Here we are.. the third and final part of the trilogy. Some time has passed, but so much has happened. It’s almost the perfect time to close the book on this chapter.

We once collected images and called it art. We mistook scarcity for significance, provenance for presence. But the gallery’s spell has broken. The velvet rope hasn’t disappeared—it’s wrapped around the artist now. No longer do we mint artworks for their meaning; we mint creators for their market potential. The NFT era has been eclipsed—not by better technology, but by a better lie. Social‑Fi, in its blur of platforms, coins, and creators-as-assets, has hollowed out the object and erected the person in its place. And then, it priced that person.

In March 2021, BitClout emerged as the first whisper of this transformation. BitClout was a social media platform. Its users could post short-form writings and photos similar to X. They could also award money to posts they particularly liked by clicking a diamond icon (similarly to Twitch Bits.)

It launched not with artworks, but with coinized profiles—including 15,000 of them being celebrity names attached without consent, speculation baked into every click preloaded onto the blockchain. The protocol would later unveil itself as DeSo, a decentralized social ecosystem led by Nader Al‑Naji and backed by venture giants like a16z and Sequoia. But the damage had already been done: the platform didn’t just tokenize creators—it normalized the premise that identity itself was fair game.

In July 2024, al-Naji was arrested by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and charged with fraud involving BitClout.

By August 2023, Friend.tech took that kernel and polished it into a model. Built on Base and structured around “keys,” the platform offered gated chat access as a tradable unit. You didn’t follow a creator—you bought into them. Briefly, Friend.tech surpassed even Ethereum in protocol fees, riding a wave of euphoric adoption and backlash. In the process, it crystallized a new logic: proximity could be monetized, and intimacy could be priced. The velvet rope had become a liquidity pool.

But not all attempts were as surgical. In 2024, The Arena—initially known as Stars Arena—promised a reimagined social protocol on Avalanche.

Stars Arena didn’t stumble—it was gutted. Just days after its euphoric ascent into the Social‑Fi spotlight, the platform was hollowed out by a security exploit that drained nearly all its funds. The warning came on Friday, October 6th, when X user @0xlilitch flagged a vulnerability. Hours later, the exploit hit. The vault was emptied. The rope snapped. An estimated $2.9 million in $AVAX stolen from the protocol.

By Saturday morning, the developers surfaced with a plea: stop depositing, we’re investigating. But the damage was done. The total value locked—once a symbol of traction—was now a ghost figure. Some speculated this was the second act of an earlier breach attempt, one that had already rattled the protocol on October 5th. At the time, Stars Arena’s team blamed “monopolistic forces”—a phrase that felt less like technical diagnosis and more like a veiled accusation.

In Social‑Fi circles, the reference was read as a wink toward Friend.tech, the reigning incumbent with over $40 million in TVL and a firm grip on the niche’s narrative. Stars Arena had briefly surged to second place. Then it was stripped bare.

Whether the suspicion was strategic paranoia or genuine concern, the implication lingered: that the velvet rope wasn’t just economic—it was territorial. And that in a world where creators are coins, platforms are kingdoms, and liquidity is loyalty, sabotage might be just another form of competition.

Miraculously, The Arena rose like a phoenix from the flames of Stars, under new management and a new team, and has maintained a somewhat active community. However, the platform’s token rollout was riddled with delays, inconsistencies, and narrative reboots.

The $ARENA token itself materialized not as a reward for engagement but as a monument to miscommunication. The resulting token felt retrofitted, an afterthought disguised as a future. Airdrop campaigns and Uprising points were mobilized to salvage trust, but a portion of the audience sensed what had happened: social intent had been reverse-engineered into speculative infrastructure.

Revel tried something softer. In 2023, it arrived with a deceptively tender proposition—an ecosystem where members could mint “art cards” as collectables which could then be traded. But beneath the surface lay a leaderboard economy, gamified mechanics encouraging flipping, stacking, and coin accrual. Some early adopters misread the platform’s purpose. They came to witness friends’ creativity, only to be nudged into trading them like Pokémon. As better-known artists joined, liquidity migrated toward fame, and the quieter voices were flattened into background noise. Revel did not collapse—it dissolved, as its promise of relational art gave way to extractive play.

Even platforms that once resisted “coinification” are now morphing to meet the gravitational pull of speculative engagement.

Drip, a Solana-based platform, still stands apart. Focused on free, compressed NFT drops, it operates as a gratitude engine—art offered without financial friction. Its “Droplets” system allows creators to accept optional support, but there are no Creator Coins, no marketplaces, and no asset speculation. With over 36 million collectibles distributed to more than half a million users, Drip demonstrates that scale and sincerity can coexist outside tokenomics.

Echow.xyz, on the other hand, has crossed the threshold. As of 2025, creators can now issue their own Creator Coins, turning their reputations into tradable assets. These coins are used to purchase NFTs, redeem perks, and enforce royalties via smart contracts. While Echow’s “Echoes” still offer modular governance and community tooling, the introduction of Creator Coins reframes the platform as a speculative launchpad—gamified, asset-driven, and deeply entwined with crypto-native dynamics.

This evolution marks a split in ethos. Drip remains about community and expression, avoiding token-based engagement. Echow now embraces tokenomics, letting influence be minted, traded, and burned. One is a social protocol shaped by generosity; the other, an economy of attention built on programmable value.

Other platforms have followed similar arcs. Remx, launched in 2024, began as a creator-centric interface focused on showcasing art posts and mints. It pivoted to Duels: head-to-head art competitions where viewers could wager on their favorite image, with the winner being rewarded in $USDC. Then, again, it pivoted—to coins. Every post directly on Duels became a coin, and participants could “boost” them by buying the underlying asset. The art was still there, but only as scaffolding for speculation.

Rodeo and Access Protocol have also joined the coinification wave. Access, originally designed for on-chain subscriptions, has announced Creator Coins—explicit instruments for collecting, holding, and investing in people. Even Zora, once a sanctuary for mint culture and open editions, has fully transformed. Its updated feed now treats every post as an ERC‑20 token, automatically furnished with liquidity. You no longer mint a moment—you mint a market.

What was once slow—contemplative, intimate—has become frictionless. The social layer of Web3, ostensibly meant to deepen community, now functions as a dashboard for betting on reputation. Curation is algorithmic. Fame is fluid. And value is measured not in meaning but in volatility.

Schrödinger’s JPEG—our mascot of digital ambiguity—has evolved. It’s now Schrödinger’s Coin, a token whose worth oscillates between intimacy and instrumentality, depending on whether the box has been opened.

We arrived here because we mistook attention for affection. We built platforms that measured proximity and rewarded momentum. In the end, we didn’t collect artworks—we collateralized intimacy. And in doing so, we priced care out of the equation.

The NFT era, for all its confusion, at least gestured toward memory. Social‑Fi, in its final mutation, gestures toward exit liquidity. What began as a celebration of creators has become a clearance sale. The artist is the asset. The platform is the exchange. And the audience is the algorithm.

It spoke of provenance, of digital relics etched into the blockchain like cave paintings in zeroes and ones. But when every post is tokenized and every moment monetized, the ledger becomes landfill. The signal drowns in noise. Scarcity dies not from abundance, but from indifference.

When every post is a token and every user a tradable asset, the idea of rarity is a mirage. Millions of coins minted off ephemeral content. Market caps ballooning from memes and micro-interactions. The architecture promises scarcity, but the culture delivers disposability.

Dan | BloqDigital is a lighting designer and digital artist based in the UK, who writes about Art, Technology, Web3 and Culture.

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