At the peak of the 2021 bull market, GameFi, a blockchain-based combination of gaming and finance, arose as one of the biggest winners in the Web3 market. One of the greatest champions of the GameFi sector was the play-to-earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity. Only three years after its initial funding, the game’s AXS token skyrocketed to a total market cap of $43.2 billion and reached a daily revenue of over $17.5 million.

Even as the bull market hype dies down, GameFi apps continue to be developed and enjoy a significant amount of attention. In the second quarter of this year, blockchain-based gaming made up 52% of unique active wallet activity. GameFi has become a dominant force in crypto, amassing a high of 60% of all blockchain activity in July.

As the market consolidates and we wait for another bull market to return, blockchain builders are already building the next big breakthrough into the Web3 market. We got the opportunity to talk to Bit islands founder Craig Simons to hear why he believes web3 social (“SocialFi”) will be the GameFi of the next bull market.

Simons is a founding team member at Bit islands. He entered the crypto segment in 2017 after being a core member of a highly successful IT company back in the Web2 era. As a successful person, he is exceptionally low key, with little to no information found about him on social media. He avoided discussing past experiences and was even more reluctant to share his successes in the Web2 era, arguing that Web3 is a new technology cycle and that past experiences can become a burden that hinders innovation.

In our conversation, we discussed the issues of Web3 social, such as entrepreneurship, innovation paths, native scenarios, privacy, data value, data silos, economic mechanisms, governance ethics and other topics in this emerging market. With Simons’ permission, I wanted to bring up this conversation in the hope that it will provide new perspectives ahead of the interview.

Q:

 SocialFi, like GameFi, is looking to move a staple of Web2 into Web3. Do you think there’s a need for social platforms on Web3?

A:

 Today’s social environment is entirely controlled by a few social-media giants. These giants control our data and limit our freedom on the internet through censorship, leakage, silos and data abuse.

When you recognize these massive issues in Web2 and the opportunity Web3 has to eliminate these giants, the question becomes, do we need freedom?

Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, said that Twitter should become a protocol-level public product. Compared with a radical overhaul, a more typical approach is to complete the Web3 transformation by adding blockchain elements to the Web2 social products.

Some people chose to make a sharp break with Web2. They plan to create infrastructures that anyone can use and are not controlled by anyone by making open-source protocol modules.