol is powered by NFTs, allowing users to own and control all the content they create.
At present, the LENS ecology is very active, and many developers choose to develop their own ecological applications based on LENS. Such as Web3 blog Lenster, Share-to-Earn platform Phaver, etc.
6.CyberConnect
Official website: https://link3.to/
CyberConnect is a decentralized social graph protocol serving the Web3.0 social network and metaverse.
As of now, CyberConnect has completed two rounds of financing with a total of $25 million, of which Multicoin Capital, Animoca and Sky9 are its investors.
CyberConnect describes data standards, storage infrastructure, identity and rights management mechanisms as the foundation for a seamless and secure digital social experience in Web3. CyberConnect also proposes a topology of a social data network consisting of indexed data and recommendations that can be universally accessed and contributed without permission.
7.Relation
Official website: https://relationlabs.ai/home
Relation is committed to becoming a value explorer of social graph data on Web3. The vision is to provide the most powerful and richest social relationship graph for the global multi-chain ecosystem, and jointly explore the new paradigm of people and organizations, relationships and behaviors in the Web3 world, and be the next-generation social infrastructure for Web3.
Relation announced the completion of seed round financing at a valuation of $20 million on Jan 28, 2022. Investors include HashKey Capital, SNZ Holding, Signum Capital, SpringWind Ventures, DRK Lab, Nothing Research, Winkrypto, etc.
Summary
In general, the SocialFi sector is still in the stage of accumulating momentum, and it is being paid attention by more and more large Web3 enterprises and institutions who entered this market.
With the expectation of a small bull in 2023 and Bitcoin halving in 2024, the entire crypto industry will expand again, allowing more outsiders to enter the market.
At that time, a huge circle that cannot be ignored is about to form, and the social needs based on this circle may directly detonate the popularity of SocialFi. Before that, all we need to do is to seek the opportunity, take root in it, and wait for the blast to come.