After surviving the dot-com crash and witnessing the Web3 bubble, the world began to ask a sharper question: If we can tokenize money, ownership and access - why not social relationships? Communities? Social media itself?

And so, a new dream stepped onto the stage: SocialFi.

SocialFi = Social + Finance

SocialFi stands for Social Finance - the idea of merging social interaction, content flow and community-building with on-chain economic structures. Every like, share, comment… every interaction could be tokenized. Participation, contribution and community governance could be transparently rewarded on-chain. This vision promised to liberate the massive social graph locked inside Web2 platforms. A decentralized, reward-based, revenue-sharing ecosystem. A dream of a new kind of social network.

Early Pioneers

DeSo: One of the first to champion SocialFi, DeSo built its own Layer-1 blockchain to store social content on-chain. Every profile, post and follow was written to the blockchain in a decentralized way. It introduced creator tokens, social NFTs and tipping models. But its complexity, poor onboarding and inability to generate sustained demand limited its reach.

Lens Protocol: Created by the Aave team, Lens aimed to modularize the on-chain social graph. Users could carry their social identity, followers and content across platforms using their wallets - making "platform-independent social identity" a reality. However, despite its strong vision, Lens struggled with complex UX and lacked aggressive onboarding strategies. The early hype eventually faded.

Phaver: Phaver tried to bridge the Web2 crowd by aggregating multiple social protocols like Lens and Farcaster into one mobile app. With gamified systems like NFT-based levels and a “cred” score for social reputation, it reached over 650K downloads and 400K wallet connections. Yet, strategic missteps, lack of a solid revenue model and technical bottlenecks with Lens led to its shutdown announcement in December 2024.

Arena: Built on Avalanche, Arena allowed creators to monetize their following using “tickets” - tokenized assets that fans could buy. With over 200K users and $6M+ paid to creators, Arena integrated AVAX-based content rewards, voice rooms (Stages), launchpads (Groups), Stripe integration and credit card onboarding. Still operating like a closed community, it remains to be seen how far Arena can scale.

Zora: Zora let creators mint media as ERC-721 NFTs with built-in royalty mechanisms. Its marketplace enabled perpetual income through resales, distributing revenue between creators, previous owners and current holders. Its new version introduced bonding curves and ERC-20 tokens per piece of content, turning media into tradable social economic units, not just digital assets.

Farcaster: Built on Ethereum L2, Farcaster introduced a chain-native identity system. Each user has a “fid” (Farcaster ID), representing an on-chain social graph. Its core promise: users truly own their graph and can publish across multiple clients (like Farcaster or Base App) using the same identity. With spam filtering, open protocol infrastructure and dev-friendly mini-apps, the ecosystem is growing fast. Base’s recent launch of TBA (The Base App) marked full integration with Farcaster, potentially opening the gates to Coinbase’s 100M+ user base. Its funnel strategy stands out: weekly creator rewards, mini-app grants and over 15,000 Pro memberships sold, generating $1.8M in revenue - all of which gets reinvested into creator and developer rewards. Farcaster is becoming one of the first working examples of a sustainable SocialFi economy.

Dream or Illusion? Why Didn’t It Fully Land?

The idea behind SocialFi was strong:  Human contributions = On-chain value. But execution proved messy:

• On-chain interactions are still costly and slow. Writing every like or comment to the blockchain hurts UX.

• Onboarding is hard. Wallet setup, seed phrase security, gas fees - it’s still too complex for the average user.

• Incentives drifted from real contribution to reward farming.

• Sustainable revenue models are scarce. When token prices drop, motivation disappears.

Bottom line: SocialFi remains a powerful idea, but it’s not yet a serious rival to Web2’s social giants.

And Next Comes a New Layer: AI + Signal

Despite its shortcomings, SocialFi laid foundational pillars: on-chain identity, social graphs and transparent contribution records. But to reach full potential, on-chain infrastructure isn’t enough. A new player is stepping in: AI-powered signal layers.

These tools are designed to extract signals from the social graph noise, measure real contribution and separate hype from value. Platforms like Kaito, Cookie and the next generation of AI layers are rising to meet this exact need. But the story doesn’t end here. From where SocialFi left off, we now dive into the chaotic flows of Crypto Twitter, where attention is currency, capital moves via memes and noise is monetized.

All of that in the next chapter: Attention Economy 1: Disrupting Capital. We’ll explore how the VC era is cracking, how attention loops are becoming the new capital systems and which platforms are rewriting the rules.

See you next Sunday.

After surviving the dot-com crash and witnessing the Web3 bubble, the world began to ask a sharper question: If we can tokenize money, ownership and access - why not social relationships? Communities? Social media itself?

And so, a new dream stepped onto the stage: SocialFi.

SocialFi = Social + Finance

SocialFi stands for Social Finance - the idea of merging social interaction, content flow and community-building with on-chain economic structures. Every like, share, comment… every interaction could be tokenized. Participation, contribution and community governance could be transparently rewarded on-chain. This vision promised to liberate the massive social graph locked inside Web2 platforms. A decentralized, reward-based, revenue-sharing ecosystem. A dream of a new kind of social network.

Early Pioneers

DeSo: One of the first to champion SocialFi, DeSo built its own Layer-1 blockchain to store social content on-chain. Every profile, post and follow was written to the blockchain in a decentralized way. It introduced creator tokens, social NFTs and tipping models. But its complexity, poor onboarding and inability to generate sustained demand limited its reach.

Lens Protocol: Created by the Aave team, Lens aimed to modularize the on-chain social graph. Users could carry their social identity, followers and content across platforms using their wallets - making "platform-independent social identity" a reality. However, despite its strong vision, Lens struggled with complex UX and lacked aggressive onboarding strategies. The early hype eventually faded.

Phaver: Phaver tried to bridge the Web2 crowd by aggregating multiple social protocols like Lens and Farcaster into one mobile app. With gamified systems like NFT-based levels and a “cred” score for social reputation, it reached over 650K downloads and 400K wallet connections. Yet, strategic missteps, lack of a solid revenue model and technical bottlenecks with Lens led to its shutdown announcement in December 2024.

Arena: Built on Avalanche, Arena allowed creators to monetize their following using “tickets” - tokenized assets that fans could buy. With over 200K users and $6M+ paid to creators, Arena integrated AVAX-based content rewards, voice rooms (Stages), launchpads (Groups), Stripe integration and credit card onboarding. Still operating like a closed community, it remains to be seen how far Arena can scale.

Zora: Zora let creators mint media as ERC-721 NFTs with built-in royalty mechanisms. Its marketplace enabled perpetual income through resales, distributing revenue between creators, previous owners and current holders. Its new version introduced bonding curves and ERC-20 tokens per piece of content, turning media into tradable social economic units, not just digital assets.

Farcaster: Built on Ethereum L2, Farcaster introduced a chain-native identity system. Each user has a “fid” (Farcaster ID), representing an on-chain social graph. Its core promise: users truly own their graph and can publish across multiple clients (like Farcaster or Base App) using the same identity. With spam filtering, open protocol infrastructure and dev-friendly mini-apps, the ecosystem is growing fast. Base’s recent launch of TBA (The Base App) marked full integration with Farcaster, potentially opening the gates to Coinbase’s 100M+ user base. Its funnel strategy stands out: weekly creator rewards, mini-app grants and over 15,000 Pro memberships sold, generating $1.8M in revenue - all of which gets reinvested into creator and developer rewards. Farcaster is becoming one of the first working examples of a sustainable SocialFi economy.

Dream or Illusion? Why Didn’t It Fully Land?

The idea behind SocialFi was strong:  Human contributions = On-chain value. But execution proved messy:

• On-chain interactions are still costly and slow. Writing every like or comment to the blockchain hurts UX.

• Onboarding is hard. Wallet setup, seed phrase security, gas fees - it’s still too complex for the average user.

• Incentives drifted from real contribution to reward farming.

• Sustainable revenue models are scarce. When token prices drop, motivation disappears.

Bottom line: SocialFi remains a powerful idea, but it’s not yet a serious rival to Web2’s social giants.

And Next Comes a New Layer: AI + Signal

Despite its shortcomings, SocialFi laid foundational pillars: on-chain identity, social graphs and transparent contribution records. But to reach full potential, on-chain infrastructure isn’t enough. A new player is stepping in: AI-powered signal layers.

These tools are designed to extract signals from the social graph noise, measure real contribution and separate hype from value. Platforms like Kaito, Cookie and the next generation of AI layers are rising to meet this exact need. But the story doesn’t end here. From where SocialFi left off, we now dive into the chaotic flows of Crypto Twitter, where attention is currency, capital moves via memes and noise is monetized.

All of that in the next chapter: Attention Economy 1: Disrupting Capital. We’ll explore how the VC era is cracking, how attention loops are becoming the new capital systems and which platforms are rewriting the rules.

See you next Sunday.