By Andy Chen, Jad Chahine, Jacob Ko

Before we begin, a big thank you to the builders who contributed to this article: Christina Beltramini (Lens), Alex Comeau & David Finkelstein (Airstack), Abhi Raheja (CyberConnect), Dan Romero (Farcaster), Billy Luedtke (Intuition), Helena Gagern (Salsa), and Suji Yan (Mask Network)

There has been an explosion of technical advancements, new applications, and users building in Web3 Social. Major protocols such as CyberConnect and Lens have launched new versions of their social graphs, there’ve been 7 million POAP NFTs minted to represent IRL and online attendance, over 50 million Galxe NFTs representing onchain actions, and approximately 150,000 tickets per month are sold through GetProtocol’s NFT platform.

Blockchain Infrastructure has now improved to a point where builders have more choice than ever to create, but with the large multitude of protocols & design choices where do they start? In this article we landscape the Web3 Social stack and help lay out the design considerations for builders looking to create the next generation of social media apps.

In Part I of our Web3 Social series, we shared the 4 key Value Propositions of Web3 Social:

1. Open Data & Portability: your data & social graph is owned by you and you can port your information across different social apps.

2. Web3 Composability: blockchain technology enables the combination of different onchain primitives and use cases, creating new experiences & powering the next wave of Super Apps (i.e. users plugging in their social profile & graph with other primitives like DeFi, music, attestations, loyalty, commerce and ‘banking).

3. Next-Level Community Enablement: onchain activity, zk proofs, and token/NFT ownership facilitate the formation of new and unique communities.

4. Censorship Resistance & Ownership: rather than a single source of truth, decisions on content rules can truly be distributed and enforced at the application level.

In this article (Part II of our Web3 Social series) we are going to ‘unpack the stack’ and discuss the different decisions needed to build an application and bring these Value Propositions to life. Note: The companies highlighted in the stack and in this article are not an exhaustive list of the Web3 Social ecosystem.

1. Blockchain & data storage: The foundation on which everything is built, similar to how Netflix is built on AWS. For example, friend.tech is built on BASE, which is a Layer 2 blockchain (“L2”) on top of Ethereum.

2. Social networks: The social graphs that delineate user profiles, relationships, and interactions. For example: Lens, Farcaster, and Cyberconnect.

3. Middleware: Tools and intermediary services that make it easier for developers to build applications and infuse them with utility. For example, Airstack makes it easy to develop composable applications and Huddle01 enables decentralized applications to use video communication.

4. Applications: The interface for users to interact with Web3 Social. For example, Orb allows users to easily access communities that use Web3 technology via their mobile app.

At the bottom of the stack, a decision is required on what blockchain and data storage solutions to use. Given the decentralized architecture of blockchains, they typically cannot handle the volume of transactions and amount of data needed to be stored to run social applications; for example, it costs $60M to store 1 GB of data on ETH Mainnet and an estimated $1.4M on Optimism Mainnet to store 1 GB of data onchain. Teams typically use a combination of onchain and offchain data storage solutions to deal with the trade-off between decentralization and scalability.

At the blockchain level, social apps need to decide whether to use a general-purpose or app-specific blockchain, each with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Which blockchain an app is deployed on will have an impact on technical design choices and existing ecosystem support (users, liquidity, applications, etc).

• General-purpose blockchains are designed to be open platforms to enable a multitude of smart contracts to deploy and operate. Building in these ecosystems will maximize composability and allow apps to easily access data and liquidity that is on the same chain.

• App-specific blockchains are designed to allow for greater flexibility and scaling. Appchains enable the teams to customize their infrastructure, but typically need to bootstrap network security and integrate interoperability solutions to increase composability.

Within general-purpose and app-specific blockchains, there’s a choice in the type of network: Layer 1 (L1) and Layer (L2). At a high level, L1s are a blockchain network with its own set of nodes, form of consensus, and set of rules; whereas, L2s are chains built on top of L1s that solely focus on executing transactions and sending transaction data to the L1 for security. For more information on the nuances of these networks, take a look at Cointelegraph’s research report.

Some considerations below on evaluating blockchains:

For further reading, here are some other helpful resources:

• General-purpose and app-specific L1 landscape: Comparing Layer-1 Platforms by The Block

• App-specific L2s: The Layer 2 Evolution by Binance

Once the decision has been made on the blockchain, it’s time to pick the data storage provider. It can be prohibitively expensive to put the amount of data generated from social protocols onto blockchains, so scalable and secure solutions are key. Decentralized data storage solutions like Arweave can be more than ~250,000x cheaper than posting data onto Optimism and ~10,000,000x cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet.

(Numbers may vary based on gas & token prices. Estimated storage costs of 1GB data: $60m on ETH mainnet; $1.4m on Optimism; $6.52 on Arweave)

1GB storage on Mainnet ($60m) / 1GB storage on Arweave = ~10,000,000x

1GB storage on Optimism L2 ($1.4m) / 1GB storage on Arweave = ~250,000x

While there are many options out there, some of the top Web3 Social protocols today use a few different solutions:

• IPFS: a peer-to-peer network for sharing data, functioning closer to a torrent network. Although IPFS is not a data storage solution, providers like Filecoin, Pinata, and Filebase have built systems on top of IPFS to ensure data storage and retrieval.

• Filecoin: built on top of IPFS, Filecoin adds an incentive layer that enables anyone to come in and pay storage providers a recurring fee to store data over a certain period of time. As of November 2023, storage prices are $0.002336 GB/yr.

• Arweave: unlike Filecoin, Arweave is a blockchain network that enables users to pay a one-time fee for permanent data storage. As of November 2023, storage prices are $6.52 per GB. Additionally, service providers like Irys (formerly Bundlr), ArDrive, and Akord have been built on top of Arweave to augment the capabilities of protocol and simplify the user experience.

• Custom Data Storage Solutions: some social protocols have decided to forgo existing decentralized data storage solutions and develop their own in-house solution.

  • Offchain: protocols like Farcaster have opted to create their own data storage networks.

  • Onchain: protocols like DeSo have built an app-specific L1 optimized to handle large quantities of data.

With so many options out there, how do developers make decisions around the foundational level of their tech stack to solve for scalability and decentralization? Let’s take a look at the design choices of some Web3 Social protocols in the following table:

When deciding which blockchain to deploy an application, it’s important to note that historically Web3 Social networks built on app-specific chains have had the most success. DeSo for example, has facilitated the creation of 2 million wallets, 85+ million transactions, $2+ billion total transaction volume, and $30 million in creator earnings as of October 2023 — more than any other Web3 Social network.

While there’s been great traction so far for app-specific social protocols, we believe that building applications on general-purpose blockchains with social protocols like Lens and Farcaster will bring in the most users, improve composability and community enablement, and minimize onboarding friction. Social applications are a user-centric experience and realize their full potential when augmenting an existing ecosystem’s network of applications to provide better user experiences — not as a standalone product/chain. For example, Farcaster recently migrated to Optimism Mainnet in order to be closer to their community consisting primarily of developers on Ethereum.

Additionally, one of our core beliefs is that blockchain will be multichain and multilayer, meaning the same for Web3 Social. Apps, creators, and entrepreneurs within each blockchain ecosystem will require tools to provide social experiences to their communities. The path for many Web3 Social protocols may begin on a single blockchain (either general-purpose or app-specific), but over time, we’ll begin to see expansion into other blockchains to help different ecosystems build out their social sector. We’ve seen early signs of multichain social networks like CyberConnect; who have spent an arduous amount of time designing and implementing cross-chain features. As it stands, the current state of interoperability and blockchain technologies are too nascent for protocols to easily support a robust multichain social network. For more information on the current state and future of interoperability, read through our series here.

Today, most people think of a social network as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc — places where users share content, view media, and communicate with others within the bounds of their respective platforms. Leveraging web3 technology, we define social networks differently: we see a true social network as a system of relationships and experiences that enables users to connect and communicate with one another, in new ways, irrespective of platform.

Under a decentralized architecture, the interface (frontend platform) and social graph (user connections) are decoupled. A user could post on X and another user could view it on Instagram. Or a user could share a video on TikTok and a user could like and comment on it via Facebook — all without having to sign into different accounts and platforms.

There are two types of decentralized social networks, federated networks (non-blockchain) and blockchain-based networks. Before we dive into blockchain-based social networks, which are best suited to bring the Web3 Social Value Propositions to fruition, it’s important to highlight a few examples of federated networks that are moving the industry towards a decentralized world.

The idea of federated networks has been around for some time; with the first decentralized computing network, Mix Network, being conceived in 1979. Federated Networks helps solve for 2 of the 4 value propositions, namely Open Data & Portability and Censorship Resistance. Similar to blockchain, federated networks consist of many independent servers that are able to communicate with one another through an open standard. You can compare these networks to email where there are many providers (gmail, outlook, etc), but they can all communicate with one another. A recent example of a federated social network is ActivityPub, which launched in January of 2018 with the backing of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The most well-known application on ActivityPub, Mastodon, has almost 2 million MAU, and Instagram is stating that they may move Threads to ActivityPub.

Here are some important federated networks to be aware of:

Federated Networks support many typical social media activities, such as profiles/identities, connections, posts, likes, follows, subscriptions, and comments. But they lack a few of the core primitives required for Web3, namely the ability to create ownership through tokens/NFTs and new experiences through smart contracts.

Similar to Federated Networks, Blockchain-enabled Social Graphs are a form of decentralized social network that include profiles/identities, social connections, posts, likes, follows, subscriptions, comments, etc. The primary difference is that Federated Networks are a peer-to-peer system that emphasizes sharing of information; whereas, blockchain networks primarily serve as a tamper-resistant, distributed ledger. The distributed ledger enables all sorts of new use cases, such as tokens to represent value, trustless governance systems, decentralized compute, and ownership of assets. The combination of tokens with a decentralized social graph provides a much greater chance at adoption than Federated Networks alone and we believe Blockchain-enabled Social Graphs will solve for all four value propositions.

Here are some Blockchain-based Social Graph protocols that are important to be aware of:

Cyberconnect

Founded in 2021, CyberConnect is a multichain social graph deployed on several EVM networks, including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB, Polygon, and Linea. Its most popular dApp, Link3, is a social platform built by the CyberConnect team to help users find events, discover content, and display their profile. CyberConnect is currently undergoing deployment of CyberConnect V3, featuring three core upgrades:

• CyberAccount: an ERC-4337 compatible account that serves as a user’s identity and access point across the CyberConnect ecosystem.

• CyberGraph: serving as CyberConnect’s social graph layer, CyberGraph links CyberAccounts to their content and social connections.

• CyberNetwork: an app-specific L2 optimized for Web3 Social.

To date, CyberConnect V3 is one of the most popular social graph protocols with over 500,000 CyberAccounts and 1M User Operations executed as of November 2023.

Farcaster

Founded by former Coinbase early employees Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan in 2020, Farcaster defines itself as a “sufficiently decentralized social network,” meaning two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it. There are three features required to obtain to be a sufficiently decentralized social network:

• The ability to claim a unique username

• The ability to post messages under that name

• The ability to read messages from any valid name

Additionally, one of the focal points of the team is to provide accessible core infrastructure to encourage developers to build new features and creative applications that may be lacking or improved upon in the current Farcaster ecosystem.

As of November 2023, Farcaster’s metrics show 196K users, 3.5K weekly active users, and over 7.6K casts per day.

Lens Protocol

Developed by the team behind Aave, Lens Protocol is a social graph protocol with a modular toolkit providing users and developers with easy-to-use features adapted to their needs. Lens V1 launched in early 2022 without any user-facing app experiences with the intention of focusing exclusively on providing powerful tools to enable dApp developers to build social experiences. Since then, Lens has quickly grown into a rich ecosystem of applications experimenting with new ways to leverage Lens’ social graph and tooling.

In accordance with their original thesis of supporting developers, Lens Protocol is currently undergoing their next major upgrade, Lens V2, to provide an even greater suite of tools, features, and upgrades to the existing architecture. Here are a few:

• Smart Posts (Open Actions): enabling users to combine external smart contract functions with Lens publications. Developers can create their own set of Open Action smart contracts or use Lens Protocol’s out-of-the-box features.

• Collective Value Share: a system that rewards users, applications, algorithms, and networks for their positive contributions.

• Security: profile manager upgrades, Profile Guardian, and onchain blocking.

• Architecture: social operations are now profile-based instead of address-based, Lens Handles upgrades, and more.

To date, the protocol has facilitated $7M in economic activity, deployed over 100K profiles, and brought in over 4,000 daily active users.

Note: As of November 2023, Lens Protocol is in beta and new users must be approved from a waitlist before accessing the social network.

DeSo

DeSo (short for Decentralized Social) is an app-specific layer 1 blockchain created for decentralized social media applications. Most Web3 Social protocols utilize some form of offchain storage to handle all of the data social applications produce; however, DeSo is able to store almost every social action onchain — identity, connections, posts, follows, likes, messaging, and more. By building their chain from the ground up, the DeSo team has had full control over the design of the chain, allowing them to optimize various elements, including data structures, storage, consensus mechanism, social graph, etc.

The next layer in the stack is middleware. Web3 Social middleware helps bring apps to life by abstracting the complexity of blockchain infrastructure and allows builders to develop standardized, yet unique experiences for their users. Whether it’s the ability to easily communicate across protocol, providing seamless attestation engines, to payments, and more, Web3 Social middleware is certainly a must-have for builders and entrepreneurs.

Web3 Social middleware typically falls under one of two categories:

1. Developer Experience: Providing APIs, SDKs, frameworks, and other tooling to make it simpler for developers to build their consumer-facing dApps — abstracting away backend complexity. For example, instead of developers running/maintaining their own data infrastructure for their Web3 Social app, Airstack abstracts the complexity away by cleaning and maintaining usable data.

2. New Capabilities: Make it possible to build things onchain that weren’t possible before by providing new services that augment the capabilities of the underlying blockchain or social protocol. For example, communication between wallets isn’t a native function to blockchains; however, XMTP bringing this capability onchain unlocks all sorts of new innovations — decentralized chat apps, marketing platforms, etc.

Back when X had a more open API, there was a small but innovative ecosystem of developers creating many different custom features. A lot of the features that you see today were actually built by these third-party developers, such as @ replies, hashtags, quote tweets, and more. Unfortunately, over time Twitter (and many other social media platforms) slowly tightened public access to these tools. In the same way Twitter used to provide an open API, most Web3 Social protocols (Lens, Farcaster, and CyberConnect) also offer a suite of tools to help builders create applications and features — the key difference being that many of these tools are open source and available forever.

Pulling data into an application to display for the user or use on the backend is one of the fundamental building blocks for software. While data on public blockchains are freely available for everyone to view and use, developers quickly find that it is mostly unusable in its raw form. Data platforms are basic core tools that clean, transform, and make it simple for developers to access usable data via APIs and SDKs so developers no longer have to spend weeks if not months building data infrastructure internally to power their software.

Airstack: a web3 development platform that provides GraphQL APIs for integrating onchain and offchain data into any application. They’ve integrated Lens, Farcaster, POAP, XMTP, and more to make it easy to gather data for your application. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Airstack.

Goldsky: a real-time data indexing platform that makes it easy for developers to access the latest blockchain data. They have two core products: a data pipeline platform that easily syncs real-time blockchain data with any offchain database called Mirror and custom subgraphs.

As more and more of our lives move onchain, there will need to be a way to prove that we are who we say we are. We’re excited to see this layer evolve with teams experimenting with different ways to prove identity, including attestations, KYC, biometric proof-of-personhood, and more. We believe identity solutions built with blockchain tech will give us greater control of our information, unlock better protocol & product innovation, and lead to better community & user experiences.

Credentials and attestations are often used interchangeably; however, they’re more-so complementary technologies. The key difference is that credentials are the onchain representation of a fact while attestations are onchain proofs that the credential is true. Placing credentials onchain will allow users to be more expressive of their achievements and contributions. These credentials, represented in the form of NFTs, can express both onchain and offchain actions.

• Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): an open-source public good infrastructure service providing onchain and offchain attestations. EAS is built around two primary smart contracts: one to register a schema to define the data to be attested and one to make the attestation.

• Intuition: a full-stack, decentralized identity & knowledge solution that aims to empower users to provide and query attestations about any subject. This platform provides an indexed, discoverable, and composable knowledge graph constructed with verifiable data — opening up the attestation landscape to subjective claims and more advanced reputational models. Additionally, Intuition enables users and developers to easily filter attestations by the voices and opinions they trust. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Intuition.

• POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol): one of the most popular credentialing protocols, POAP allows users to mint NFTs at live events as onchain proof that they participated in-person.

• Galxe: on the other end of that spectrum, Galxe is a platform that creates campaigns around onchain actions. After users perform these actions, they’re rewarded an NFT credential proving they’ve accomplished said action.

Social media can be a very turbulent place, full of hundreds of thousands of posts and activities per second. Access control infrastructure helps creators create value for their community by giving holders access to exclusive benefits. On the user side, it helps retain a high signal-to-noise ratio in a social feed.

• Collab.Land: perhaps the most well-known access control protocol, Collab.Land allows communities to curate access to social platforms like Discord and Telegram based on tokens held, NFTs, onchain interactions, and much more. They are the de facto tool, serving 50,000+ tokenized communities serving some of the biggest brands using NFTs. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Collab.Land.

• Guild.xyz: the team at Guild have built infrastructure helping online communities to manage access across many social platforms. Guild provides “one membership to rule them all” that allows memberships and access control to be interoperable with connected social platforms (i.e. — utilize Discord membership tiers for Google Workspace without having to rebuild access control from the ground up again).

The most intimate of conversations, sharing of the deepest secrets, jamming on the most outlandish of ideas, and emotional vulnerability happen when there isn’t an audience. Private conversations are a key part of the human experience and a Web3 Social dApp experience isn’t complete without the right infrastructure in place to support this!

• XMTP: an open protocol, network, and standards for secure, private web3 messaging. Founded in 2021, they’ve quickly become one of the most used web3 messaging network in the world and have integrated Farcaster and Lens Protocol on the social network side.

• Ylide: a cross-chain wallet-to-wallet communications solution for Web3 projects. The core product is the Ylide SDK, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate an all-in-one communications platform (including DMs, forums, group chats, etc), spam-prevention mechanisms, and multichain capabilities with over 20 chains supported.

Notifications are not inherently part of Web3 apps. For these apps to share information with their users, they have relied on user activity in groups often within Telegram, Discord or X. Web3 notification systems allow for the sharing of important information, directly within apps and wallets.

• Notifi: Notifi allows for simplified communication across web2 and web3 messaging channels (Discord, Telegram, SMS, Twitter). Designed with simple APIs for easy integration and customizable and advanced features for dApps and web3 applications, Notifi empowers developers and creators to better engage with their users and communities via multichannel communications. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Notifi.

• Push Protocol: a communication network that allows users and developers to communicate through a variety of ways, including notifications, text chat, video chat, and host token-gated spaces.

A lot of dApps in the future will generate content outside the scope of the social graph protocol. For example, data intensive social dApps like streaming platforms may want to allow creators to store VODs on their platform but may find it too expensive to store on their respective protocol or maybe the protocol doesn’t even support that type of data (for example, the Farcaster protocol only allows for the storage of text). Built on top of data storage solutions like IPFS and Arweave, Data storage management middleware like Irys, Pinata, or Livepeer make it easy for developers to access these data storage solutions without having to integrate direct pipelines themselves.

• Irys (Formerly Bundlr): defining itself as a “provenance layer,” Irys simplifies access to Arweave to permanently store data, provide timestamps for sequential ordering of data, and access the data at any time.

• Livepeer: a video infrastructure network that handles transcoding, streaming, distributing, storing, and broadcasting of video in a decentralized and secure manner.

One of the core value propositions of blockchain is the ability to transfer value. As creators move on chain, ensuring infrastructure is available to allow creators to be rewarded financially for their content, users to contribute to communities, and more through payment services will be vital.

• Superfluid: an asset streaming protocol that enables real-time crypto transfers. They make it easy for crypto-native businesses and creators to exchange value onchain via ERC-20 token transfers.

Now that we’ve covered the infrastructure, social network & middleware layers — it’s time to cover the fun part — Web3 Social Applications. Good applications solve everyday problems for their users and/or are fun to use. A few of our favorites:

• Orb: Orb is an X-like mobile app allowing users to explore all forms of media available on Lens (text, video, and music). With an emphasis on community discovery and creation, Orb makes it easy to create, join, and find new communities on Lens. For example, if you own a particular NFT, you can automatically be granted access to that community on Orb. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Orb.

• Mirror: If you’re reading this right now, chances are you’re probably on Mirror! Mirror is a decentralized publishing platform that allows writers to fully control their relationship with their readers. Creators also have the ability to monetize through selling NFTs of publications and build a following through subscriptions. All posts made on Mirror are stored and will forever be available on Arweave.

• Friend.tech: Instead of using a blockchain-based social graph, Friend.tech relies on users signing up with their Twitter accounts — leveraging an existing, centralized social graph. Built on Base as the underlying network, users can buy and sell ‘keys’ using ETH in order to create or join exclusive chat groups. This feature of ‘people tokens’ is likely something we will see combined within other Web3 Social applications. Note: as of November 2023, new users require a special invite code to join the platform.

The success of Web3 Social is reliant on the same factors as traditional social media: distribution, retention, and monetization; however, the means to achieve these objectives will be through curating network effects, vibes, and utility. In the long term, Web3 Social will be an ecosystem of dApps that provide novel experiences, high-value content, new revenue streams, and new growth strategies.

Metcalfe’s Law states the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). Although initially created to describe communication networks like the telephone and fax machines, Metcalfe’s Law has been used as a guideline for social networks as well.

While a great idea in principle, we quickly find Metcalfe’s Law falls short of capturing the full picture of users on a social network, including activity, types of interactions, the quality of interactions, and more. Having plenty of users does contribute to the value of a social network but what makes a social network truly valuable is having users and retention. Many social networks with high distribution like Vine (peak: 200M DAU) disappear while some “smaller” social networks like Kakao (current: 47M DAU) maintain success over time via distribution and retention.

The first step for successful Web3 social apps is to build out a strong underlying social graph with high-quality users and content for the apps to tap into. For comparison, Facebook boasts an impressive 3B monthly active users, but its true value is derived from the attention Facebook captures from its 2.3B daily active users. Constant user engagement enables advertisers and creators to dedicate time & resources to the platform as a distribution channel for their content, products & services which in turn, incentivizes users to stay on the platform to consume more content, thus driving a positive flywheel effect.

In order for Web3 Social networks to succeed, they will need to build out a similar network effect. We believe this will happen by building out a network of applications across the spectrum of hyper-curated experiences to generalized large platforms.

To succeed, Web3 Social applications will need to create more than just content (which users can get from most other social media platforms) — they’ll need deeper forms of engagement. Li Jin from Variant suggests that as traditional social media platforms trend toward large distribution platforms and focus less on the curation of intimate relationships & communities, there’s an opportunity for Web3 Social to capture this underserved domain.

Web3 also has token incentives to help drive ownership & participation and turn communities into distribution channels. New business models based on DAOs, revenue share, and more allow for the creation of sustainable small communities without the need to rely on size for value capture. Of course, while token incentives are helpful to bootstrap initial behaviors, users will only be retained if the communities successfully create an environment where users feel they belong — in other words, the vibes need to be immaculate.

The open nature of social protocols on blockchain enables the ability for third-parties to leverage the social graph to build apps that provide new experiences, serving as a gateway to onboard new users. As Chris Dixon from a16z would say, “come for the tool, stay for the network.”

• Creators will find new ways to monetize, distribute content, and grow their audience.

• Users will be able to directly support their favorite creators, enjoy new experiences, and find community.

• Entrepreneurs will find new ways to build and grow businesses.

• Protocols will need to capture some of the value through a multitude of ways to ensure contributors are sustainably rewarded for managing the protocol and implementing upgrades, e.g. Protocol transaction fees; API fees; Domain name registration

Over the last few years, development across all the layers of the Web3 Social stack (1) Blockchain and Data Storage, (2) Social Network Layer, (3) Middleware and (4) Applications have made significant progress. The blocks are there for builders to start creating new applications and experiences for users that extend beyond Web 2 social applications.

While it’s still early and we haven’t quite brought all the value propositions and use cases to life yet, we are optimistic about what will be built from here, so…

• If you’re looking for a career in Web3 Social, now is the time!

• If you’re a user, hop in and try some of the dApps;

• If you’re a creator, utilize all the tools in front of you to build out your community and brand;

• If you’re a developer, start playing around with different tools now on offer; and

• If you’re an entrepreneur who’s passionate about upending the current social media landscape and creating meaningful apps that foster deep community relationships, start building!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/superscrypt

Website: https://www.superscrypt.xyz/

By Andy Chen, Jad Chahine, Jacob Ko

Before we begin, a big thank you to the builders who contributed to this article: Christina Beltramini (Lens), Alex Comeau & David Finkelstein (Airstack), Abhi Raheja (CyberConnect), Dan Romero (Farcaster), Billy Luedtke (Intuition), Helena Gagern (Salsa), and Suji Yan (Mask Network)

There has been an explosion of technical advancements, new applications, and users building in Web3 Social. Major protocols such as CyberConnect and Lens have launched new versions of their social graphs, there’ve been 7 million POAP NFTs minted to represent IRL and online attendance, over 50 million Galxe NFTs representing onchain actions, and approximately 150,000 tickets per month are sold through GetProtocol’s NFT platform.

Blockchain Infrastructure has now improved to a point where builders have more choice than ever to create, but with the large multitude of protocols & design choices where do they start? In this article we landscape the Web3 Social stack and help lay out the design considerations for builders looking to create the next generation of social media apps.

In Part I of our Web3 Social series, we shared the 4 key Value Propositions of Web3 Social:

1. Open Data & Portability: your data & social graph is owned by you and you can port your information across different social apps.

2. Web3 Composability: blockchain technology enables the combination of different onchain primitives and use cases, creating new experiences & powering the next wave of Super Apps (i.e. users plugging in their social profile & graph with other primitives like DeFi, music, attestations, loyalty, commerce and ‘banking).

3. Next-Level Community Enablement: onchain activity, zk proofs, and token/NFT ownership facilitate the formation of new and unique communities.

4. Censorship Resistance & Ownership: rather than a single source of truth, decisions on content rules can truly be distributed and enforced at the application level.

In this article (Part II of our Web3 Social series) we are going to ‘unpack the stack’ and discuss the different decisions needed to build an application and bring these Value Propositions to life. Note: The companies highlighted in the stack and in this article are not an exhaustive list of the Web3 Social ecosystem.

1. Blockchain & data storage: The foundation on which everything is built, similar to how Netflix is built on AWS. For example, friend.tech is built on BASE, which is a Layer 2 blockchain (“L2”) on top of Ethereum.

2. Social networks: The social graphs that delineate user profiles, relationships, and interactions. For example: Lens, Farcaster, and Cyberconnect.

3. Middleware: Tools and intermediary services that make it easier for developers to build applications and infuse them with utility. For example, Airstack makes it easy to develop composable applications and Huddle01 enables decentralized applications to use video communication.

4. Applications: The interface for users to interact with Web3 Social. For example, Orb allows users to easily access communities that use Web3 technology via their mobile app.

At the bottom of the stack, a decision is required on what blockchain and data storage solutions to use. Given the decentralized architecture of blockchains, they typically cannot handle the volume of transactions and amount of data needed to be stored to run social applications; for example, it costs $60M to store 1 GB of data on ETH Mainnet and an estimated $1.4M on Optimism Mainnet to store 1 GB of data onchain. Teams typically use a combination of onchain and offchain data storage solutions to deal with the trade-off between decentralization and scalability.

At the blockchain level, social apps need to decide whether to use a general-purpose or app-specific blockchain, each with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Which blockchain an app is deployed on will have an impact on technical design choices and existing ecosystem support (users, liquidity, applications, etc).

• General-purpose blockchains are designed to be open platforms to enable a multitude of smart contracts to deploy and operate. Building in these ecosystems will maximize composability and allow apps to easily access data and liquidity that is on the same chain.

• App-specific blockchains are designed to allow for greater flexibility and scaling. Appchains enable the teams to customize their infrastructure, but typically need to bootstrap network security and integrate interoperability solutions to increase composability.

Within general-purpose and app-specific blockchains, there’s a choice in the type of network: Layer 1 (L1) and Layer (L2). At a high level, L1s are a blockchain network with its own set of nodes, form of consensus, and set of rules; whereas, L2s are chains built on top of L1s that solely focus on executing transactions and sending transaction data to the L1 for security. For more information on the nuances of these networks, take a look at Cointelegraph’s research report.

Some considerations below on evaluating blockchains:

For further reading, here are some other helpful resources:

• General-purpose and app-specific L1 landscape: Comparing Layer-1 Platforms by The Block

• App-specific L2s: The Layer 2 Evolution by Binance

Once the decision has been made on the blockchain, it’s time to pick the data storage provider. It can be prohibitively expensive to put the amount of data generated from social protocols onto blockchains, so scalable and secure solutions are key. Decentralized data storage solutions like Arweave can be more than ~250,000x cheaper than posting data onto Optimism and ~10,000,000x cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet.

(Numbers may vary based on gas & token prices. Estimated storage costs of 1GB data: $60m on ETH mainnet; $1.4m on Optimism; $6.52 on Arweave)

1GB storage on Mainnet ($60m) / 1GB storage on Arweave = ~10,000,000x

1GB storage on Optimism L2 ($1.4m) / 1GB storage on Arweave = ~250,000x

While there are many options out there, some of the top Web3 Social protocols today use a few different solutions:

• IPFS: a peer-to-peer network for sharing data, functioning closer to a torrent network. Although IPFS is not a data storage solution, providers like Filecoin, Pinata, and Filebase have built systems on top of IPFS to ensure data storage and retrieval.

• Filecoin: built on top of IPFS, Filecoin adds an incentive layer that enables anyone to come in and pay storage providers a recurring fee to store data over a certain period of time. As of November 2023, storage prices are $0.002336 GB/yr.

• Arweave: unlike Filecoin, Arweave is a blockchain network that enables users to pay a one-time fee for permanent data storage. As of November 2023, storage prices are $6.52 per GB. Additionally, service providers like Irys (formerly Bundlr), ArDrive, and Akord have been built on top of Arweave to augment the capabilities of protocol and simplify the user experience.

• Custom Data Storage Solutions: some social protocols have decided to forgo existing decentralized data storage solutions and develop their own in-house solution.

  • Offchain: protocols like Farcaster have opted to create their own data storage networks.

  • Onchain: protocols like DeSo have built an app-specific L1 optimized to handle large quantities of data.

With so many options out there, how do developers make decisions around the foundational level of their tech stack to solve for scalability and decentralization? Let’s take a look at the design choices of some Web3 Social protocols in the following table:

When deciding which blockchain to deploy an application, it’s important to note that historically Web3 Social networks built on app-specific chains have had the most success. DeSo for example, has facilitated the creation of 2 million wallets, 85+ million transactions, $2+ billion total transaction volume, and $30 million in creator earnings as of October 2023 — more than any other Web3 Social network.

While there’s been great traction so far for app-specific social protocols, we believe that building applications on general-purpose blockchains with social protocols like Lens and Farcaster will bring in the most users, improve composability and community enablement, and minimize onboarding friction. Social applications are a user-centric experience and realize their full potential when augmenting an existing ecosystem’s network of applications to provide better user experiences — not as a standalone product/chain. For example, Farcaster recently migrated to Optimism Mainnet in order to be closer to their community consisting primarily of developers on Ethereum.

Additionally, one of our core beliefs is that blockchain will be multichain and multilayer, meaning the same for Web3 Social. Apps, creators, and entrepreneurs within each blockchain ecosystem will require tools to provide social experiences to their communities. The path for many Web3 Social protocols may begin on a single blockchain (either general-purpose or app-specific), but over time, we’ll begin to see expansion into other blockchains to help different ecosystems build out their social sector. We’ve seen early signs of multichain social networks like CyberConnect; who have spent an arduous amount of time designing and implementing cross-chain features. As it stands, the current state of interoperability and blockchain technologies are too nascent for protocols to easily support a robust multichain social network. For more information on the current state and future of interoperability, read through our series here.

Today, most people think of a social network as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc — places where users share content, view media, and communicate with others within the bounds of their respective platforms. Leveraging web3 technology, we define social networks differently: we see a true social network as a system of relationships and experiences that enables users to connect and communicate with one another, in new ways, irrespective of platform.

Under a decentralized architecture, the interface (frontend platform) and social graph (user connections) are decoupled. A user could post on X and another user could view it on Instagram. Or a user could share a video on TikTok and a user could like and comment on it via Facebook — all without having to sign into different accounts and platforms.

There are two types of decentralized social networks, federated networks (non-blockchain) and blockchain-based networks. Before we dive into blockchain-based social networks, which are best suited to bring the Web3 Social Value Propositions to fruition, it’s important to highlight a few examples of federated networks that are moving the industry towards a decentralized world.

The idea of federated networks has been around for some time; with the first decentralized computing network, Mix Network, being conceived in 1979. Federated Networks helps solve for 2 of the 4 value propositions, namely Open Data & Portability and Censorship Resistance. Similar to blockchain, federated networks consist of many independent servers that are able to communicate with one another through an open standard. You can compare these networks to email where there are many providers (gmail, outlook, etc), but they can all communicate with one another. A recent example of a federated social network is ActivityPub, which launched in January of 2018 with the backing of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The most well-known application on ActivityPub, Mastodon, has almost 2 million MAU, and Instagram is stating that they may move Threads to ActivityPub.

Here are some important federated networks to be aware of:

Federated Networks support many typical social media activities, such as profiles/identities, connections, posts, likes, follows, subscriptions, and comments. But they lack a few of the core primitives required for Web3, namely the ability to create ownership through tokens/NFTs and new experiences through smart contracts.

Similar to Federated Networks, Blockchain-enabled Social Graphs are a form of decentralized social network that include profiles/identities, social connections, posts, likes, follows, subscriptions, comments, etc. The primary difference is that Federated Networks are a peer-to-peer system that emphasizes sharing of information; whereas, blockchain networks primarily serve as a tamper-resistant, distributed ledger. The distributed ledger enables all sorts of new use cases, such as tokens to represent value, trustless governance systems, decentralized compute, and ownership of assets. The combination of tokens with a decentralized social graph provides a much greater chance at adoption than Federated Networks alone and we believe Blockchain-enabled Social Graphs will solve for all four value propositions.

Here are some Blockchain-based Social Graph protocols that are important to be aware of:

Cyberconnect

Founded in 2021, CyberConnect is a multichain social graph deployed on several EVM networks, including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB, Polygon, and Linea. Its most popular dApp, Link3, is a social platform built by the CyberConnect team to help users find events, discover content, and display their profile. CyberConnect is currently undergoing deployment of CyberConnect V3, featuring three core upgrades:

• CyberAccount: an ERC-4337 compatible account that serves as a user’s identity and access point across the CyberConnect ecosystem.

• CyberGraph: serving as CyberConnect’s social graph layer, CyberGraph links CyberAccounts to their content and social connections.

• CyberNetwork: an app-specific L2 optimized for Web3 Social.

To date, CyberConnect V3 is one of the most popular social graph protocols with over 500,000 CyberAccounts and 1M User Operations executed as of November 2023.

Farcaster

Founded by former Coinbase early employees Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan in 2020, Farcaster defines itself as a “sufficiently decentralized social network,” meaning two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it. There are three features required to obtain to be a sufficiently decentralized social network:

• The ability to claim a unique username

• The ability to post messages under that name

• The ability to read messages from any valid name

Additionally, one of the focal points of the team is to provide accessible core infrastructure to encourage developers to build new features and creative applications that may be lacking or improved upon in the current Farcaster ecosystem.

As of November 2023, Farcaster’s metrics show 196K users, 3.5K weekly active users, and over 7.6K casts per day.

Lens Protocol

Developed by the team behind Aave, Lens Protocol is a social graph protocol with a modular toolkit providing users and developers with easy-to-use features adapted to their needs. Lens V1 launched in early 2022 without any user-facing app experiences with the intention of focusing exclusively on providing powerful tools to enable dApp developers to build social experiences. Since then, Lens has quickly grown into a rich ecosystem of applications experimenting with new ways to leverage Lens’ social graph and tooling.

In accordance with their original thesis of supporting developers, Lens Protocol is currently undergoing their next major upgrade, Lens V2, to provide an even greater suite of tools, features, and upgrades to the existing architecture. Here are a few:

• Smart Posts (Open Actions): enabling users to combine external smart contract functions with Lens publications. Developers can create their own set of Open Action smart contracts or use Lens Protocol’s out-of-the-box features.

• Collective Value Share: a system that rewards users, applications, algorithms, and networks for their positive contributions.

• Security: profile manager upgrades, Profile Guardian, and onchain blocking.

• Architecture: social operations are now profile-based instead of address-based, Lens Handles upgrades, and more.

To date, the protocol has facilitated $7M in economic activity, deployed over 100K profiles, and brought in over 4,000 daily active users.

Note: As of November 2023, Lens Protocol is in beta and new users must be approved from a waitlist before accessing the social network.

DeSo

DeSo (short for Decentralized Social) is an app-specific layer 1 blockchain created for decentralized social media applications. Most Web3 Social protocols utilize some form of offchain storage to handle all of the data social applications produce; however, DeSo is able to store almost every social action onchain — identity, connections, posts, follows, likes, messaging, and more. By building their chain from the ground up, the DeSo team has had full control over the design of the chain, allowing them to optimize various elements, including data structures, storage, consensus mechanism, social graph, etc.

The next layer in the stack is middleware. Web3 Social middleware helps bring apps to life by abstracting the complexity of blockchain infrastructure and allows builders to develop standardized, yet unique experiences for their users. Whether it’s the ability to easily communicate across protocol, providing seamless attestation engines, to payments, and more, Web3 Social middleware is certainly a must-have for builders and entrepreneurs.

Web3 Social middleware typically falls under one of two categories:

1. Developer Experience: Providing APIs, SDKs, frameworks, and other tooling to make it simpler for developers to build their consumer-facing dApps — abstracting away backend complexity. For example, instead of developers running/maintaining their own data infrastructure for their Web3 Social app, Airstack abstracts the complexity away by cleaning and maintaining usable data.

2. New Capabilities: Make it possible to build things onchain that weren’t possible before by providing new services that augment the capabilities of the underlying blockchain or social protocol. For example, communication between wallets isn’t a native function to blockchains; however, XMTP bringing this capability onchain unlocks all sorts of new innovations — decentralized chat apps, marketing platforms, etc.

Back when X had a more open API, there was a small but innovative ecosystem of developers creating many different custom features. A lot of the features that you see today were actually built by these third-party developers, such as @ replies, hashtags, quote tweets, and more. Unfortunately, over time Twitter (and many other social media platforms) slowly tightened public access to these tools. In the same way Twitter used to provide an open API, most Web3 Social protocols (Lens, Farcaster, and CyberConnect) also offer a suite of tools to help builders create applications and features — the key difference being that many of these tools are open source and available forever.

Pulling data into an application to display for the user or use on the backend is one of the fundamental building blocks for software. While data on public blockchains are freely available for everyone to view and use, developers quickly find that it is mostly unusable in its raw form. Data platforms are basic core tools that clean, transform, and make it simple for developers to access usable data via APIs and SDKs so developers no longer have to spend weeks if not months building data infrastructure internally to power their software.

Airstack: a web3 development platform that provides GraphQL APIs for integrating onchain and offchain data into any application. They’ve integrated Lens, Farcaster, POAP, XMTP, and more to make it easy to gather data for your application. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Airstack.

Goldsky: a real-time data indexing platform that makes it easy for developers to access the latest blockchain data. They have two core products: a data pipeline platform that easily syncs real-time blockchain data with any offchain database called Mirror and custom subgraphs.

As more and more of our lives move onchain, there will need to be a way to prove that we are who we say we are. We’re excited to see this layer evolve with teams experimenting with different ways to prove identity, including attestations, KYC, biometric proof-of-personhood, and more. We believe identity solutions built with blockchain tech will give us greater control of our information, unlock better protocol & product innovation, and lead to better community & user experiences.

Credentials and attestations are often used interchangeably; however, they’re more-so complementary technologies. The key difference is that credentials are the onchain representation of a fact while attestations are onchain proofs that the credential is true. Placing credentials onchain will allow users to be more expressive of their achievements and contributions. These credentials, represented in the form of NFTs, can express both onchain and offchain actions.

• Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): an open-source public good infrastructure service providing onchain and offchain attestations. EAS is built around two primary smart contracts: one to register a schema to define the data to be attested and one to make the attestation.

• Intuition: a full-stack, decentralized identity & knowledge solution that aims to empower users to provide and query attestations about any subject. This platform provides an indexed, discoverable, and composable knowledge graph constructed with verifiable data — opening up the attestation landscape to subjective claims and more advanced reputational models. Additionally, Intuition enables users and developers to easily filter attestations by the voices and opinions they trust. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Intuition.

• POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol): one of the most popular credentialing protocols, POAP allows users to mint NFTs at live events as onchain proof that they participated in-person.

• Galxe: on the other end of that spectrum, Galxe is a platform that creates campaigns around onchain actions. After users perform these actions, they’re rewarded an NFT credential proving they’ve accomplished said action.

Social media can be a very turbulent place, full of hundreds of thousands of posts and activities per second. Access control infrastructure helps creators create value for their community by giving holders access to exclusive benefits. On the user side, it helps retain a high signal-to-noise ratio in a social feed.

• Collab.Land: perhaps the most well-known access control protocol, Collab.Land allows communities to curate access to social platforms like Discord and Telegram based on tokens held, NFTs, onchain interactions, and much more. They are the de facto tool, serving 50,000+ tokenized communities serving some of the biggest brands using NFTs. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Collab.Land.

• Guild.xyz: the team at Guild have built infrastructure helping online communities to manage access across many social platforms. Guild provides “one membership to rule them all” that allows memberships and access control to be interoperable with connected social platforms (i.e. — utilize Discord membership tiers for Google Workspace without having to rebuild access control from the ground up again).

The most intimate of conversations, sharing of the deepest secrets, jamming on the most outlandish of ideas, and emotional vulnerability happen when there isn’t an audience. Private conversations are a key part of the human experience and a Web3 Social dApp experience isn’t complete without the right infrastructure in place to support this!

• XMTP: an open protocol, network, and standards for secure, private web3 messaging. Founded in 2021, they’ve quickly become one of the most used web3 messaging network in the world and have integrated Farcaster and Lens Protocol on the social network side.

• Ylide: a cross-chain wallet-to-wallet communications solution for Web3 projects. The core product is the Ylide SDK, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate an all-in-one communications platform (including DMs, forums, group chats, etc), spam-prevention mechanisms, and multichain capabilities with over 20 chains supported.

Notifications are not inherently part of Web3 apps. For these apps to share information with their users, they have relied on user activity in groups often within Telegram, Discord or X. Web3 notification systems allow for the sharing of important information, directly within apps and wallets.

• Notifi: Notifi allows for simplified communication across web2 and web3 messaging channels (Discord, Telegram, SMS, Twitter). Designed with simple APIs for easy integration and customizable and advanced features for dApps and web3 applications, Notifi empowers developers and creators to better engage with their users and communities via multichannel communications. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Notifi.

• Push Protocol: a communication network that allows users and developers to communicate through a variety of ways, including notifications, text chat, video chat, and host token-gated spaces.

A lot of dApps in the future will generate content outside the scope of the social graph protocol. For example, data intensive social dApps like streaming platforms may want to allow creators to store VODs on their platform but may find it too expensive to store on their respective protocol or maybe the protocol doesn’t even support that type of data (for example, the Farcaster protocol only allows for the storage of text). Built on top of data storage solutions like IPFS and Arweave, Data storage management middleware like Irys, Pinata, or Livepeer make it easy for developers to access these data storage solutions without having to integrate direct pipelines themselves.

• Irys (Formerly Bundlr): defining itself as a “provenance layer,” Irys simplifies access to Arweave to permanently store data, provide timestamps for sequential ordering of data, and access the data at any time.

• Livepeer: a video infrastructure network that handles transcoding, streaming, distributing, storing, and broadcasting of video in a decentralized and secure manner.

One of the core value propositions of blockchain is the ability to transfer value. As creators move on chain, ensuring infrastructure is available to allow creators to be rewarded financially for their content, users to contribute to communities, and more through payment services will be vital.

• Superfluid: an asset streaming protocol that enables real-time crypto transfers. They make it easy for crypto-native businesses and creators to exchange value onchain via ERC-20 token transfers.

Now that we’ve covered the infrastructure, social network & middleware layers — it’s time to cover the fun part — Web3 Social Applications. Good applications solve everyday problems for their users and/or are fun to use. A few of our favorites:

• Orb: Orb is an X-like mobile app allowing users to explore all forms of media available on Lens (text, video, and music). With an emphasis on community discovery and creation, Orb makes it easy to create, join, and find new communities on Lens. For example, if you own a particular NFT, you can automatically be granted access to that community on Orb. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Orb.

• Mirror: If you’re reading this right now, chances are you’re probably on Mirror! Mirror is a decentralized publishing platform that allows writers to fully control their relationship with their readers. Creators also have the ability to monetize through selling NFTs of publications and build a following through subscriptions. All posts made on Mirror are stored and will forever be available on Arweave.

• Friend.tech: Instead of using a blockchain-based social graph, Friend.tech relies on users signing up with their Twitter accounts — leveraging an existing, centralized social graph. Built on Base as the underlying network, users can buy and sell ‘keys’ using ETH in order to create or join exclusive chat groups. This feature of ‘people tokens’ is likely something we will see combined within other Web3 Social applications. Note: as of November 2023, new users require a special invite code to join the platform.

The success of Web3 Social is reliant on the same factors as traditional social media: distribution, retention, and monetization; however, the means to achieve these objectives will be through curating network effects, vibes, and utility. In the long term, Web3 Social will be an ecosystem of dApps that provide novel experiences, high-value content, new revenue streams, and new growth strategies.

Metcalfe’s Law states the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). Although initially created to describe communication networks like the telephone and fax machines, Metcalfe’s Law has been used as a guideline for social networks as well.

While a great idea in principle, we quickly find Metcalfe’s Law falls short of capturing the full picture of users on a social network, including activity, types of interactions, the quality of interactions, and more. Having plenty of users does contribute to the value of a social network but what makes a social network truly valuable is having users and retention. Many social networks with high distribution like Vine (peak: 200M DAU) disappear while some “smaller” social networks like Kakao (current: 47M DAU) maintain success over time via distribution and retention.

The first step for successful Web3 social apps is to build out a strong underlying social graph with high-quality users and content for the apps to tap into. For comparison, Facebook boasts an impressive 3B monthly active users, but its true value is derived from the attention Facebook captures from its 2.3B daily active users. Constant user engagement enables advertisers and creators to dedicate time & resources to the platform as a distribution channel for their content, products & services which in turn, incentivizes users to stay on the platform to consume more content, thus driving a positive flywheel effect.

In order for Web3 Social networks to succeed, they will need to build out a similar network effect. We believe this will happen by building out a network of applications across the spectrum of hyper-curated experiences to generalized large platforms.

To succeed, Web3 Social applications will need to create more than just content (which users can get from most other social media platforms) — they’ll need deeper forms of engagement. Li Jin from Variant suggests that as traditional social media platforms trend toward large distribution platforms and focus less on the curation of intimate relationships & communities, there’s an opportunity for Web3 Social to capture this underserved domain.

Web3 also has token incentives to help drive ownership & participation and turn communities into distribution channels. New business models based on DAOs, revenue share, and more allow for the creation of sustainable small communities without the need to rely on size for value capture. Of course, while token incentives are helpful to bootstrap initial behaviors, users will only be retained if the communities successfully create an environment where users feel they belong — in other words, the vibes need to be immaculate.

The open nature of social protocols on blockchain enables the ability for third-parties to leverage the social graph to build apps that provide new experiences, serving as a gateway to onboard new users. As Chris Dixon from a16z would say, “come for the tool, stay for the network.”

• Creators will find new ways to monetize, distribute content, and grow their audience.

• Users will be able to directly support their favorite creators, enjoy new experiences, and find community.

• Entrepreneurs will find new ways to build and grow businesses.

• Protocols will need to capture some of the value through a multitude of ways to ensure contributors are sustainably rewarded for managing the protocol and implementing upgrades, e.g. Protocol transaction fees; API fees; Domain name registration

Over the last few years, development across all the layers of the Web3 Social stack (1) Blockchain and Data Storage, (2) Social Network Layer, (3) Middleware and (4) Applications have made significant progress. The blocks are there for builders to start creating new applications and experiences for users that extend beyond Web 2 social applications.

While it’s still early and we haven’t quite brought all the value propositions and use cases to life yet, we are optimistic about what will be built from here, so…

• If you’re looking for a career in Web3 Social, now is the time!

• If you’re a user, hop in and try some of the dApps;

• If you’re a creator, utilize all the tools in front of you to build out your community and brand;

• If you’re a developer, start playing around with different tools now on offer; and

• If you’re an entrepreneur who’s passionate about upending the current social media landscape and creating meaningful apps that foster deep community relationships, start building!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/superscrypt

Website: https://www.superscrypt.xyz/